The Army Needs New Incentives

Army Secretary Louis Caldera set off a small political firestorm recently when he announced that he was thinking about lowering the Army’s enlistment standards. The secretary, himself a West Point graduate, apparently saw this as a reasonable response to the Army’s recruiting shortfalls. Predictably, Clinton ‘administration critics pounced on it as evidence that the president doesn’t understand the military and doesn’t care if its quality falls.

In truth, Caldera’s proposal would have minimal effect on the quality of the Army. It would add a couple of thousand high school dropouts to the roughly 70,000 men and women recruited every year--a minor dilution. Further, the dropouts that Caldera wants to enlist are not semiliterate delinquents; they all possess a high school general equivalency diploma. In school districts where a minimum standardized test score is not a requirement for graduation, the GED actually may be a better indicator of educational achievement than a diploma.

In addition, the Army would retain its own standardized test score requirements, its medical and physical requirements and its character standards. In short, the Army would still be more selective than most of the nation’s colleges.

The only down side to Caldera’s approach is that it may increase the number of enlistees who leave the service before completing their first tour of duty. (High school diploma recipients are preferred to those with GEDs not because they are smarter but because they are more persistent.) However, the Army was experiencing a 30% first-term loss rate even when 95% of its recruits were high school graduates; so the incremental cost of a few more GED graduates will be relatively small.

Right now, it is not clear whether Caldera actually will alter the enlistment standards. In the short term, he has other options; among them are spending even more on recruiting, which already costs the Army about $10,000 per enlistee; making greater use of recruiting bonuses and opening up more career fields to women.

The larger problem is that all of the military services are in a tough recruiting environment: Unemployment is at a 30-year low, and college attendance is at an all-time high. The solution to the recruiting shortfall is therefore quite easy, at least in principle: Make military service a condition for receiving college financial aid. This approach is very difficult politically, because millions of college-bound students and their parents have come to view the college financial aid as an entitlement. However, it has three things to recommend it.

First, right now the federal government is spending billions of dollars to recruit people into the military while spending billions more to give them a very attractive option to military service: college. By reducing the amount of unconditional federal student financial aid and shifting some of it into a form of GI bill, we ease this conflict somewhat.

Second, the best educated people in this society should learn about common purpose and self-sacrifice and duty and, yes, even honor. These values are not part of the normal college curriculum; the military is one of the few institutions that still tries to instill them.

Third, education benefits have proved to be among the military’s most effective recruiting incentives--even more effective than increased pay. If we know what works, we ought to use more of it.

This solution, of course, is beyond Secretary Caldera’s pay grade. It needs to come from the president or from a senior member of Congress. The question is, do any of the nation’s political leaders have the political courage to turn an entitlement program into a service obligation?