Smokers More Likely to Wash Out of Service
Recruits who enter service as heavy cigarette smokers are nearly twice as likely as nonsmokers to be separated early, mostly due to “substandard behavior,†according to new research aimed at easing the U.S. military’s disturbingly high attrition rate.
For all its achievements over three decades, the volunteer military has had one chronic problem: an alarming washout rate. A third of all new entrants fail to complete initial service obligations, driving up recruiting and training costs.
This shouldn’t be a shock to anyone because when I was in high school back in the day, the people who smoked were usually people who had authority problems and smoked just to piss people off.
Now this is interesting:
Now it appears pre-service smoking habits could well be the equal of a diploma for predicting if a recruit will succeed in service, said Dr. Eli S. Flyer, a former senior manpower analyst with the Defense Department.
I can’t imagine the military not letting people enlist because they smoke. Especially with the recruiting problems of today.
Now this I find hard to believe:
Just more than half — 51 percent — of all servicemembers smoked in 1980. Smoking declined to a 29.9 percent level in 1998, but smoking increased to 33.8 percent according to the 2002 survey of Health Related Behaviors Among Military Personnel.
Only 33.8% of people in the military smoke? I would think it would be around 50% or more. The military has so many smokers IMHO because it is the easiest way to sham out of work. The laziest soldiers I know are all smokers who hide in the smoke shack and they hide there because the people in charge of them smoke to and are in the same smoke shack. Just about every soldier that I know of who gets into trouble is a smoker.
As many of you know 2ID has started a campaign to ban smoking on the 2ID camps. All this does is cause the smokers to go to the far off smoking designated point to smoke removing them from work that much longer. What the army needs to do is limit the number of smoke breaks to one in the morning for 10 minutes and one in the afternoon for 10 minutes and implement a sign in and sign out roster to track it. If the soldier has to go through a lot of hurdles to take a smoke break that will cut the number of smokers because many of them smoke just to get out of work.
This is just one person’s opinion, so feel free to comment if your unit has nothing but hard working smokers because mine doesn’t and I’m willing to bet many other units are the same way.
Tell me about.
I pop my head onto the smoke deck just to see whether or not our department is feeding their addiction too often (or for too long). It got so tiresome in another department that one of their division's DIVO and LCPO restricted their guys from smoking during working hours – except for the DIVO and LCPO themselves. [Oh, brother]
Yes, it can be grating for those who don't smoke and can't/don't/won't use that excuse.
That said, abuse can be kept at a minimum: If you're caught taking too many or too long a smoke break, you deep clean the smoke deck AFTER working hours.
So there is justice in this world after all…
So when did 2ID start cracking down on smoking within its camps? This is a bit surprising even in this age of rampant political correctness.
My bet is that the more people that quit smoking, you'll have roughly equal number that start dipping.
Never served in the military, but I did work in a Korean company not long ago and noticed that those who smoked spent at least an hour a day on smoke breaks. Some worked hard when they were back in the office, some didn't, but just that amount of time out of the office alone really cut into productivity.
If I ever ran a company, I'd only hire Mormons and Seventh Day Adventists: They wouldn't be the most interesting bunch of workers in the world, but no smoke breaks and no hangovers, just hard work.
[…] has been a steady flow of stories coming out over the years such as servicemembers who smoke are more likely to wash out of the service, that will probably ultimately lead to smoking being banned at some point. I find this interesting […]