Coming on the heels of the Bowe Bergdahl court-martial the Army has elected to lower standards again rather than put more stringent mental health screening into place during the recruiting process.
(Washington, D.C.) Faced with the challenge of meeting an administrative recruiting goal of 80,000 soldiers over the next year, the Army has decided to allow civilians with a history of self-mutilation, bipolar disorder, and substance abuse to seek waivers that would allow them to enlist. The current ban was enacted in 2009 amid the epidemic of suicide among service members and veterans. While the suicide rate has not slowed, rather than seeking to fix the current problem, the Pentagon has elected to meet goals at the expense of the safety and welfare of the force. To meet last year’s recruiting goals, the Army lowered standards on aptitude tests and drug usage.
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Bowe Bergdahl couldn’t make it through Coast Guard boot camp without completely mentally breaking down; he later deserted his post in a combat zone and multiple service members were killed and/or wounded looking for him. Bradley Manning was so mentally unstable that the bolt was removed from his weapons while he was deployed to a war zone; however, he was allowed to keep serving despite his obvious mental illness, and this resulted in him committing espionage.
Last month, it seemed that the Army had learned their lesson. On October 11th, at the Association of the US Army’s Annual Meeting and Exposition, Sergeant Major of the Army Daniel Dailey said that “we can not afford to lower our standards” for enlistment. However, the memos acquired by USA Today show that this simply isn’t true.
Once the mentally ill are allowed to enlist, it becomes an extremely expensive process to process them out of the Army. This will also be a drain on time at multiple levels, as these soldiers will require significant administrative action. Then once they are out processed, they will be a continued drain on taxpayers due to the cost of VA benefits that they will then be eligible for.
For their part, the Army has responded to the negative responses to this change in a fairly predictable manner. In a statement to reporters, LTG Thomas Seamands called the changes a “simple administrative change.” Denying that any policy had changed, they focused on the fact that the barriers to enlistment were still in place. However, this is inherently dishonest, as the reporting has focused on the fact that the Army changed policy to allow waivers to ensure that mental illness was not an absolute barrier to service.
This sort of bureaucratic focus on technicalities displays the root of the problem: Army leadership is more concerned with how to game the system than they are with fixing the internal problems.
Until the Army can make significant inroads into reducing the suicide rate, it might not be the best practice to leave the door open for more issues to enter the ranks. The Army can offer hypothetical situations where the waivers could theoretically be an added value, but the fact remains that once that door is opened, it is very hard to close.
