[Reading-hall-of-fame] Scraping the Barrel

[tsticht at znet.com]

August 9, 2012


“McNamara’s Moron Corps”: They Done Good After All!


Tom Sticht
International Consultant in Adult Education


In August of 1966, U. S. Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara stood
before the Veterans of Foreign Wars and announced that in addition to
fighting the war in Vietnam, the military services were also going to help
fight President Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty at home. The Services would
start taking in hundreds of thousands of undereducated, disadvantaged young
men who were being rejected for service because their mental aptitude
scores were at the lower end of the Armed Forces Qualification Test (AFQT).
 Because the plan was to enlist about 100,000 lower aptitude recruits a
year, it was called Project 100,000.


Project 100,000 was not a popular idea in military circles. The Army Times
editorialized: “Are the services likely to get any reasonable mileage from
such people? Past performance indicates not. Is this any time to require
the services to take on a large scale “poverty-war” training mission? We
would think not.”


Years later, the Department of Defense issued a report claiming that the
Project 100,000 personnel were failures both in and out of the military.
The Washington Post of February 24, 1990, quoted the Director of Accession
Policy of the Department of Defense saying "The lesson is that low-aptitude
people, whether in the military or not, are always going to be at a
disadvantage. That's a sad conclusion." Sixteen years later the New York
Times of February 27, 2006 Harvard University professor Kelly Greenhill had
an opinion piece entitled “Don’t Dumb Down the Army” and stated that,
“
Project 100,000 was a failed experiment. It proved to be a distraction
for the military and of little benefit to the men it was created to help.”


However, a recent analysis shows that the Department of Defense report and
the newspaper articles based on it were wrong. In a new book entitled
“Scraping the Barrel: The Military Use of Substandard Manpower” (Sanders
Marble, Ed., Fordham University Press, 2012), I have a chapter called
“Project 100,000 and Afterword” in which I indicate what past analyses of
Project 100,000 have done wrong, and I come to different conclusions about
how well these personnel performed during their military service and how
they escaped poverty as veterans.


First, regarding their military service, the Project 100,000 personnel
actually far exceeded by a large margin the negative expectations for their
performance as a group. Instead of finding a 100 percent failure rate, which
was the expected rate indicated by the fact that all the Project 100,000 men
were taken from a group that had been excluded from service because of their
low aptitude, it was found that across all four Services some 85 percent
actually performed well in basic training, job training, and on the job,
some 97 percent served without criminal or lesser disciplinary actions, and
some 85 percent completed their tour of duty with honor.  Thus, contrary to
the comments by the Army times, the data indicate that indeed the military
services got much more than just "reasonable mileage" from the Project
100,000 personnel.


The goal for Project 100,000 as a part of the War on Poverty was that
military service would help undereducated, unemployed young men escape the
"cycles of poverty" considered prevalent at the time. In my analyses I
found that before their service 46 percent of the Project 100,000 personnel
were unemployed and on average they were earning below poverty wages for an
individual. However, some 20 years after their service more than 80 percent
were employed and they were earning well above the poverty level for a
family of four. Further, their rate of earnings increase from the mid-1960s
to the mid-1980s was well above that of non-veterans used by the Department
of Defense as comparison groups. These data support the idea behind Project
100,000 that military service would provide the disadvantaged recruits of
Project 100,000 a "leg up" for escaping the cycles of poverty.


Years ago, on April 25, 1985,  I conducted the only interview Secretary
McNamara ever gave about Project 100,000. He told me “There was immense
resistance initially in the services to Project 100,000 
to be absolutely
frank with you - I told you, I believe, that before the experiment began,
this was known as McNamara’s Moron Corps.”


I discussed with Secretary McNamara the results of an early analysis of
Project 100,000 personnel performance showing that most completed their
first term satisfactorily, many performed in an outstanding manner, and on
average they were doing better three years later in their post-service
lives than comparable non-veterans. At the end of my interview with
Secretary McNamara he said, “Now, this kind of approach shows that there is
something that can be done, and people - individuals in our society - that
society thinks can be cast off need not be cast off.”


This is a message that we need to keep in mind when making decisions about
people’s lives based upon fallible standardized tests. If we are to rely
more and more upon such tests to make important decisions affecting
people’s lives, our aim should always be to support policies and practices
that foster social inclusion, not exclusion.


Reference: Sticht, T. (2012) Project 100,000 in the Vietnam War and
Afterwards. In: S. Marble (Ed.) Scraping the Barrel: The Military Use of
Substandard Manpower, 1860–1960New York: Fordham University Press.


tsticht at aznet.net