Lowering the Recruiting Standards?

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U.S. Military has lots of complex missions, from fighting wars to building the advanced equipment and weapons needed to fight them. People are always amazed, for instance, the first time they step foot into the mile-long Air Force Plant No. 4 on Fort Worth's west side and see multimillion-dollar fighter jets rolling off the assembly line. But as stunning as that is to behold, it's nothing compared to the job of retooling more than 100,000 kids into U.S. soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines year after year.

And as the Iraq war drags into its fifth year next month, the raw material that the Defense Department has been molding into freshly minted troops since 9/11 is becoming a little frayed. That's led the military to boost recruiting incentives, but even that is not always enough. So when the sign-up bonuses don't bring in sufficient bodies, the military has long held its nose and issued a variety of waivers to allow once-barred candidates to join the services.

Not surprisingly, given the grinding ground war in Iraq, the Army and Marine Corps are the two branches issuing the most waivers these days. The Army granted more than double the number of waivers for felonies and misdemeanors in 2006 than it did in 2003, the year of the Iraq invasion, according to just-released Pentagon data. Such waivers allow recruits with criminal records, medical problems or poor aptitude scores to enlist despite problems that otherwise would bar them from service. Most are so-called "moral waivers," which include some felonies, misdemeanors, and drug and traffic offenses. Such waivers grew in the Army from 4,918 in 2003 to 8,129 last year. For the Marines, the total grew only slightly, from 19,195 to 20,750 (the higher Marine total is due largely to its stricter anti-drug rules for recruits).

Democratic Congressman James Moran recently expressed concern to Army leaders over the trend. "The percentage of recruits who have received medical, moral or criminal record waivers has doubled," he said at a House Appropriations Committee subcommittee hearing Feb. 9. "It was about 10 percent — it's now a little over 18 percent." Army Secretary Francis Harvey responded by noting that recruits with waivers survive training just as well as those without them. "We have not found any difference in the attrition between those that we gave waivers and we didn't give waivers," he said.

The data were released by the Michael D. Palm Center, a think tank associated with the University of California at Santa Barbara. The new center continues the work of what had been called the Center for the Study of Sexual Minorities in the Military, which studies the impact of the Pentagon's "don't ask, don't tell" policy designed to keep active homosexuals out of the military.

Interestingly, the waiver data suggests that the Iraq war may actually be a boon to the quality of people enlisting in the Air Force and Navy. Even as the Army and Marines have had to be a little less choosy about their recruits, the number of moral waivers issued for Air Force and Navy recruits has actually declined. The Air Force moral-waiver count fell from 2,632 in 2003 to 2,095 last year; the figures for the Navy were 4,207 and 3,502.>

Pentagon officials say the waiver program is a way to give young people who made mistakes in the past a second chance. That's a line they use only, of course, when there aren't enough untainted bodies marching into the military's recruiting stations.