It's a bait and switch, bitch!

The headlines show that to take up the slack in recruiting the Army is offering enlistments for terms as short as 15 months of active duty. Don't fall for it, buzzards!

After 15 months of active duty, the plan is to switch to Army Reserve or National Guard for two years, then be classified as Individual Ready Reserve for 7 years. In reality, this does not offer any shorter term risk for deployment, since you can still be called up all the way to the end.

In the short term, I don't see how the Army, and especially the Reserve, is going to make up for short-falls. Why join the Reserve when you know you're going to get called up immediately? If you wanted to go that bad, you'd already be in the regular Army. They have extended the age for Reservists from 34 to 39, which is good. One thing holding back the regular Army is that after the age of 30, a recruit has basically no chance of becoming an officer based on talks I had with recruiters a year ago. Why would anyone over 30 want to go in enlisted if they qualified for OCS? It seems to me that this really limits your pool of recruits to kids under 20, and that's it.