No Diploma? No Problem! The U.S. Navy has again lowered enlistment requirements as it struggles to meet self-inflicted recruiting goals. We'll get to the latter in a bit. Spoiler: Perhaps Navy brass should have dropped Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) goals instead.
As reported by Navy Times on Friday, America's naval force will now allow those without a high school diploma to enlist as long as they score a 50 or higher on the Armed Forces Qualification Test that all prospects must take. Those without a General Educational Development (GED) will also be allowed to enlist if they hit the test threshold, according to the Chief of Naval Personnel’s office.
The Navy is not alone in its failure to hit recruiting goals.
Last fiscal year, which ended Sept. 30, the Navy, Army and Air Force all failed to meet their recruitment goals, while the Marine Corps and the tiny Space Force met their targets.
The previous fiscal year, the Army fell 15,000 short of its enlistment goal of 60,000, and the other services had to dig into the pools of delayed entry candidates in order to meet their recruiting numbers.
[T]he Navy's [2023] enlistment goal was 37,700, but the service brought in just 31,834. This year ... the goal [is] higher — at 40,600. The total size of the Navy for 2024 is set at 337,800.
While multiple issues are likely responsible for the U.S. military recruiting crisis, Shillman Journalism Fellow Daniel Greenfield believes there's one culprit in particular.
The military is in the midst of a self-inflicted recruitment crisis.
As I wrote earlier, new data showed that the Army’s recruitment crisis was almost entirely caused by a drop in white recruits and a woke brass chasing DEI and diversity at the expense of national security. There are good odds that the Navy has the same issues and that its recruiting crisis could be fixed if the service, which is even more woke than the Army, stopped playing political games.
So the Navy is dealing with that by dropping standards even further. And I don’t just mean with its ‘drag queen ambassador’ but by tossing out a GED or high school diploma requirement.
Lowering standards had been recommended to the military brass in order to improve diversity metrics. As was ignoring criminal records and other issues. Expect those to show up on the agenda soon enough.
The Navy could drop DEI or drop its standards. It’s choosing to drop standards.
Greenfield was right. As the Heritage Foundation opined in a December 2023 article: "The military went woke. Time to make some changes at the top." (Emphasis, mine.)
Today's American military has fully embraced the social imperatives of the Left and the most progressive aspects of American society.
The U.S. Air Force selects officers based on a race- and sex-based quota system for officer applicants—an affirmative action program that would make the Ivy League blush.
In August, the U.S. Army Special Operations Command released a report on “Women in Combat”—not to analyze the effectiveness of Army Special Operations Forces, but to excoriate itself for supposed persistent bigotry.
Earlier this year, Army officials released a memo making soldiers undergoing “gender transition” non-deployable for almost one year. At a time of severe readiness concerns, such a concession to ideology is absurd. The military should not be in the business of accommodating social ideology if it means accepting non-deployability.
Each of these examples, and countless others, embody the faulty assumption that the military must reflect the society it is built to protect.
A fighting force that rejects the above observations will sooner or later get its ass kicked on the battlefield and the high seas.
"If the nation is to reclaim the military as an institution built for victory in war," the Heritage Foundation advised, "conservatives must have the courage and audacity to reform the institution, starting at the top, with uniformed leadership."
Amen to the hell yeah.
The Soft Bigotry of Low Expectations
So what — or whom — is to blame for declining educational standards in America? Here's a hint:
In October 2023, Oregon became the latest Democrat-run state to drop virtually all high school graduation requirements, including basic reading, writing, and math skills. I'd ask, "Why the hell even bother with high school, then?" — but I don't want to get off-track.
Oregon’s State Board of Education voted unanimously, arguing that requiring students to complete standardized tests both presented a “harmful hurdle for historically marginalized students” and represented a misuse of state tests. The reason? COVID-19. Please don't insult our intelligence.
While Oregon isn't the only state "guilty" of lowering high school graduation requirements, it does serve as a perfect example of the insanity of "the soft bigotry of low expectations."
The Bottom Line
Lowered educational standards for all students — vs. raising the effectiveness of properly educating those who struggle — is not only a black mark on those who lower those standards; lowered standards then metastasize into the whole of society, slowly but surely.
The United States Armed Forces is presently a perfect example of the latter.