The U.S. Military Looks to Foreign Soldiers to Fill Recruiting Gaps

It is reported by the People’s Daily Online on December 7 that the U.S. Department of Defense planned to recruit more foreign soldiers for temporary purposes because of urgent vacancies of medical and foreign language professionals. They will have to consider foreign citizens who hold temporary resident visas in the U.S in this program, too. In addition to the requirement of proficiency in English, those professionals must go through a series of rigorous testing. Formerly the U.S. military only recruited someone who held a “green card” (permanent resident status), or someone who was in the process of applying for it. Currently, there are 29,000 non-American soldiers serving in various military branches.

According to a pilot expansion program which will be launched soon, the scope of the recruiting group for the U.S. military will be expanded to include people who hold temporary visas as students, skill workers, refugees or political asylum seekers under the condition that they have lived in U.S. legally for over two years. The U.S. military plans to recruit 1,000 temporary staff among the people mentioned above, about one-third of which are medical staffers who mainly work as doctors in American hospitals. In the United States Army, foreigners will be able to speed up the process of becoming a citizen and enjoy other benefits (such as tuition paid by military).

In recent years, the U.S. military has been hungry for medical and language talents. At present, the vacancy of medical staffs was over one thousand, which is unable to meet the medical needs of the war on terrorism; doctors of neurosurgery and dermatology are especially in demand. At the same time, in order to meet the needs of global battle deployment, the U.S. Special Operations Headquarters is desperately in need of foreign language talents, including Arabic and Chinese talents. In addition to that, they also need people who are fluent in Albanian, Korean, Punjabi, Somali and Turkish to join in the field of intelligence collecting.

U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates recently authorized the Marine Corps and Armed force to recruit foreign medical and language professionals who are vital to national interests. The total number of foreign soldiers in U.S. army reached 2.9 million, accounting for about 2% of the whole active-duty force. There are 8000 foreigners who join the U.S. military annually, the so-called “Green Card Soldiers.” Once they have joined the army, the doctor or the nurses will have to serve for three years (Active) or six years (Reserve). Language professionals must serve four years on active service.