Kelly M. Greenhill : Don't Dumb Down the Army
[Kelly M. Greenhill is an assistant professor of government at Wesleyan and a research fellow at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government.]
... Welcoming [recruits without high school diplomas] ... into the military has obvious appeal at a time when recruitment numbers are slipping, while manpower needs remain acute. But the adoption of lower standards to fill the ranks is shortsighted and imprudent. Moreover, continuing or expanding this policy would be a mistake for the Army and for the recruits themselves. Pentagon officials should know this better than anyone: their previous experiments with lower standards were clear failures.
Four decades ago, during the Vietnam War, Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara created Project 100,000, a program intended to help the approximately 300,000 men who annually failed the Armed Forces Qualification Test for reasons of aptitude. The idea behind Mr. McNamara's scheme was that the military would annually absorb 100,000 of the country's "subterranean poor" — people who would otherwise be rejected.
Using a variety of "educational and medical techniques," the Pentagon would "salvage" these Category IV recruits first for military careers and later for more productive roles in society. Project 100,000 recruits — known as New Standards Men — would then return to civilian life with new skills and aptitudes that would allow them to "reverse the downward spiral of human decay."
Mr. McNamara further concluded that the best way to demonstrate that the induction of New Standards Men would prove beneficial was to keep their status hidden from their commanders. In other words, Project 100,000 was a blind experiment run on the military amid the escalation of hostilities in Southeast Asia.
Despite the skepticism of the military leadership and objections from some of Mr. McNamara's own advisers, the first New Standards Men began entering service in October 1966. By the time of the Tet offensive in 1968, approximately 150,000 had been inducted.
While standards were lowered for entry into the services, they were not lowered for acceptance to the military's technical schools. After basic training, only the most technically qualified moved onto advanced training. The rest ended up in "soft skill" areas, including supply, food service, clerical and, most significantly, the infantry.
In the program's first three years, nearly half of the Army's and well over 50 percent of the Marines' New Standards Men were assigned to combat specialties. The results were not surprising: a Project 100,000 recruit who entered the Marine Corps in 1968 was two and a half times more likely to die in combat than his higher-aptitude compatriots. After all, they tended to be the ones in the line of fire.
But Project 100,000 recruits fared poorly outside combat as well. ...
Read entire article at NYT
... Welcoming [recruits without high school diplomas] ... into the military has obvious appeal at a time when recruitment numbers are slipping, while manpower needs remain acute. But the adoption of lower standards to fill the ranks is shortsighted and imprudent. Moreover, continuing or expanding this policy would be a mistake for the Army and for the recruits themselves. Pentagon officials should know this better than anyone: their previous experiments with lower standards were clear failures.
Four decades ago, during the Vietnam War, Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara created Project 100,000, a program intended to help the approximately 300,000 men who annually failed the Armed Forces Qualification Test for reasons of aptitude. The idea behind Mr. McNamara's scheme was that the military would annually absorb 100,000 of the country's "subterranean poor" — people who would otherwise be rejected.
Using a variety of "educational and medical techniques," the Pentagon would "salvage" these Category IV recruits first for military careers and later for more productive roles in society. Project 100,000 recruits — known as New Standards Men — would then return to civilian life with new skills and aptitudes that would allow them to "reverse the downward spiral of human decay."
Mr. McNamara further concluded that the best way to demonstrate that the induction of New Standards Men would prove beneficial was to keep their status hidden from their commanders. In other words, Project 100,000 was a blind experiment run on the military amid the escalation of hostilities in Southeast Asia.
Despite the skepticism of the military leadership and objections from some of Mr. McNamara's own advisers, the first New Standards Men began entering service in October 1966. By the time of the Tet offensive in 1968, approximately 150,000 had been inducted.
While standards were lowered for entry into the services, they were not lowered for acceptance to the military's technical schools. After basic training, only the most technically qualified moved onto advanced training. The rest ended up in "soft skill" areas, including supply, food service, clerical and, most significantly, the infantry.
In the program's first three years, nearly half of the Army's and well over 50 percent of the Marines' New Standards Men were assigned to combat specialties. The results were not surprising: a Project 100,000 recruit who entered the Marine Corps in 1968 was two and a half times more likely to die in combat than his higher-aptitude compatriots. After all, they tended to be the ones in the line of fire.
But Project 100,000 recruits fared poorly outside combat as well. ...