Cat IV Follies
Project 100,000
Remember the recruitment crisis where military enlistment goals fell short by some 41,000 applicants? The excuses fell like autumn leaves-
- A strong economy, which resulted in many more options for young people.
- A smaller eligible population- everything from drugs, tats, gangs and obesity barred entry.
- Generation Z, the generation born from 1997 to 2012, had generally low trust in institutions.
- Generation Z decreasingly followed traditional life and career paths.
- Young people have fewer family members who served, which decreases the propensity to serve.
One of the more ill-advised stopgap measures was lowering enlistment standards for ASVAB Cat Iv recruits. Shades of MacNamara’s Morons! Seems they cooked these numbers too.
Army, Navy underreported low-scoring recruits, DOD watchdog finds
By Eve Sampson
A Pentagon watchdog found that the Army and Navy failed to accurately calculate the number of recruits who scored low on military aptitude tests, a practice that risked circumventing legal limits and rules meant to govern enlistment quality.
The Army and Navy counted scores earned after enlistees attended their respective preparatory programs, the Future Soldier Preparatory Course and Future Sailor Preparatory Course, instead of the marks recruits received when they first signed up, a Dec. 11 report by the Department of Defense Inspector General said.
The report specifically discusses Category IV enlistments, which are recruits scoring in the 10th to 30th percentile on the Armed Forces Qualification Test, a battery of metrics used by the services to assess eligibility and recruit quality. Congress capped the number of enlistees who can join the service with scores in that range at 4% of the total incoming population.
Using original test scores, the Navy’s Category IV enlistments would have totaled 11.3% of fiscal year 2025 accessions as of March 31, compared to 7.2% under the recalculated rate. The report said the Army also exceeded 10%, although it did not specify the exact figure.
The branches can exceed that limit with approval from the secretary of defense, who must notify the House and Senate armed services committees within 30 days. Category IV enlistments exceeding 10% trigger additional statutory requirements, including formal notification to Congress and the use of mandatory preparatory programs.
The real reason for such low enlistments was never addressed- the surge of DEI and the White Supremacy witch hunt had repulsed the largest pool of normally reliable recruits- white males from middle America.
This has recently changed with entirely predictable results but are there still remnants of the prior admin that need to be purged.
Category: Big Pentagon, Blue Falcons, DEI
You can have a seat over there…..on the Group W Bench…
with the Mother rapers. Father stabbers. Father
rapers…and the litterers.
(I was really like a kid when this came out but I remember…slightly, from when I was older.)
‘and creating a public nuisance
There were other issues with recruitment.
There was a lot of concern that Biden would commit US troops to half measures in the Ukraine War, causing casualties without achieving anything. Trump is all out against the war and people have noticed. While bad things are still happening, nobody is checking their watch either.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DTPXVEX2GWg
Youth (18-24) unemployment among males was 7.5% in 24Q2 and was 9.8% 25Q4, showing a steady rise. While that number is not hugely significant, there are about 300K additional men in that age bracket looking for work.
I was a recruiter from 08-11 (USMC) for the push to 202K and then the drawdown. I remember if the kid wasn’t an Alpha (over 50 AFQT) and a HS grad/senior you tended to keep them in your back pocket and always got screamed at to “stop trying to qualify the disqualified!!”
My my how the turn tables
I enlisted back when we had a draft. It was job opportunity.
We need to bring back the draft but today’s liberals will
riot in the streets because Trump.
I don’t like the odds against sifting a winner out of the large pile of losers you’ll get when you compel people to enlist.
“compel people to enlist”
Compel is too nice a word. A draft would be under threat
of criminal justice and loss of freedom, as it should be.
People will riot in the street because of the draft alone. At least they did last time we had a draft.
I recall a local guy that was incarcerated at Devens for
failure to report.
Induction at Boston Army Base was a pretty good sorting.
And Basic at Dix straightened a lot of guys out.
White males have been the backbone of our military for over 250 years.