Military check-up time

By | Sunday, May 4, 2008

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How well are our armed forces, and particularly our ground forces, holding up under the remarkable strain of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars?

As a nation, never have we asked so much of so few for so long. As such, the strain on soldiers and Marines must be constantly tracked as we reach decisions about how long to sustain 15 brigades in Iraq (once we draw down to that number this summer), how much to increase our forces in Afghanistan (now that Defense Secretary Robert Gates has promised U.S. allies that the next American administration will do so), and how much faster we should increase the size of our Army and Marine Corps (if that is even possible).

In fact, to date, our military is holding up reasonably well under the immense strain. By most measures of quality, it still looks roughly comparable to say the early years of the Reagan buildup — if not necessarily as strong as its typical state of the late Reagan years or the 1990s.

Of course, there have been huge individual sacrifices, and for many soldiers and Marines and their families, things are not good at all. We owe these people more than we can every say, more than we can ever repay. But at a strategic level, the state of the force is not so bad as to necessitate an immediate change in our approaches to fighting wars.

The most important area of strain on the military is on its personnel. While there are equipment shortages and maintenance depot queues of equipment due to the ongoing wars, Congress has been generous enough with supplemental appropriations that these situations are not dire. And while normal training patterns for soldiers and Marines have been badly disrupted by Iraq and Afghanistan, there can be little doubt that the overall battle toughness of these forces is robust.

But how well are people holding up? Key measures of personnel readiness include the experience and aptitude of typical troops, the availability of individuals with critical specialized skills, and the ability of the military to recruit new members and retain those already in.

One recent worry relates to a lowering of personnel standards. For example, the military has accepted more recruits with general equivalency degrees rather than high-school diplomas; it has enlisted a higher percentage of applicants scoring very low on its aptitude tests; and it has also taken on more individuals over 40 years old as first-time military personnel.

For the most part, however, these are not huge problems at present. The G.E.D. is considered academically equivalent to a high-school diploma, and certainly the military can ensure that anyone with such qualifications is up to par by testing them in other ways too. As of 2005, moreover, 90 percent of recruits continued to have high-school diplomas, comparable to the 1985 figure at the height of the Reagan buildup. And the typical recruit scored better on the Armed Forces Qualification Test (AFQT) in 2005 than in 1985.

That said, while figures for the other services have remained good, the Army has had some worsening problems of late, with the high-school graduation figure for 2007 declining to just over 70 percent of new recruits — comparable to the norm of the 1970s. That suggests a trendline that needs to be arrested and reversed, even if overall statistics on the quality of new recruits are reasonably solid.

Moral waivers for new recruits for their criminal histories have increased substantially in recent years. A total of 860 soldiers and Marines required waivers from convictions for felony crimes in 2007, up by 400 from 2006.

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