[greedo]

Basic is designed around two guiding principles; instilling fundamental military skills, and social coercion to instill compliance. I don't mean the latter in a derogatory way at all. Think about it; who in their right mind wants to expose themselves to small arms fire, etc etc? Basic training has a lot of experience dealing with people "who don't want to be there." Now it's become a lot softer compared to during the Cold War; we have to treat everyone as a special snowflake, and a lot of the old methodologies have become proscribed. But if the military let out everyone who decided (during basic) that signing on the dotted line was a mistake, the system wouldn't work.