This is one of the most troubling bits of news about the U.S. military that I've heard for a long time.
U.S. military officer IQ is has declined significantly since both 1980 and 2004, although IQ in the senior non-commissioned officer ranks is apparently up, and office physical fitness is at an all time high.
[T]he intelligence of new Marine Corps officers has declined steadily since 1980. Two-thirds of the new officers commissioned in 2014 would be in the bottom one-third of the class of 1980; 41 percent of new officers in 2014 would not have qualified to be officers by the standards held at the time of World War II. Similarly, at the top of the distribution, there are fewer of the very intelligent officers who will eventually become senior leaders. . . .
In 1980, 18.6 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds were in college. Today, that number is close to 30 percent. The dramatic rise in college attendance has increased the pool of people eligible to become officers in the military (possession of a bachelor’s degree being one of the chief requirements to be commissioned as an officer in all branches), but it also means that possession of a college degree is a less significant indicator of intelligence now than it once was. Marine Corps officers have reflected this trend, declining in average intelligence along with the population of college graduates
For example, the average Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) score of a Navy Reserve Officer Training Corps graduate in 2014 was the same as that of a new Marine officer. In the Army, the test scores of previously enlisted officer candidates have been declining since at least the mid-1990s. . . .In 2014, the average SAT score of incoming Marine officers was 1198, compared to an average of 1010 for college-bound high school seniors. [94th v. 74th percentile].
The decline in average intelligence manifests itself not just in the middle of the distribution, but also at the top. Figure 2 shows the distribution of intelligence scores for 1980 and 2014. Note how not only the average has declined, but also the number of officers who are achieving the highest scores.
In 1980, there were 14 Marine officers entering who scored above 155 (on a test with a maximum score of 160). In 2004, the year of incoming officers who are now recently promoted majors, there were only two lieutenants who scored above 155. In 2014, there were none.This and the material below are from:
Matthew F. Cancian, "Officers Are Less Intelligent: What Does It Mean", 81 Joint Forces Quarterly (2nd Quarter, April 2016) (March 29, 2016).
There is objective evidence that this matters a lot:
[T]he link between intelligence and enlisted job performance; studies show that more intelligent enlistees are more proficient at technical skills, make more lethal riflemen, and are more law abiding. The most holistic studies are found in the congressionally mandated Job Performance Measurement project, a series of broad, multimillion-dollar studies assessing how accurately intelligence tests could predict on-the-job success for enlisted members in the military. The Army’s “Project A” was conducted in the 1980s as an extension of this effort. The results are unambiguous: intelligence testing provides an excellent way to predict the job performance of enlistees. . . .
The link between intelligence and performance in officers, while less thoroughly studied than the link in enlisted, is still clear. In World War II, there was no requirement that an officer have a college education, but possessing a 4-year degree allowed one to be commissioned without taking the GCT. Without a college degree, enlistees in the Army who scored above 110 on the GCT were considered for Officer Candidate School (OCS), which was used to train and screen potential officers (the minimum score for Marine officer candidates was 120). The GCT score was found to be highly correlated with success there. In fact, it was so important that it was administered to all officers again at the beginning of infantry school to ensure that they were competent enough to be suitable combat leaders. Additionally, there was much debate about whether 110 was a sufficient minimum score, as most of the failures at Army OCS were by candidates who scored between 110 and 115.
Scores on the GCT have been found to be highly indicative of performance at The Basic School (TBS), the 6-month-long initial training for Marine officers. New officers at TBS are graded on a mix of military skills (such as running an obstacle course or orienteering), leadership evaluations (made by staff members and peers), and academics (technical knowledge). The GCT score was found to have a 0.75 correlation with academic grade at TBS and a 0.65 correlation with total grade there. This means that GCT scores have a 0.6 correlation with nonacademic events. It is likely, therefore, that not only does the GCT correlate strongly with academic ability, but that it also correlates to leadership grade at TBS. No pen and paper test can exactly predict leadership; these results, however, indicate that there is a relationship between GCT scores and the leadership potential of young officers. . . .
Some might argue that junior officers only need leadership and physical fitness. If so, we already have a cadre who fit that bill: our staff noncommissioned officers (SNCOs). Why not have them lead our platoons, companies, and battalions? While many might dismiss this idea outright, in the long view of history, it has been done before by successful armies. Take the Roman Legions, for instance, whose centurions rose through the ranks to lead all units up to the cohorts (battalion equivalents). Thus, centurions, proven enlisted leaders, held responsibility equivalent to that of a lieutenant colonel. A small group of educated aristocrats was needed only for the highest ranks. That functioned very well—2,000 years ago. While the nature of warfare has not changed, its practice certainly has.
The complex nature of contemporary warfare puts great intellectual demands on our mid- and upper-level leaders. The Roman Legions did not employ artillery, tanks, communications, or any number of technical branches that we have today. Consider the job of the contemporary infantry platoon commander, the least technical, most leadership-intensive position. In a conventional war, he must be a physically fit leader, but he must also know how to program a radio, accurately locate targets for airstrikes and artillery, and calculate geometries of fire, among many other intellectual demands. In an unconventional conflict, we also ask him to be a cultural expert, government builder, and humanitarian aid planner. This requires a high degree of intelligence. While contemporary enlistees are on average the brightest they have ever been, there is a wide variance in their quality that makes the “Roman solution” ill advised today.
Physical fitness does not have the correlation to military performance that general intelligence does. In an initial statement to the Marine Corps Times regarding this new data, Marine Corps Recruiting Command repeated a common rebuttal to these findings: new Marine officers are the most physically fit that they have ever been, achieving an average physical fitness test score of 279. Our military leaders, however, need to be more than just tough. While physical fitness is probably well correlated to success in some military skills events, such as the endurance course, it does not have the strong correlation to total TBS grade that intelligence does (0.65). There are numerous studies correlating intelligence to success in the military; there are none doing the same for physical fitness.
Finally, most members of the military would argue that having distance between commissioned officers and the enlisted is necessary for military effectiveness; the decline of officer intelligence and the rise in enlisted intelligence has blurred these lines. Given that the intelligence of entering enlisted has risen over time, and that more intelligent enlisted tend to be promoted, it is not unreasonable to guess that right now the average intelligence of SNCOs is close to that of our junior officers. If officers are much like the troops they command, why have an officer corps at all? Raising average officer intelligence is necessary to maintain the utility and credibility of the officer corps.
For the last point on NCO IQ, the article cites to:
Lauren R. Malone and Adam M. Clemens, The Impacts of Budget Cuts on Recruit Quality and the United States Marine Corps: Executive Summary (Alexandria, VA: Center for Naval Analyses, September 2013).
In the current fiscal environment, all government agencies including those beyond the Department of Defense (DOD) are being asked to take budget cuts and to consider how to reallocate resources to yield efficiencies. Within DOD, the United States Marine Corps (USMC) is evaluating how the effects of resource cuts may vary depending on where they occur. Marine Corps Recruiting Command (MCRC) is perhaps more at risk than other USMC commands because of its ongoing success: MCRC is surpassing historical norms in terms of recruit quality. Although some of this success is certainly attributable to the lack of civilian employment opportunities in the currently weak economic environment, it raises questions as to whether MCRC could meet its mission with fewer resources. If MCRC s resources are cut via a decrease in its advertising budget (currently $80 million), its recruiting operations budget (currently $97 million), and/or its recruiter end strength (currently 3,760) what would be the implications for both MCRC and the USMC? CNA was tasked with helping MCRC answer this question. Even in difficult recruiting environments when resources, recruiter end strength, the civilian unemployment rate, and/or military propensity are low the services tend to meet their overall recruiting missions. This is because these are missions for which recruiters (and their commanding officers) are personally responsible and, thus, that greatly affect their careers and continued professional development. Recruiters are personally incentivized to meet their missions, regardless of how hard they might have to work to make this happen. As a result, there is little variation over time in the gap between accessions and missions, and we cannot identify a systematic relationship between resource cuts and the mission-accession gap. In most cases, this gap simply does not exist, as illustrated in figure 1.Full text here.
Our study focused on how the quality of new accessions varies over time. Average quality depends on both the recruiting environment (the overall quality of the eligible and propensed population) and the accession mission (for a given recruiting environment, increased missions will decrease overall quality since the “stock” of high-quality (HQ) people does not change). We define HQ recruits as those who have traditional high school diplomas and score in the upper 50 percentiles of the Armed Forces Qualification Test (AFQT). Lower quality (LQ) recruits are those who do not meet both of these qualifications. There is also a “lower bound” below which quality cannot fall: the Commandant of the Marine Corps’ (CMC’s) recruit quality standards. Although, as previously noted, it is unlikely that we will observe dips in recruit quality below these cutoffs, there will still be variation in quality above the benchmarks. This is where quality is a more useful indicator of the effect of recruiting cuts; accessions will generally not exceed the mission, whereas recruit quality can exceed the CMC’s benchmarks.
The percentage of HQ enlisted accessions is currently higher than ever, largely a result of the weak economy and increased recruiting resources. In FY12, 99.9 percent of recruits had a traditional high school diploma and 74.8 percent scored 50 or above on the AFQT. Thus, there is room for quality to fall from its current levels and still satisfy the CMC’s recruit quality standards of 95 percent high school diploma graduates and 63 percent in the upper 50 percentiles of the AFQT.2
Because numerous studies have proved that resources and recruit quality move together, we take that relationship as given and evaluate both the immediate and longer term effects of accessing LQ enlisted recruits.
What are the implications of a lower quality accession cohort?
Because youth with more education and higher aptitude have more attractive options outside the military—and, thus, are more difficult to recruit—a lessened recruiting capacity (via budget or recruiter cuts) implies that these will be some of the recruits forgone, resulting in lower average recruit quality.
As we demonstrate, at any percentage of HQ accessions, there are possible trade-offs: increasing the HQ percentage further (by increasing the percentage with traditional high school diplomas or improving the AFQT distribution) always implies higher recruiting costs (in a given recruiting environment), lower attrition, and higher readiness. Conversely, decreasing the HQ share implies lower recruiting costs, higher attrition, and reduced readiness. What is important for the USMC to determine is the relative cost of these outcomes, and whether the savings from decreasing the HQ share (perhaps by different amounts) is sufficient to compensate for the resulting, undesirable effects.
Our analyses reveal that HQ recruits provide a greater return on investment than their LQ counterparts. We find direct effects of recruit quality on important USMC outcomes. For example, HQ recruits are less likely to attrite, from both bootcamp and their first terms, yielding savings for the USMC because attrition is costly. In addition, HQ recruits are less likely to receive Non-Judicial Punishments (NJPs) or be demoted—processes that entail significant administrative costs and potential morale effects for other Marines. So, despite the higher recruiting expense, replacing an LQ recruit with an HQ recruit is likely a cost-saving endeavor for the enterprise.
HQ recruits also are more likely to contribute to a more able USMC. They are more likely to be rifle experts by the end of the first term and to promote faster. They receive higher Proficiency and Conduct marks but have slightly lower physical fitness test (PFT) scores at the end of the first term and are less likely to reenlist among the population of recommended and eligible Marines (perhaps because of better outside job opportunities). Table 1 summarizes both the direction and magnitude of these effects.
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