By: Matthew F. Cancian and Michael W. Klein
July 20, 2015
The question of “Who serves when not all serve?” has been a central issue in the all-volunteer United States military, even before the end of conscription in 1973.[1] Advocates for the end of the peace-time draft argued conscription was, in the words of Milton Friedman, “inequitable and arbitrary, seriously interfer[ing] with the freedom of young men to shape their lives.";[2] Others, however, were concerned with the quality of an all-volunteer force.[3] While the military services initially faced challenges in attracting high-quality enlisted personnel, the problems seemed to have been resolved by the late 1980s. Bernard Rostker, one of the foremost experts on military manpower analysis, declared in his 2006 RAND monograph I Want You that “the alternative to the draft, the all-volunteer force, has been a resounding success for the American military and the American people.”[4] Even during the most trying years of conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, around 60 percent of new recruits were deemed “high-quality,” possessing a high school diploma and being above the average intelligence of the American population (compared to a low of 27.1 percent of new recruits deemed high-quality in 1977).
The success of the volunteer military in attracting high quality enlisted recruits, however, does not necessarily carry over with respect to its ability to attract high-quality officers.[5]Commissioned officers comprise about 16 percent of the military, but they make up its leadership and exert a disproportionate impact on military effectiveness.
In this paper, we show that the quality of officers in the Marines, as measured by scores on the General Classification Test (GCT), a test that all officers take, has steadily and significantly declined since 1980.[6] For example, the GCT score in 1980 that demarcated the lower one-third of new officers that year demarcated the lower two-thirds of the new officers in 2014. While 85 percent of those taking the test in 1980 exceeded 120, the cut-off score for Marine officers in World War 2,[7] only 59 percent exceeded that score in 2014. At the upper end of the distribution, 4.9% of those taking the test scored above 150 in 1980 compared to 0.7% in 2014. This negative trend could contribute to adverse consequences for military effectiveness and national security.
We also examine the relationship between the annual averages of these test scores and the size and composition of the pool of potential officers (i.e., college graduates), labor market conditions, and the ethnic, racial and gender composition of incoming officers. We find that the dominant correlate to the declining GCT scores over time is the expansion of the pool of potential officers as the ranks of college graduates has risen over the past three decades.
There is no evidence that the increasing proportion of women or African Americans in the ranks of incoming officers are independent causes of the decrease in test scores, and while in some specifications there is a significant effect of the proportion of incoming Hispanic officers on these scores, the quantitative effect of this on the average GCT is very small, representing only about 5 percent of the decline; the other 95 percent is due to the expansion of the pool of non-Hispanic college students.
The next section of this paper traces the history of intelligence testing by the American military in the 20th century. This section also includes a brief discussion of America’s return to an All-Volunteer Force in 1973. Section III presents our analysis of the GCT individual-level data that shows a steady and significant decline in the mean scores across the period 1980 to 2014 as well as a significant shift in the distribution of the scores. Section IV presents a regression analysis of the partial correlates of annual mean test scores with the characteristics of the potential pool of officer recruits, the gender, racial, and ethnic characteristics of the recruits, and labor market and other factors that could potentially affect the quality of recruits and, therefore, the GCT scores. We offer some concluding comments in Section VI.
*The GCT is a test of general intelligence and has been shown to have a strong link to military performance.
[1] See In Pursuit of Equity: Who Serves When Not All Serve, United States National Advisory Commission on Selective Service, 1970. This commission is commonly referred to as the Gates Commission after its Chairman, Thomas Gates, Jr., a former Secretary of Defense in the Eisenhower administration.
[2] Capitalism and Freedom, p. 36
[3] See, for example, Janowitz and Moskos (1974).
[4] Rostker (2006), p. 9.
[5] In the American military, officers are said to receive a commission for service rather than enlisting. Enlisted personnel can be promoted to be non-commissioned officers, but these positions are distinct from those of commissioned officers (who are simply called officers, the term we will henceforth use in this paper).
[6] As discussed in more detail below, we obtained individual-level information on the universe of Marine Officer Recruits who took General Classification Test (GCT) from 1980 to 2014. The data provided do not include any individual level characteristics, such as race or gender, in order to preserve privacy for the test takers.
[7] Nalty and Moody (1970).
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