Number of Military Desertions Up Since Bush Took Office...

[Scaramouche]

Check out this fascination information at the Memory Hole on this one: http://www.thememoryhole.org/mil/deserters/army-deserters.htm

...Freedom of Information Act request regarding deserters yielded the following documents from the US Army.

The official numbers:

FY 1997: 2,218
FY 1998: 2,520
FY 1999: 2,966
FY 2000: 3,949
FY 2001: 4,597
FY 2002: 4,021
FY 2003 (to May 2003): 2,096
TOTAL: 22,367

:wtf:

[Tempest]

1. You're wrong, I'm sorry to say

According to the figures, the rate of desertion is down since Bush took office.

Not only is the rate down, the actual number of desertions is decreasing.

[T Roosevelt]

2. How do you figure that?

The rate of change may be down (of course it spiked in 2001), but the numbers are clearly up, particularly when you extrapolate out the 2003 numbers to cover 12 months - then you're looking at over 5000. Now if you want to compare these as a percent of the total in the military, you might have an argument, but to my knowledge the number in the services has not changed substantially, and may have in fact fallen (but I don't have those numbers).

[WoodrowFan]

3. look again

you must have misread them.

[Scaramouche]

4. Huh?

Look at thea comparable period under Clinton
-98-00 9,435 dessertions
then the period under Bush
-01-03 10,714 dessertions

We still don't know how many more folks will dessert this year but it looks like the trend in continuing.

Them numbers are definitely up...

on edit: screwed up the years I was counting...