In other news, I’ve achieved my goal of dunking a basketball by playing over on the 8′ rim at the local grade school.

So last month the Army had missed its recruiting goal by 25%, and that was only after revising their goal downward from 8,050 to 6,700. Well, if at first you don’t succeed… aim lower!

(New York Times) Gen. Richard B. Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told a public forum at the Pentagon on Wednesday that the Army exceeded its June goal, but he gave no details. Senior Army officials said in interviews earlier in the day that the Army exceeded the quota of 5,650 recruits by about 500 people. The Army Reserve also made its first monthly goal since last December, the officials said.

Hmm, so you mean you got about 6,150 people for June, which is about 550 short of your previously-reduced May goal, but now exceeds your further-reduced June goal. Or to put it another way, you did get about 1,000 more recruits than you did in May, here at the beginning of the peak recruiting season as high school kids end their term.

Here’s an idea; why not just lower the recruiting goal to two people: the Bush twins. Then when you get 5,000 recruits, you can say you beat your goal by 2,500%

That still leaves the active-duty Army about 7,800 recruits behind schedule to send 80,000 enlistees to boot camp with only three months to go in the recruiting year that ends on Sept. 30. The Army has not missed its annual enlistment quota since 1999, when a strong economy made recruiters’ lives miserable.

To address this shortfall, the Army is lobbying President Bush to mandate an extra twenty days each for the months of July, August, and September. The recruiting year will end September 50th, leaving us the remaining 32 days of the renamed month of Octnodecember to celebrate.

Army officials publicly insist that they can still reach their annual goal, especially with hundreds of new recruiters on the street for the peak summer recruiting month, armed with big enlistment bonuses and greater leeway to recruit more high-school dropouts and lower-achieving applicants.

“Hey, look sergeant! There’s plenty more recruits over here in the bottom of this barrel!”

Anybody else feel a draft? Well, I’m not quite as sure. A draft would be political suicide; I don’t see many senators or representatives cozying up to the idea (aside from Rep. Charles Rangel’s bluff). My theory is that the maladministration will combine their two favorite Wars on Nouns (drugs and terror) and start offering to plea bargain mandatory drug sentences in exchange for military service.