October 10, 2005: The U.S. Army is lowering its admission standards in order to make up for a shortage of volunteers. In the coming year, the army will allow up to four percent of the recruits to be of the second lowest aptitude level (Category IV). A year ago, for the first time since 1998, the U.S. Army lowered some requirements for recruits. This, for the fiscal year that ended on September 30, at least 90 percent of new recruits had to be high school graduates, as compared to 92 percent in the year before. Up to 2 percent of recruits could be of Category IV, compared to 1.5 percent in the previous year. These changes meant that the Army was able to accept as many as 2,000 recruits that would have been previously been rejected. Last year, the army wanted to recruit 80,000 new people, but fell 8.5 percent (6,800 recruits) short. That's the largest shortfall since 1979.

In the last century, as the army increasingly used aptitude tests, and tracked the performance of troops, it became obvious that those with higher scores did better, and were much less likely to be problems (and get tossed out the army.) The army aptitude tests take into account intelligence, as well as psychological suitability for military life and situations. Thus those in Category IVare limited to the number of jobs they are qualified for, are hard to train, and more likely to have problems adjusting to military life. In the late 1970s, about 30 percent of the volunteers were Category IV and V (the lowest level). The army had a lot of trouble with those recruits, and, starting in the early 1980s, eliminated any Category Vs, and sharply reduced the number of Category IVs (usually by insisting they be high school graduates.)

However, over the last two decades, the army has also done a lot of research into training methods, and believes it can sharply reduce the training and discipline problems of Category IVs. This is pretty important, because if you get thousands of Category IV recruits out of basic, you just transfer poorly adapted troops to units throughout the army. You are just going to see lots of NCOs and officers get out themselves, rather than put up with these additional headaches. It will be several years before it is known if this experiment works.