Copyright John T. Reed

According to Military.com, the Department of Defense is considering banning smoking in the U.S.military:

One in five Americans uses tobacco, but more than 30 percent of active-duty military personnel and about 22 percent of veterans use tobacco. The DoD spends more than $1.6 billion per year on tobacco-related medical care, increased hospitalizations, and lost days of work.

Uh, dudes.

You can’t ban smoking in the U.S. military. Alcohol, tobacco, and firearms is not just a federal agency, it’s also a lifestyle. It is favored by dimwits. That’s your demographic, guys.

As a group, military enlisted are not very bright. As a group, the officers are brighter than the EMs, but less bright than their civilian college grad peer group. Smokers, by definition, are not very bright. So it is not surprising that the percentage of tobacco users in the military is 50% higher than in the general population.

A reader wrote to tell me the U.S. military currently claims that their IQs are a little bit above average compared to the U.S. population as a whole. Yeah, I heard that in the news. I don’t believe it. I also see documentaries about basic training and life in today’s military. You would not mistake a documentary about say, the Marine Corps “crucible,” for a rocket scientist convention. If it is true that the U.S. military IQ scores are above the average for American citizens in general, I would expect they are combining the scores of the officers (who are overeducated for their job content) and the enlisted men and that the percentage of officers in the military exceeds the percentage of college grads in the population as a whole. Go look at the academic rankings of a high school class from five years ago. See who in that class enlisted in the military, and who went in as officers and where the smartest and dumbest kids in the class ended up. Go to a high school where almost everyone goes to college and see if anyone at all enlisted in the military. There are individual exceptions. That’s why I used the phrase “as a group.”

One of my Web articles about the military has the subhead “As fit as a drunken, chain-smoking Marine.”

I am in favor of a draft. Indeed, I would prohibit any enlisting, re-enlisting, or military careers. Make it like jury duty. That would lower the percentage of smokers in the military to 20%. It would also lower the level of alcohol abuse in the military. Draftees are a better class of people than enlistees. When I was in the Army from 1964 to 1972, we had draftees. My father and uncles were World War II and Korean War draftees. Elvis and Ralph Nader were draftees.

Did the geniuses who recommended ending smoking in the Deparment of Defense check with the recruiting departments of the various branches of the military? I suspect their reaction would be something like,

Are you nuts!? We were having to recruit convicted criminals and dropouts to make our quotas until the recession! If we can only recruit non-smokers, we’ll have to solicit pedophiles, clincial morons, amputees, and terrorists to make the quotas!

Would the U.S. military be better off without smokers?

Absolutely. And much, much smaller.

Oh, wait a minute. The military is highly disciplined. It says so in all sorts of military propaganda. So just order them to stop smoking. I wonder why no one ever thought of that before.

John T. Reed

Link to information about John T. Reed’s Succeeding book which, in part, relates lessons learned about succeeding in life from being in the military

John T. Reed military home page