Wednesday 30 May 2012

US Military - Does it attract the wrong sort of people?

www.rollingstone.com/politics...-team-20110327


Read the above article and then read what follows.


American troops tend to come in to the American army from an educated background as they put it in simple terms. A report showed that 90% of people had a high school diploma (I take this to be a leaving cert) and were well educated with a lot of them coming out with degrees . This in itself is I imagine pretty much a standard in a lot of military careers out there, they get degrees and as a result get good jobs and off they go. Im not disputing that. What I am disputing though is the type of intelligence that they are seeking. All entrants must undergo AFQT (http://www.heritage.org/research/rep...s-and-officers)




Quote:
More evidence of the quality of America's enlisted forces comes from the standardized Armed Forces Qualifying Test (AFQT) that the military administers to all recruits. Over two-thirds of enlisted recruits scored above the 50th percentile on the AFQT. The military tightly restricts how many recruits it accepts with scores below the 30th percentile, and only 2.3 percent of recruits in 2007 scored between the 21st and 30th percentiles (Category IVA; see Chart 3). The military does not accept any recruits in the bottom 20 percent.

This is the standard test which allows American troops to see if they are capable or not of serving in the American military.According to about.com , American military entrants are tested on four areas




Quote:
Only four areas of the ASVAB test are used to compute the overall ASVAB score, also known as the AFQT (Armed Forces Qualification Test) score.

The four areas of the ASVAB used to compute the AFQT score are: Word Knowledge (WK), Paragraph Comprehension (PC), Arithmatic Reasoning (AR), and Mathmatics Knowledge (MK).

http://usmilitary.about.com/od/joini...lafqtscore.htm




The only pre checks done in terms of psychological evaluation from what I can see after that is the following . According to a recent study "an educational achievement, cognitive testing, and a cursory psychiatric evaluation". Cursory according to a dictionary definition on google means that this is hasty . The source for this is :http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17274262 .


Considering that cognitive testing is limited in its scope (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_test) and that education and a "cursory psychiatric evaluation" are taken into account, do they not screen new cadets for emotional intelligence? Do they not measure them for such things like empathy, anger etc?


It would be in my opinion that such a process perhaps needs to be looked at if we have the situation that arose above such as the killing of a 15 year old boy and other such scandals such as Abu Gharib and the defiling of the bodies of victims in Afghanisatan. From the article in Rolling Stone magazine, it was a common practice to go out and want to shoot people (at random). Some of the charges are for the pre mediated murder of people , these people thought about killing others and to make matters worse tried to cover up evidence. Eg. The fifteen year old boy who was blown up by a grenade was said to have used a grenade? WTF? They threw it?


, Minnestoa Public Radio had an article recently which stated


http://minnesota.publicradio.org/dis...fghan-mission/




Quote:
Senior leaders have warned for several years about a deterioration of discipline that may have contributed to increased substance abuse, suicides, domestic abuse and other problems.

Why were a lot of these not nipped in the bud first hand and the cadets refused entry to the military?
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