With Troop Surge, Pressure on Standards

QUANTICO, Jan. 27, 2007 — -- As the Army and Marine Corps prepare to answer President Bush's call to expand their ranks by 92,000 troops, history shows the services will struggle to avoid lowering their standards for new recruits, critics say.

"There is no question that standards will suffer if they have to, in order to meet the specific year goals," said Eli Flyer, former senior manpower analyst at the Department of Defense.

Watch John Hendren's report on military recruiting standards Saturday on "World News." Check local listings for times.

The services have met their goals since missing them in 2005, but Flyer and other critics said they've done so by accepting in greater numbers troops who otherwise would not have been allowed to enlist. The Army has accepted more who score in the lowest acceptable category on intelligence tests. The age limit for new recruits has risen from 35 to 42 in recent years.

Yet Pentagon officials say they can meet the new recruiting numbers without dropping standards.

Bill Carr, deputy under secretary of defense for military personnel policy, said, for instance, that while the Army has accepted more low test scorers -- the number rose from 2 percent to 4 percent in recent years -- the rate still meets the Pentagon's overall minimum standard of 4 percent.

Carr noted that the Army was already well on the way to increase its ranks by 30,000 on a temporary basis, so the additional increase amounts to 62,000 on top of that by 2012.

"Recruiting is hard, but hard is what we do," Carr said. "It's certainly within our reach."

Marine recruiters who gathered on a recent day to speak to would-be local recruits in Quantico, Va., said they intend to cope by appealing to a sense of duty, an appeal that worked for Paul Rukenbrod, a college graduate who said he was impressed with the retired Marines who worked in his Northern Virginia technology firm. Recruiters did not have to persuade him, he said.

"I got most of the info on my own, and I was pretty much ready to sign up when I walked in," said Rukenbrod, age 24.

Recruiters acknowledge that their job is harder in war time, but say they're not soft-pedaling the chances of going from boot camp to Baghdad, or elsewhere in Iraq or Afghanistan.