GI Standards at Issue

The all-volunteer armed forces are having trouble finding the nearly 200,000 recruits they need each year to maintain their authorized strength of 1.38 million. The Army especially can’t attract all the qualified young men and women it wants and is worrying it might fall well short of the 74,500 enlistees sought this year.

That has prompted Army Secretary Louis Caldera to call for easing standards to let the service sign up more high school dropouts. Skepticism was promptly expressed in Congress and the Pentagon since experience has shown that recruits who haven’t completed high school are less likely to complete their service commitment and more likely to get into trouble. Caldera knows that. His idea is a pilot program involving several thousand recruits whose chances for success would be judged by something other than a high school diploma.

The test project is worth trying, so long as it doesn’t mean any significant lowering of Army standards. The current system requires that 90% of recruits have high school diplomas, that at least 67% of them score above 50% on the Armed Forces Qualification Test and that no more than 2% score below 31% on that test, which measures math and verbal aptitude. A modest relaxation of these standards might be possible in the case of candidates who have shown--for example, on the basis of their civilian work records--that they have the motivation to be good soldiers.

Caldera especially hopes to attract more Latinos, who are underrepresented in the Army in comparison with their numbers in the population. But the project would of course not be limited or weighted toward one ethnic group. The object is to provide a chance for any who measure up.

The Army’s difficulties with recruitment touch on a much larger issue, however. Since the Selective Service system ended a quarter-century ago, enlistees have been drawn disproportionally from the ranks of the poorer and less educated, those least likely to find good opportunities in the civilian economy. The post-Cold War contraction of the military has helped disguise the extent of the problem. But it’s something that should concern Americans because it means that the armed forces are not representative of society as a whole.

Caldera’s idea deserves a fair test, keeping in mind that the only valid measure of its success must be whether it benefits the Army. If those benefits arise, some expansion of the effort could be warranted.