Monday’s Slate featured an article called “GI Schmo” by Fred Kaplan describing the Army loosening it’s restrictions on the recruitment of what are known as Category IV recruits.

In response to the tightening trends, on Sept. 20, 2005, the Defense Department released DoD Instruction 1145.01, which allows 4 percent of each year’s recruits to be Category IV applicants ”up from the 2 percent limit that had been in place since the mid-1980s. Even so, in October, the Army had such a hard time filling its slots that the floodgates had to be opened; 12 percent of that month’s active-duty recruits were Category IV. November was another disastrous month; Army officials won’t even say how many Cat IV applicants they took in, except to acknowledge that the percentage was in “double digits.”

What’s worse is that one would think with training and proper education most average Americans could be made into infantry fighters or military support staff. However, as Kaplan continues a study by the RAND corporation done for the DoD suggests otherwise, and even more frighteningly the increase in Category IV can have an overall net negative affect on the military as affects can be seen in individual units.

The same study of signal battalions took soldiers who had just taken advanced individual training courses and asked them to troubleshoot a faulty piece of communications gear. They passed if they were able to identify at least two technical problems. Smarts trumped training. Among those who had scored Category I on the aptitude test (in the 93-99 percentile), 97 percent passed. Among those who’d scored Category II (in the 65-92 percentile), 78 percent passed. Category IIIA: 60 percent passed. Category IIIB: 43 percent passed. Category IV: a mere 25 percent passed.

The pattern is clear: The higher the score on the aptitude test, the better the performance in the field. This is true for individual soldiers and for units. Moreover, the study showed that adding one high-scoring soldier to a three-man signals team boosted its chance of success by 8 percent (meaning that adding one low-scoring soldier boosts its chance of failure by a similar margin).

Kaplan continues to note that the study also shows that better units make fewer mistakes and in turn are cheaper. Absent a sudden surge in recruitment the evidence is pretty frightening. Of course has casualties mount and we remain without an exit strategy there is little reason to believe that recruitment will be on the upswing. And we’re left with a crucial question is pulling out also beneficial to maintain our army as an elite, well trained, and intelligent fighting force?