A Stunning Disclosure on Illegals in the Military

Monday, March 1, 2004
By Matthew Dodd

DefenseWatch

Lt. Col. Matthew Dodd USMC is a Senior Editor of DefenseWatch. He can be reached at mattdodd1775@hotmail.com. Please send Feedback responses to dwfeedback@yahoo.com. ©2004 DefenseWatch. All opinions expressed in this article are the author's and do not necessarily reflect those of Military.com

After reading and reflecting on the Denver Post article, I found myself exhausted - mentally, physically, and emotionally drained. The threat of illegal aliens in our country and in our military is serious, and so is the unnecessary risk of literally being stopped dead in our complacent tracks.

Military.com
Every now and then, I read or hear something that just stops me dead in my tracks. Sometimes I break out in laughter, sometimes I scream out in anguish, and sometimes I break down and feel like crying.

On rare occasions, I find myself with all those reactions. On very rare occasions, those reactions are almost lost in a cacophony of a multitude of rapid-fire involuntary reactions that include pride, relief, anger, frustration, motivation, inspiration and blatant disbelief. An article in The Denver Post on Feb. 24 that the U.S. military does not know the citizenship status of 16,031 active-duty military personnel provided me with my latest "very rare occasion."

In a recent article ("The Illegal Immigration Threat," DefenseWatch, Jan. 14, 2004), I talked about a 19-year old illegal alien who used a bogus green card to enlist in the Army, and how the Army was going to help facilitate getting him citizen status. (The Army's efforts did result in that soldier being sworn in as a U.S. citizen.) Little did I know at the time that that soldier was literally just the latest tip on a monolithic iceberg.

Let me share with you excerpts from the Denver Post article and my varied reactions to them:

The Denver Post article reported:
"[T]he citizenship of 16,031 members of the Army, Air Force, Navy and Marines is listed as 'unknown.' That's about one in 100 active-duty military members who might be U.S. citizens, legal immigrants - or just about anybody else."

Reaction: I am stunned, completely dumbfounded. I do not know what is worse: the fact that we have so many "unknowns" serving, or that they are serving despite the fact that we apparently have reasonably accurate statistics about them.

Think about the logic trail for a moment. For each case, someone knew enough about the individual to decide that he or she was an "unknown," someone had to enter the "unknown" data into some sort of database, someone had to be responsible for gathering that data, someone had to need that data for some reason (or else why would we track the data in the first place?), so someone had to see these staggering "unknown" totals, yet nobody apparently cared enough about the potential threat of these "unknowns" in our post-9/11 world until the Denver Post reporter showed up and found out.

(More: Military.com / Military Headlines)

2004 © DefenseWatch.

Dan