Army Reaches Its Lowest Counts

Army reaches low, fills ranks

12% of recruits in Oct. had lowest acceptable scores

By Tom Bowman

Sun reporter

November 8, 2005

WASHINGTON // The number of new recruits who scored at the bottom of the Army's aptitude test tripled last month, Pentagon officials said, helping the nation's largest armed service meet its October recruiting goal but raising concerns about the quality of the force.

Former Army Secretary Thomas E. White said the service was making a mistake by lowering its standards. "I think it's disastrous. You are throwing the towel in on recruiting quality," said White, a retired general whom Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld fired in 2003 over other policy differences.

"We have clear experience from the 1970s with recruiting a sizable number of people from the lowest mental categories," said White. After the Vietnam War, the Army accepted a higher proportion of low-scoring recruits, leading to training and discipline problems, he added.

To achieve last month's recruiting targets, 12 percent of those accepted by the Army had the lowest acceptable results. They scored between 16 and 30 points out of a possible 99 on an aptitude test that quizzes potential soldiers on general science, mathematics and word knowledge.

No more than 4 percent of all recruits can come from that lowest category, according to Pentagon limits. Army officials insisted they would still meet the 4 percent goal - despite the October spike - when numbers are tallied for an entire year. October is the first month of the service's fiscal year, which will end Sept. 30, 2006.

"We're on track to meet our 4 percent annual goal," said Lt. Col. Brian Hilferty, a spokesman for Army personnel. He declined to comment on the 12 percent figure. "It's very early in the year," he said.

The National Guard's October recruit pool included 6 percent from the lowest-scoring category, though Guard officials also said they expected that figure to drop below the 4 percent ceiling by the time the recruiting year ends. Defense officials discussed the numbers on the condition of anonymity. The recruiting figures will be officially released later this week.

The number of poor-scoring recruits brought in by the Army Reserve, which officials said also achieved its monthly recruiting goal in October, could not be determined.

Charles Moskos, a military sociologist at Northwestern University, said he was concerned that the reduction in the quality standards for military recruiting signaled a return by the Army to the troubled personnel era of the 1970s. He said the military must come up with new ways to attract better recruits.

The Army, which has about 492,000 soldiers, hopes to attract 80,000 recruits in 2006 as part of an effort to increase the size of the force by 30,000 during the next several years. The Army National Guard has a goal of 70,000 recruits over the next year, to maintain its force of 350,000.

Officials blame the recruiting problems on the deadly war in Iraq and an improved economic climate at home, which has made it more difficult to sign up volunteers for military duty.

Army Secretary Francis J. Harvey told reporters last month that the Army would begin accepting more people who scored in the bottom third on the military's aptitude test, increasing the proportion to 4 percent from 2 percent. The Army had kept the figure at 2 percent since 1990.

But Harvey did not say that the Army already had brought in 4 percent - or roughly 2,900 of its 73,000 recruits - from the lowest category for the 2005 recruiting year, which ended Sept. 30. In 2004, the Army accepted just 440 soldiers from the lowest category, or about 0.6 percent of 70,000 recruits.

The National Guard also doubled its number of low-scoring