by Matt Kennard
Over the previous decades the US public school system had been steadily degraded and exam results continued to be appalling relative to other developed countries. The National Assessment of Education Progress reported in 2007 that 69 percent of the nation’s eighth graders scored below proficiency level in math, and 70 percent scored below proficiency level in reading.34 A study of high school dropout rates found it hit a trough at 20 percent in the late 1960s and then increased just 4–5 percentage points afterward, and in terms of black and Hispanic students, it found “no evidence of convergence in minority-majority graduation rates over the past 35 years,”35 while high school dropouts were disproportionately from poorer families. As one journalist put it, “If you come from a poor family, you are more likely to drop out of high school. And if you drop out and stay out of high school, you are more likely to be poor.”36 Of course, the government didn’t embark on a splurge of spending on the education system. This was the perfect demographic to reenfranchise into the military: Black, Hispanic, poor, and with a high probability of being unemployed. It would be an extension of the existing demographics of the fighting force: according to research, recruits from families with annual incomes below $60,000 are over-represented in the military, while those families earning more are under-represented.37 The military now dangled a carrot: we’ll give you a proper education if you agree to become war fodder afterward.
During the War on Terror, George W. Bush’s educational reforms were further impacting the public schooling system through increasing standardization and lack of funds. “There is a dark side to the educational reforms initiated under the Bush administration and now used in a number of school systems throughout the country,” wrote educational theorist Henry Giroux:
As the logic of the market and “the crime complex” frame the field of social relations in schools, students are subjected to three particularly offensive policies, defended by school authorities and politicians under the rubric of school safety. First, students are increasingly subjected to zero-tolerance policies that are used primarily to punish, repress and exclude them. Second, they are increasingly absorbed into a “crime complex” in which security staff, using harsh disciplinary practices, now displace the normative functions teachers once provided both in and outside of the classroom. Third, more and more schools are breaking down the space between education and juvenile delinquency, substituting penal pedagogies for critical learning and replacing a school culture that fosters a discourse of possibility with a culture of fear and social control.38
It sounded remarkably like boot camp. Giroux continued, “Any youth of color in urban school systems, because of harsh zero-tolerance policies, are not just being suspended or expelled from school. They are being ushered into the dark precincts of juvenile detention centers, adult courts and prison.” During the War on Terror another “dark precinct” opened up: the military.
Typical of this move from the streets to the warzone was another National Guard program called the Youth ChalleNGe, which describes itself as a “preventive rather than remedial” at-risk youth program that specifically targets participants who are “unemployed, drug-free and law-free high-school dropouts, 16 to 18 years of age.”39 The twenty-two-week program, which takes place in camps, most of which are on military bases, is followed by a year-long mentoring relationship with someone from each youth’s community. “By taking them away from their neighborhoods, we’re giving them a safe place to get their act together,” one colonel assured the critics. “These youths have been told they are failures. Here they find that if they straighten up, others will believe in them.”40 But it wasn’t about providing disadvantaged youths with a safe place. It was about militarizing their education and sending them to the most dangerous places in the world—Iraq and Afghanistan. Even though it claimed it was not a military recruitment program, during the War on Terror 15 to 20 percent of Youth ChalleNGe graduates entered the armed services or the National Guard.41
There was another way still for non-graduates to get into the military: the general equivalency degree, or GED, which can afford recruits a waiver if they score well enough on the military’s entrance exam.42 The army accepts about 15 percent of recruits without a high school diploma if they have a GED. Alive to this loophole, the military instituted another program in 2008, the so-called GED Plus, to give more of America’s youth the requisite qualifications they needed to go and fight. It opened its first prep school for the purpose, targeted, of course, at tough inner city areas. The program involved a harsh regimen with an intense academic component starting at 5 a.m. “An hour of marching drills and military discipline is thrown in for good measure,” reported AP.43 The militarization of education was complete. The whole concept was, again, framed in terms of “helping these lazy layabouts,” the rhetoric sounding like something out of Full Metal Jacket rather than a caring teaching environment. “It’s a tough, structured day. Some of them have sat on the couch for eighteen years, but I haven’t heard any howling yet,” social studies instructor John Solis said. Apparently Solis preferred high school grads because of their “tenacity,” but, he added, “the reality of current graduation rates has the army pressed to find an alternative.”
With the GED behind them, the class goes through to basic training, which often includes combat training. Those entering prep school have to agree to a two- to four-year commitment, just like a regular recruit. “We have two missions: get the GED and prepare them physically and mentally for basic training,” said the school’s commander, Captain Brian Gaddis. “These kids may have quit at some point, but the big thing is, a lot of people have quit on them,” Gaddis added. “We are not going to allow them to quit.” The prison-like conditions were successful in getting recruits. In 2007 the GED Plus Program trained 709 soldiers, with a 73 percent success rate. In the next two years, 2,400 soldiers had a 95 percent success rate, significantly higher than the 69 percent national average success rate in the civilian GED program.44 Things looked so good that in 2009, $18 million was ploughed into a new GED Plus educational complex on a National Guard campus in Arkansas.45
It all had a strong echo of the Vietnam era. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara had started his Project 100,000 in 1966, which was designed to get 100,000 men into the military who had failed the qualifying exam even at the lowered standards. McNamara presented the move as one that would improve the lot of America’s “subterranean poor”: exactly the same as the War on Terror narrative. “The poor of America . . . have not had the opportunity to earn their fair share of this nation’s abundance,” McNamara said, “but they can be given an opportunity to serve in their country’s defense and they can be given an opportunity to return to civilian life with skills and aptitudes which for them and their families will reverse the downward spiral of decay.” But it was a complete lie. As one historian describes it:
Never well known, Project 100,000 has virtually disappeared from histories of the Johnson presidency. It was conceived, in fact, as a significant component of the administration’s “war on poverty,” part of the Great Society, a liberal effort to uplift the poor, and it was instituted with high-minded rhetoric about offering the poor an opportunity to serve. Its result, however, was to send many poor, terribly confused, and woefully uneducated boys to risk death in Vietnam.46
Likewise with Iraq and Afghanistan. “Project 100,000 and the abandonment of all but the most minimal mental requirements for military service were crucial institutional mechanisms in lowering the class composition of the US military.”47 Likewise again.
Even with the military working hard to give recruits the requisite qualifications in exchange for service, it still wasn’t enough. Eventually they began to stretch the existing standards, allowing greater numbers of those with no qualifications at all to sign on the dotted line. “The DOD’s benchmark standard calls for at least 90 percent of troops to be high school graduates,” writes one academic. “Meeting those benchmarks has been a hallmark of the all-volunteer military
since the end of conscription in 1973,” and since the mid-1980s there had been a strict cap on recruits with no high school diploma. But this was to change. In 2005, the number of recruits with no military experience and with high school diplomas was 83.5 percent; a year later it had dropped to 73.1 percent.48 “The overall quality of the force today is lower than it was a year ago,” complained David R. Segal, director of the Center for Research on Military Organization at the University of Maryland. “It means they can anticipate more problem situations with recruits in the training cycle.”49 The army found another way to avoid admitting its problems through the handsomely named Tier Two Attrition Scheme, or TTAS, which would not count non-graduate recruits against the 10 percent cap if they were projected to have lower or similar attrition rates to graduates. “Compared with the costs of digging deeper into the relatively expensive [high school diploma graduates] recruiting market, the Army’s ability to recruit more high-quality [non high school diploma graduates] could save millions of dollars in recruiting resources,” said an army assessment.50 It was merely a way to massage the figures. As Military magazine put it:
The Army announced that 81 percent of its non-prior service recruits for 2006 were high school graduates. That was disturbingly below the 90 percent Department of Defense standard for every service. But the proportion of high school graduates would have been reported as 74.3 percent if the Army had to count the 5900 TTAS enlistees high school dropouts. The number instead is ignored. In March, Defense officials gave the Army permission to sign up 8000 TTAS recruits a year to ease increasingly difficult recruiting challenges.51
Despite all this, the military had the full support of lawmakers as they went about enlisting the poor and vulnerable young men and women of America. “I’m not totally naïve, but I have faith in recruiters,” said Representative Joe Wilson, (R-SC). “There may be higher dropout rates. But a lot of times they’re extending opportunities to minorities who wouldn’t have opportunities otherwise.”52 The opportunities offered to minorities came, of course, at the expense of their service in war and the very real threat to their lives. What did it say about America that its ethnic minorities could only get the chance to better themselves by putting their bodies in the line of fire?
Intelligence Testing
Another way for the military to measure the brain power of recruits is the armed forces qualification test, or AFQT, which every prospective soldier has to take in an effort to weed out the slowest. For decades, the military had spent a lot of money and time developing psychometric tests because it believed in a strict correlation between operational performance and mental attainment. The testing was formalized as far back as 1968 and taken up by all branches of the military in 1976, but it didn’t start rejecting low-scoring applicants until the mid-1980s. By the time of the War on Terror it was ingrained in the military recruitment process. The AFQT is a multiple-choice questionnaire very similar to an IQ test, or what psychologists call “G”—covering abilities from arithmetical reasoning to paragraph comprehension. From these results the recruits are put into five categories, running from Category 1, the best performing, to Category 5, the worst. Army regulation shut out anyone who scored in the lowest category, and strictly restricted Category 4 to two percent of the intake. By 2004, Category 4 recruits still only accounted for 0.6 percent of new recruits. But a year later, with the military desperate, a new DOD directive allowed in up to 4 percent of recruits from Category 4. Before long, that percentage had reached double figures.53 The military was literally getting dumber. The New York Times reported that recruiters were even being told to accept more Category 4 recruits. “A recruiter in Washington, who insisted on anonymity to protect his career, said that at the time, he was concerned about whether these recruits could handle the increasingly high-technology tools of combat,” its report noted. “Another recruiter, in New York, who insisted on anonymity for the same reason, said this month that the Army seemed to care less about quality than about filling the holes left by soldiers who decline to re-enlist . . . It’s about one thing: numbers,” added the recruiter.54
For some, letting in recruits with low IQs was actually more equitable as it is an extremely controversial metric, not least for its common use by racists to give a dubious scientific basis for their prejudices. In the US, for example, Hispanics and African Americans score lower than whites on IQ tests, as was demonstrated by the infamous Bell Curve book in 1994.55 But serious psychologists put this discrepancy down to the differing educational standards that exist between ethnic groups. The average black IQ is 85, below the 92 that is the 30th percentile cut-off point for joining the military, for example. There was compelling evidence that strict IQ testing was discriminating against young black wannabe soldiers. But there was also evidence supporting the military’s claim that IQ has a direct impact on operational performance as well as monetary cost. The differential in how quickly recruits leave the military (attrition rates) provides one clear example. Army studies demonstrate about 80 percent of those with diplomas complete their first three-year term of enlistment compared to only half of those with a GED.56 “Recruits with a high school diploma are also valued since years of research and experience show that high school diploma graduates are more likely to complete their initial 3 [years of service],” said one directive.57 The higher dropout rate for GED soldiers means they must be replaced, which “drives up military spending because of the need to spend money recruiting, outfitting, and training new troops,” reports Time magazine. The cost of signing up a new, fresh recruit rose from $15,000 to $21,000 in five years to 2008.58 Further to that, the military has been concerned about levels of attrition in the first years of service because it is, they say, “disruptive, degrades unit performance, and wastes valuable training and recruiting resources.”59 This seems like an argument for recruiting those who are most likely to adapt to military life and stay the course. The army explicitly accepted that “the high school diploma has been a reliable indicator of ‘stick-to-itiveness.’”60 But it didn’t stop recruits getting in without one: the military simply couldn’t slow down. A study by Rand concluded that the diploma was also an important indicator of operational performance, which was a more serious concern. Still the military didn’t move. “Generally, studies conducted in this area have supported the assertion that higher-quality personnel, in this case personnel with a higher AFQT score, appear to be more productive and to exhibit generally higher performance,” it noted.61 Two other studies supported that conclusion. One from 1986 tried to answer the question, “Are smart [gun] tankers better?” by using their firing scores at a standardized course, and found that there was a strict correlation between accuracy and AFQT scores; for example, an increase of score from Category 4 to Category 3 led to an improvement of over 20 percentage points in performance. This was a serious business. It goes without saying that a bad shot in the War on Terror could mean the difference between a dead and a living civilian, or even an American soldier being hit by “friendly fire.” How many died as a result of this no one really knows, but there were large numbers of “friendly fire” casualties in the War on Terror. And then there was the money component: stray bombs cost.
None of this appeared to matter. The grand plan was in many ways coming together. High school dropouts composed 41 percent of the prison population in US, which, together with the new acceptance to ex-cons, was opening up the military to thousands more people. But, in truth, why stop at dropouts? They had already started recruiting in prisons; why not get into the high schools as well?
CHILD SOLDIERS
There is not a way out.
Military recruiter to seventeen-year-old Irving Gonzalez, 200862
When Irving Gonzalez was seventeen years old he signed a non-binding agreement with the local military recruiter in Texas saying he would join the military after his final exams at high school. He didn’t worry about it too much at the time. He was concentrating on his finals and one of the provisos of the so-called delayed e
nlistment program, or DEP, was that he could pull out at any time before the start of basic training. At the end of school, it turned out, pulling out was what he wanted to do. He had other ideas about what he wanted to do with his life which didn’t involve service. But it wouldn’t prove as easy as it should have. When he informed the recruiter who had signed him up, Sergeant Glenn Marquette from Greenspoint Recruiting Station in Houston, of his decision, Sergeant Marquette went apoplectic. Gonzalez, alongside his friend Eric Martinez, who had signed the same document, were subjected to a tirade of threats and lies from Marquette who told them that their lives would to-all-intents-and-purposes be finished if they decided to spurn the military. Although intimidated, Gonzalez felt something was not quite right and was smart enough to start recording the conversations he was having with Marquette, later releasing them to a local television network. The recording gave a depressing glimpse into the kind of recruiter-conduct towards America’s children that became de rigueur during the War on Terror. “The main thing is, I want out. I don’t want to be in it. I don’t want to go to the army,” Gonzalez told the recruiter in one conversation, to which the reply was that he would have to come into the recruiting station and see the company commander. Marquette then added, “There is not a way out. You signed a binding contract,” which was a barefaced lie. Later, the recruiter went further with the threats: “I’ll tell you what happens to you, OK? This is what will happen. You want to go to school? You will not get no loans, because all college loans are federal and government loans. So you’ll be black-marked from that. As soon as you get pulled over for a speeding ticket or anything with the law, they’re gonna see that you’re a deserter. Then they’re going to apprehend you, take you to jail . . . All that lovey-dovey ‘I want to go to college’ and all this? Guess what. You just threw it out the window, because you just screwed your life.”