http://www.slate.com/id/2182752/?gt1=10935

Dumb and DumberThe U.S. Army lowers recruitment standards … again.
By Fred Kaplan
Posted Thursday, Jan. 24, 2008, at 5:25 PM ET

The Army is lowering recruitment standards to levels not seen in at
least two decades, and the implications are severe—not only for the
future of the Army, but also for the direction of U.S. foreign policy.

The latest statistics—compiled by the Defense Department. and obtained
through the Freedom of Information Act by the Boston-based National
Priorities Project—are grim. They show that the percentage of new Army
recruits with high-school diplomas has plunged from 94 percent in 2003
to 83.5 percent in 2005 to 70.7 percent in 2007. (The Pentagon's
longstanding goal is 90 percent.)

The percentage of what the Army calls "high-quality" recruits—those
who have high-school diplomas and who score in the upper 50th
percentile on the Armed Forces' aptitude tests—has declined from 56.2
percent in 2005 to 44.6 percent in 2007.

In order to meet recruitment targets, the Army has even had to scour
the bottom of the barrel. There used to be a regulation that no more
than 2 percent of all recruits could be "Category IV"—defined as
applicants who score in the 10th to 30th percentile on the aptitude
tests. In 2004, just 0.6 percent of new soldiers scored so low. In
2005, as the Army had a hard time recruiting, the cap was raised to 4
percent. And in 2007, according to the new data, the Army exceeded
even that limit—4.1 percent of new recruits last year were Cat IVs.

These trends are worrisome in at least four ways.

First, and most broadly, it's not a good idea—for a host of social,
political, and moral reasons—to place the burdens of national defense
so disproportionately on the most downtrodden citizens.

Second, and more practically, high-school dropouts tend to drop out of
the military, too. The National Priorities Project cites Army studies
finding that 80 percent of high-school graduates finish their first
terms of enlistment in the Army—compared with only about half of those
with a General Equivalency Degree or no diploma. In other words,
taking in more dropouts is a short-sighted method of boosting
recruitment numbers. The Army will just have to recruit even more
young men and women in the next couple of years, because a lot of the
ones they recruited last year will need to be replaced.

Third, a dumber army is a weaker army. A study by the RAND
Corporation, commissioned by the Pentagon and published in 2005,
evaluated several factors that affect military performance—experience,
training, aptitude, and so forth—and found that aptitude is key. This
was true even of basic combat skills, such as shooting straight.
Replacing a tank gunner who had scored Category IV with one who'd
scored Category IIIA (in the 50th to 64th percentile) improved the
chances of hitting a target by 34 percent.

Today's Army, of course, is much more high-tech, from top to bottom.
The problem is that when tasks get more technical, aptitude makes an
even bigger difference. In one Army study cited by the RAND report,
three-man teams from the Army's active-duty signal battalions were
told to make a communications system operational. Teams consisting of
Category IIIA personnel had a 67 percent chance of succeeding. Teams
with Category IIIB soldiers (who had ranked in the 31st to 49th
percentile) had a 47 percent chance. Those with Category IVs had only
a 29 percent chance. The study also showed that adding a high-scoring
soldier to a three-man team increased its chance of success by 8
percent. (This also means that adding a low-scoring soldier to a team
reduces its chance by a similar margin.)

Fourth, today's Army needs particularly bright soldiers—and it needs,
even more, to weed out particularly dim ones—given the direction that
at least some of its senior officers want it to take. When the Army
was geared to fight large-scaled battles against enemies of comparable
strength, imaginative thinking wasn't much required except at a
command level. However, now that it's focusing on "asymmetric
warfare," especially counterinsurgency campaigns, such as those in
Iraq and Afghanistan, the requirements are different. The crucial
engagements—in many ways, the crucial decisions—take place in the
streets, door to door, not by armored divisions or brigades but by
infantry companies and squads. And when the targets include hearts and
minds, every soldier's judgment and actions have an impact.

The Army's 2006 field manual on counterinsurgency, which was
supervised by Gen. David Petraeus (who is now trying to put its
principles into action as U.S. commander in Iraq), emphasized that
successful counterinsurgency operations "require Soldiers and Marines
at every echelon to possess the following"—and then the authors recite
a daunting list of prerequisites, including a "clear, nuanced, and
empathetic appreciation of the essential nature of the conflict," an
"understanding of the motivation, strengths, and weaknesses of the
insurgent," rudimentary knowledge of the local culture, and several
other admirable qualities.

Some of the officers and outside specialists who helped Petraeus write
the field manual expressed concerns to me, at the time, that the
Army—which was just beginning to lower its standards—might not be up
to the demands of this kind of warfare. Given that standards have
dipped quite dramatically since—and add to that the problems the Army
has had in retaining its most talented junior officers—the concerns
now must be graver.

It's well-known that the Army might not have enough combat troops to
conduct sustained counterinsurgency campaigns. Now it seems the
problem may soon be about quality as well as quantity (brains as well
as boots).

The main reason for the decline in standards is the war in Iraq and
its onerous "operations tempo"—soldiers going back for third and
fourth tours of duty, with no end in sight. This is well understood
among senior officers, and it's a major reason why several Army
generals favor a faster withdrawal rate. They worry that fewer young
men and women—and now it seems fewer smart young men and women—will
sign up if doing so means a guaranteed assignment to Iraq. They worry
that, if these trends continue, the Army itself will start to crumble.

So, there's a double spiral in effect. The war keeps more good
soldiers from enlisting. The lack of good candidates compels the Army
to recruit more bad candidates. The swelling ranks of ill-suited
soldiers make it harder to fight these kinds of wars effectively.

Petraeus and officers who think like him are right: We're probably not
going to be fighting on the ground, toe-to-toe and tank-to-tank, with
the Russian, Chinese, or North Korean armies in the foreseeable
future. Yet if the trends continue, our Army might be getting less and
less skilled at the "small wars" we're more likely to fight.

So, we're facing two choices. Either we change the way we recruit
soldiers (and, by the way, cash bonuses are already about as bountiful
as they're going to get), or we change the way we conduct foreign
policy—that is, we engage more actively in diplomacy or, if war is
unavoidable, we form genuine coalitions to help fight it. Otherwise,
unless our most dire and direct interests are at stake, we should
forget about fighting at all.

http://www.slate.com/id/2182752/?gt1=10935

Dumb and DumberThe U.S. Army lowers recruitment standards ... again.