Since things have been going better in Iraq, it's getting harder and harder for the MSM and moonbats on blogs to find bad news to harangue about. Pandagon tries to point out the horrific desertion rates of this war...the worst since 1980!
Nowhere in the Pandagon story does it mention actual desertion rates. It talks about the abandonment rates during the Vietnam War era as being the worst in history at about 5 percent. According to the Pentagon, about 1,500,000 soldiers went AWOL during Vietnam. "Official estimates of the actual number of service members who went AWOL or deserted run between 500,000 (Pentagon) and 550,000 (officials in the Ford Administration)."
So, what are the numbers Pandagon uses as "proof" that soldiers hate this war?
According to the Army, about nine in every 1,000 soldiers deserted in fiscal year 2007, which ended Sept. 30, compared to nearly seven per 1,000 a year earlier. Overall, 4,698 soldiers deserted this year, compared to 3,301 last year.
I'm not a math person, but isn't 1,500,000 a much greater number of deserters (and it doesn't include all the ways a person can desert the army) than 7,999? And even if you add in the totals from the Navy (1,129 for 2007), the Air Force (56--yes, 56), and the Marines (744 for 2004), it doesn't come anywhere close to 1.5 million.
I guess it's hard to make the case that soldiers hate the war when, whell, the statistics don't even back you up.
Cross-posted at Common Sense Political Thought.
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