Army Accepting More Recruits With Criminal Problems, No Diplomas

Team Infidel

Forum Spin Doctor
NPR
April 17, 2008 Morning Edition (NPR), 7:10
LYNN NEARY: Let’s start with the good news about Army recruiting. After years of war, the military still hasn’t needed a draft, but as the years go on, it’s getting harder to find qualified volunteers and documents obtained by NPR suggest that U.S. Army recruiting is not going as well as in the past.
STEVE INSKEEP: The Army is meeting its goals for the total number of soldiers signed up, but the documents show the Army accepting more recruits without high school diplomas and more with criminal or medical problems, among other problems.
NPR’s Tom Bowman has been following the story and brought up this sheet of documents here.
Tom, what are we looking at here?
TOM BOWMAN: Well, Steve, this is a briefing given by the Army to Defense Secretary Gates back at the end of January and its very interesting. It shows the rate of waivers for criminal and medical problems granted over the past several years. For example, for serious misdemeanors, there were about 3,000 waivers back in 2005. Last year in 2007, it was about 8,200.
INSKEEP: So you’ve got thousands of people who might not have gotten in before who are getting in now with criminal records. You’ve also got – there’s a chart here that shows that back in the early ‘90s, basically, 100 percent of the enlistees accepted into the United States Army had a high school diploma and its now gone down to 79 percent.
BOWMAN: Exactly. That’s right. That’s a real problem because a high school diploma, recruiters see that as an indicator of success, of intuitiveness, of completing training and actually becoming a better soldier. So that’s something that they’ve watched for years and they’re really concerned about it.
INSKEEP: So how concerned is the Army that they’re scraping the bottom of the barrel? That they’re getting recruits who are not ready for the high tech warfare they’re being thrown into?
BOWMAN: There’s great concern about it and they want to try to bring in more high school diploma grads. They want to keep these waivers down as much as they can, but they’re creeping up, again, by the hundreds, if not thousands.
INSKEEP: Now, I want to come back to that notion of the criminal waiver. That’s the classic story of how you get in the Army, you get in trouble as a kid in school and the judge says, well, you can go to jail or you can join the Army. You’re suggesting basically that’s happening again in a larger and larger scale across the country, thousands of people going to the military, not being forced by a judge necessarily, but going with a criminal background.
BOWMAN: Exactly.
INSKEEP: Is it necessarily bad? Do these people always make bad soldiers?
BOWMAN: Well, it’s funny because they did an analysis of these waivers, both for medical problems and criminal problems and they found something very interesting. They found, for example, that those with criminal waivers and medical waivers tend to do better in recruit training. They tend to finish recruit training. They tend to make sergeant faster. They tend to reenlist at higher rates and they tend to, interestingly, get more awards for valor than those without waivers.
So that’s really interesting. On the other hand though, they tend to desert in greater numbers. They tend to have misconduct problems in greater problems and they fail out of alcohol rehab in greater numbers than those without the waivers.
So it’s sort of a double-edged sword, and clearly, the Army is going to have to sort of calibrate how they bring these waiver folks in to make sure that they get those who are successful, who make sergeant better as opposed to those who become deserters.
INSKEEP: And we’re looking at a document here that you said was presented to Defense Secretary Robert Gates by people from the U.S. Army. I wonder in your conversations with people if you get a sense of the conclusions that go along with all these statistics? Does the Army think that a year from now or three years from now or five years from now, they’re going to have the numbers of qualified people that they need to do everything they’re being asked to do?
BOWMAN: Not necessarily, and there’s a real worry that as these people rise up the ranks, maybe become sergeant, will that be the best sergeant you have? Or is this some guy that’s really not going to be as good as you had maybe 10, 20 years ago?
INSKEEP: Is part of the problem just that the military is expanding, the Army especially expanding and getting in more recruits all the time?
BOWMAN: That’s part of it. They’re trying to grow the Army during wartime, during an unpopular war. So some of the best recruits are deciding not to come into the Army.
INSKEEP: NPR’s Tom Bowman covers the Pentagon. Tom, thanks very much.
BOWMAN: You’re welcome, Steve.
INSKEEP: And you can get a look at portions of this U.S. Army presentation for yourself. Just go to our Web site, npr.org.
 
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