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ID:
151017
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| Summary/Abstract |
Owing to regional and partisan imbalances, the U.S. military is at greater risk than at any time since the advent of the all-volunteer force of becoming estranged from significant portions of the society it serves. What—if anything—should be done? This article takes three initial steps to address this problem. First, the article examines regional and partisan representation in the U.S. military and suggests that existing imbalances are likely to grow worse over time. The article then argues that the most obvious policy response, a renewed draft, would in fact fail to adequately bridge the gap. Finally, the article outlines one policy response—the reassertion of nonpartisan norms—that would help to mitigate, though not close, the gap.
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| 2 |
ID:
160974
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| Summary/Abstract |
We show a statistically significant and quantitatively meaningful decline in the aptitude of commissioned officers in the marine corp from 1980 to 2014 as measured by their scores on the General Classification Test. This result contrasts with the widely studied increase in the quality of enlisted personnel since 1973 when conscription ended. As a possible cause for this decline, we focus on the fact that, during this period, marine officers had to have a 4-year college degree and there has been an expansion of the pool of young Americans in college. To corroborate this hypothesis, we show that there has been a similar decline in scores on the Armed Forces Qualification Test for responders to the 1979 and 1997 National Longitudinal Surveys of Youth among college graduates but not for the overall set of respondents.
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