The Comment Factory

Maybe the constant media abuse about his meager intellect made George W. Bush soft in the heart as well as the head. During the ‘war on terror’ the U.S. military have opened their hearts to high-school dropouts and the intellectually challenged.

From the mid-1980s, the military has barred anyone without a high school diploma. They have also required recruits to go through an Armed Forces Aptitude Test, which shut out anyone who scored in the lowest two percentiles.

The cognitive revolution in the military started in 2005 when the Pentagon decided that in order to meet its goal of recruiting 80,000 new soldiers it would have to allow 10 percent of those new recruits to be young men and women who had never graduated high school nor earned a General Equivalency Diploma.

When this wasn’t enough to meet their quotas, the Pentagon started recruiting more soldiers who scored in the lowest 10th percentile in the military aptitude test, also known as Category IV. They allowed 4 percent of new recruits to be from Category IV, up from 2 percent the year before. Now the military accept it that the percentage of Category IV recruits has gone into the double figures.

The dumbing-down of the armed forces has a very real effect on the military’s efficacy, according to a report by the RAND Corp. For example, a tank gunner in Category IV was 34 percent less likely to hit their target than a Category III.

“The overall quality of the force today is lower than it was a year ago,” said David R. Segal, of the Center for Research on Military Organization at the University of Maryland. “It means they can anticipate more problem situations with recruits in the training cycle.”

The flip side is the re-enfranchisement of a whole swathe of society; statistically an ethnic minority is much less likely to have a high school diploma. “I’m not totally naïve, but I have faith in recruiters,” said Rep. Joe Wilson (R-SC). “There may be higher dropout rates. But a lot of times they’re extending opportunities to minorities who wouldn’t have opportunities otherwise.”