Why The Army Wants To Ban Tattoos [View all]

http://breakingdefense.com/2013/09/25/why-the-army-wants-to-ban-tattooos/

Why The Army Wants To Ban Tattoos
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.
on September 25, 2013 at 12:57 PM

~snip~

But there’s method to the Army’s madness. This is just one small step in the service’s campaign to raise standards and discipline after it opened the floodgates to felons, high school dropouts, and other dubious recruits when it boosted its ranks at the height of the Iraq war.

Current regulations ban tattoos only on the face unless they’re “extremist, indecent, sexist or racist”: no swastikas or naked ladies, sorry, but almost anything else goes. On Saturday, however, Sergeant Major of the Army Raymond Chandler told troops in Afghanistan that the service was about to ban them on the neck, below the elbows, or below the knees. The ban means, in essence, no tattoos anywhere they’d be visible on a soldier wearing short sleeves and shorts. The service may well let some soldiers already in uniform keep their ink, but new recruits may have to pay out of their own pockets to get offending tattoos removed.

Why should ink disqualify you from being a soldier? “Is being willing to die for your country not good enough?” the commentator on the video asks (fast-forward to 0:45). “Does the military just have a surplus of people sitting around that they can be this choosey?”

Well, actually, it does. Between the end of the Iraq war, the drawdown in Afghanistan, and tightening budgets, the military can’t afford all the people it has, let alone the ships, planes, and main battle tanks. In fact, if the ongoing automatic spending cuts called sequestration continue for 10 years, as current law mandates, then the US will not have the firepower to defeat a single major enemy, e.g. North Korea, the chiefs of the Army, Navy, and Air Force told Congress last week. (The Commandant of the Marine Corps was predictably more gung-ho).