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In its attempts to meet its recruitment goals during an unpopular war, the U.S. Army has trimmed its recruitment goals to attract prospective soldiers. No big whoop, right? Well, according to Slate‘s Fred Kaplan, quoting a study by the National Priorities Project, the Army is increasingly turning to kids without high school diplomas — and even more worrisome — to kids who score as low as the bottom tenth on Armed Forces aptitude tests.

“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,” Kaplan writes.

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…

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.

Dumb And Dumber: The U.S. Army Lowers its Recruitment Standards…Again. [Slate]

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Gene "G.D." Demby is the founder and editor of PostBourgie. In his day job, he blogs and reports on race and ethnicity for NPR's Code Switch team.
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