COUNTERING MILITARY RECRUITMENT
Articles: Military Recruiting: Personnel Crunch
Army Giving More Waivers in Recruiting
LIZETTE ALVAREZ, NY Times
February 14, 2007
The
number of waivers granted to Army recruits with criminal backgrounds
has grown about 65 percent in the last three years, increasing to 8,129
in 2006 from 4,918 in 2003, Department of Defense records show.
During that time, the Army has employed a variety of tactics to expand
its diminishing pool of recruits. It has offered larger enlistment cash
bonuses, allowed more high school dropouts and applicants with low
scores on its aptitude test to join, and loosened weight and age
restrictions.
It has also increased the number of so-called “moral
waivers” to recruits with criminal pasts, even as the total
number of recruits dropped slightly. The sharpest increase was in
waivers for serious misdemeanors, which make up the bulk of all the
Army’s moral waivers. These include aggravated assault, burglary,
robbery and vehicular homicide.
The number of waivers for felony convictions also increased, to 11
percent of the 8,129 moral waivers granted in 2006, from 8 percent.
Waivers for less serious crimes like traffic offenses and drug use have dropped or remained stable.
The Army enlisted 69,395 men and women last year.
While soldiers with criminal histories made up only 11.7 percent of the
Army recruits in 2006, the spike in waivers raises concerns about
whether the military is making too many exceptions to try to meet its
recruitment demands in a time of war. Most felons, for example, are not
permitted to carry firearms, and many criminals have at some point
exhibited serious lapses in discipline and judgment, traits that are
far from ideal on the battlefield.
The military automatically excludes people who have committed certain
crimes. They include drug traffickers, recruits who have more than one
felony on their record or people who have committed sexually violent
crimes. A felony is defined as a crime that carries a sentence of a
year or more in prison.
Bill Carr, the under secretary of military personnel policy, said the
military granted waivers selectively and scrutinized a recruit’s
full record, the nature of the crime, when it was committed, the degree
of rehabilitation and references from teachers, employers, coaches and
clergy members.
In many cases, Mr. Carr said, the applicant may have committed the
crime at a young age and then stayed out of trouble. To his knowledge,
he said, recruits who are issued moral waivers are not tracked once
inside the military.
“If the community backs them, we are willing to take a hard
look,” Mr. Carr said, referring to the waiver process, which
includes checks of local, state and federal records.
The majority of moral waivers are for serious misdemeanors, most often
committed by juveniles. As Douglas Smith, the public information
officer for the Army’s recruiting command, said, “We
understand that people make mistakes in their lives and they can
overcome those mistakes.”
Fewer than 3 in 10 people ages 17 to 24 are fully qualified to join the
Army. That means they have a high school diploma, have met aptitude
test score requirements and fitness levels, and would not be barred for
medical reasons, their sexual orientation or their criminal histories.
The Defense Department has also expanded its applicant pool by
accepting soldiers with criminal backgrounds and medical problems like
asthma, high blood pressure and attention deficit disorder, situations
that require waivers. Medical waivers have increased 4 percent,
totaling 12,313 in 2006. Without waivers, the soldiers would have been
barred from service.
In the last three years, the percentage of moral waivers for all new
enlistments in the four services combined has fallen 3 percent, with
spikes in the Army and Air Force. In all, 125,525 such waivers have
been issued since 2003. The Marine Corps issues far more moral waivers
than the Army — 20,750 in 2006 — but only because it has a
stricter policy on drug use. It requires waivers for one-time marijuana
use while the other services do not. Rules on waivers vary by service.
“The data is crystal clear; our armed forces are under incredible
strain, and the only way that they can fill their recruiting quotas is
by lowering their standards,” said Representative Martin T.
Meehan, Democrat of Massachusetts and chairman of the House Armed
Services Subcommittee on Investigations and Oversight. He has requested
more detailed data from the Defense Department on the use of waivers.
“By lowering standards, we are endangering the rest of our armed
forces and sending the wrong message to potential recruits across the
country,” Mr. Meehan said. “Our men and women in uniform
represent the best and brightest in America , and we need to keep it
that way.”
Aaron Belkin, director of the Michael D. Palm Center , a research
institute at the University of California, Santa Barbara , that focuses
on the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell”
policy regarding homosexuality, obtained the most recent data from the
Department of Defense.
Mr. Belkin said the increases in moral waivers in the Army posed a
problem only to the extent that the military failed to track these
recruits or provide special integration training for them.
Since more than 125,000 service members with criminal histories have
joined the military in the last three years, Mr. Belkin said,
“you have a sizeable population that has been incarcerated and is
not used to the same cultural norms as everybody else.”
“The chance that one of those individuals is going to commit an
atrocity or disobey an order is higher,” he said. “Many of
those individuals can be good soldiers, but in some cases they have
special needs. The military should address those needs rather than
pretending they don’t exist.”
Recruiters ask potential recruits to reveal whether they have been
arrested or convicted of crimes. City, county and state records are
checked, as are federal fingerprint databases. The military searches
for convictions but also looks at cases that were dismissed, dropped or
settled in some way. If someone is found not guilty, depending on the
crime, extenuating circumstances are explored, said Maj. Stewart Upton,
a Defense Department spokesman.
The system is far from foolproof, though. Juvenile records can get
tricky because of privacy laws; not every state will release sealed
information. And if someone has moved to a different state, the
criminal history may not always show up.
Decisions on the most serious crimes rise up the chain of command, Mr.
Smith said. He said the military invested a lot of money training
soldiers and tried to screen its recruits to maximize success.
A General Accounting Office report that looked at attrition from 1990
to 1993 found that service members who were granted moral waivers were
more likely to be discharged from the Air Force because of misconduct.
But most who were granted moral waivers succeed in completing their
term and were more likely to re-enlist.
It is not uncommon for young criminal offenders to turn to the
military, hoping for a waiver, experts say, because their records
typically narrow their job opportunities.
Beth Asch, a senior economist for the RAND Corporation, said the
increase in waivers bore monitoring but was not atypical of what had
happened to the military during past recruitment crunches. The moral
waivers, Ms. Asch said, particularly for felons, still constitute a
relatively small proportion of all enlistments.
“It is something that should be tracked with concern,” she
said. “It shouldn’t increase without monitoring but, so
far, it is within historic norms.”
John D. Hutson, dean and president of the Franklin Pierce Law Center in
New Hampshire and former judge advocate general of the Navy, said the
military must tread carefully in deciding which criminals to accept.
There is a reason, he said, why allowing people with criminal histories
into the military has long been the exception rather than the rule.
“If you are recruiting somebody who has demonstrated some sort of
antisocial behavior and then you are a putting a gun in their hands,
you have to be awfully careful about what you are doing,” Mr.
Hutson said. “You are not putting a hammer in their hands, or
asking them to sell used cars. You are potentially asking them to kill
people.”
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