COUNTERING MILITARY RECRUITMENT
Articles: Military Recruiting: Personnel Crunch
U.S. Army expands by lowering the bar on recruits
Bryan Bender, The Boston Globe
November 27, 2007
WASHINGTON: Two weeks ago, the Pentagon announced the "good news"that the army had met its recruiting goal for October, the first
month in a five-year plan to add 65,000 new soldiers to the ranks by 2012.
But Pentagon statistics show the army met that goal by accepting a
higher percentage of enlistees with criminal records, drug or alcohol
problems, or health conditions that would have ordinarily
disqualified them from service.
In each fiscal year since the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003,
statistics show, the army has accepted a growing percentage of
recruits who do not meet its own minimum fitness standards. The
October statistics show that at least 1 of every 5 recruits required
a waiver to join the service, leading military analysts to conclude
that the army is lowering standards more than it has in decades.
"The across-the-board lowering of the standards is buying problems in
the future," said John Hutson, a retired rear admiral, dean of the
Franklin Pierce Law Center in New Hampshire, and a former judge
advocate general of the navy. "You are going to have more people
getting in trouble, more people washing out" before finishing their
tour of duty.
The Army Recruiting Command, based in Fort Knox, Kentucky, insists
that it carefully reviews each applicant. "We look at the recent
history, such as employment, schooling, references, and signs of
remorse and changed behavior since the incident occurred" on how
recruits with criminal records are regarded, the command said in a
statement to The Boston Globe.
But Senator Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat and influential chairman
of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said he was concerned that
the army was sacrificing quality for quantity.
"While quantity is of course important, quality must remain the
highest priority," Levin said at a Nov. 15 congressional hearing.
"The army must continue to uphold high standards - moral,
intellectual, and physical - for new recruits, to ensure that these
young men and women are capable of handling the great demands that
they will face. We must find a way to both increase the size of the
army and to maintain its standards."
Seeking to reduce the strain the Iraq war has placed on ground
forces, Congress this year approved the Pentagon's proposal to bring
the active-duty army to at least 547,000 troops, an increase of
65,000 and the biggest buildup of conventional forces since the end
of the Cold War. The plan is predicted to cost as much as $70 billion.
Army leaders say they are on pace to complete the expansion two years
early by beefing up recruiting efforts and offering mid-level
officers and enlisted soldiers bonuses of up to $35,000 to re-enlist.
But the recruiting data for October show that accepting applicants
who would previously have been disqualified is likely to be a key way
of reaching the numbers, according to Hutson and a military recruiting analyst.
Of the 6,434 enlistees who signed up last month, 792, or 12.3
percent, required waivers for past criminal activity that would have
disqualified them, including misdemeanor and felony convictions,
according to army data.
By comparison, 11.2 percent of army recruits were granted criminal
waivers in all of fiscal year 2007, which ended Sept. 30. The 2007
figure was the largest percentage of recruits admitted on waivers
since the Iraq war began.
Because the army has used different methods to track waivers, no one
can say for sure whether the current percentages are records. But
recruiting officials believe that the percentage of recruits admitted
on waivers is the highest the army has seen in recent decades.
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