The Perfect Soldier: Special Operations, Commandos, and the Future of Us Warfare by James F. Dunnigan
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Dirty Little Secrets
Boot Camp for Dummies
by James Dunnigan
November 24, 2005
Discussion Board on this DLS topic
The U.S. Army is lowering its admission
standards in order to make up for a shortage of volunteers. In the coming year,
the army will allow up to four percent of the recruits to be of the second
lowest aptitude level (Category IV). A year ago, for the first time since 1998,
the U.S. Army lowered some requirements for recruits. This, for the fiscal year
that ended on September 30, at least 90 percent of new recruits had to be high
school graduates, as compared to 92 percent in the year before. Up to 2 percent
of recruits could be of Category IV, compared to 1.5 percent in the previous
year. These changes meant that the Army was able to accept as many as 2,000
recruits that would have been previously been rejected. Last year, the army
wanted to recruit 80,000 new people, but fell 8.5 percent (6,800 recruits)
short. That’s the largest shortfall since 1979.
In the last century, as the army increasingly used aptitude tests, and tracked
the performance of troops, it became obvious that those with higher scores did
better, and were much less likely to be problems (and get tossed out the army.)
The army aptitude tests take into account intelligence, as well as
psychological suitability for military life and situations. Thus those in
Category IV are limited to the number of jobs they are qualified for, are
hard to train, and more likely to have problems adjusting to military life. In
the late 1970s, about 30 percent of the volunteers were Category IV and V (the
lowest level). The army had a lot of trouble with those recruits, and, starting
in the early 1980s, eliminated any Category Vs, and sharply reduced the number
of Category IVs (usually by insisting they be high school graduates.)
However, over the last two decades, the army has also done a lot of research
into training methods, and believes it can sharply reduce the training and
discipline problems of Category IVs. This is pretty important, because if you
get thousands of Category IV recruits out of basic, you just transfer poorly
adapted troops to units throughout the army. You are just going to see lots of
NCOs and officers get out themselves, rather than put up with these additional
headaches. It will be several years before it is known if this experiment
works.
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