Military Officer Aptitude in the All-Volunteer Force

• Date: 01 April 2018
• Author: Michael W. Klein,Matthew Franklin Cancian
• Published date: 01 April 2018
• DOI: 10.1177/0095327X17695223
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article
Armed Forces & Society
2018, Vol. 44(2) 219-237
Military Officer
ª The Author(s) 2017
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Aptitude in the
DOI: 10.1177/0095327X17695223
journals.sagepub.com/home/afs
All-Volunteer Force
Matthew Franklin Cancian1 and Michael W. Klein2
Abstract
We show a statistically significant and quantitatively meaningful decline in the apti-
tude 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 Long-
itudinal Surveys of Youth among college graduates but not for the overall set of
respondents.
Keywords
all-volunteer force (AVF), civil–military relations, defense policy, military organization,
recruitment/retention
Introduction
“Who serves when not all serve?” This has been a central issue in the all-volunteer
U.S. military, even before the end of conscription in 1973. Advocates for the end of
1 Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA
2 Tufts University Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Medford, MA, USA
Corresponding Author:
Matthew Franklin Cancian, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Room
E53-470, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA.
Email: mfc5h@virginia.edu

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Armed Forces & Society 44(2)
the peacetime draft argued conscription was, in the words of Friedman (1962),
“inequitable and arbitrary, seriously interfer[ing] with the freedom of young men
to shape their lives” (p. 36). Others, however, were concerned with the potential
quality of an all-volunteer force (AVF; Janowitz & Moskos, 1974). Given the strong
link between aptitude and job performance, the military has measured the quality of
its enlisted force by their scores of aptitude tests.
While the military services initially faced challenges in attracting high-quality
enlisted personnel, the problems seemed to have been resolved by the late 1980s.
Rostker (2006), one of the foremost experts in military man-power analysis,
declared in his 2006 RAND monograph I Want You that “the alternative to the draft,
the all-volunteer force, has been a resounding success for the American military and
the American people” (p. 9). Even during the most trying years of conflicts in Iraq
and Afghanistan, around 60% of new recruits were deemed “high quality,” posses-
sing a high school diploma and being above the average aptitude of the American
population (compared to a low of 27.1% of new recruits deemed high quality in
1977).1
The success of the volunteer military in attracting high-quality enlisted recruits,
however, does not necessarily carry over with respect to its ability to attract high-
quality commissioned officers. Commissioned officers comprise about 16% of the
military, but they make up its leadership and exert a disproportionate impact on
military effectiveness because of their ability to command the forces and organiza-
tions under them.
Up until now, however, there has been no systematic study of trends in officer
aptitude nor of what factors are most influential on the average aptitude of incoming
officers. In this article, we show that the aptitude of officers in the marines, as
measured by scores on the General Classification Test (GCT), has steadily and
significantly declined since 1980. For example, the GCT score in 1980 that demar-
cated the lower one third of new officers that year demarcated the lower two thirds of
the new officers in 2014. While 85% of those taking the test in 1980 exceeded 120,
the cutoff score for marine officers in World War II (Nalty & Moody, 1970), only
59% exceeded that score in 2014. At the upper end of the distribution, 4.9% of those
taking the test scored above 150 in 1980 compared to 0.7% in 2014.
We examine the relationship between the annual averages of these test scores and
the size and composition of the pool of potential officers (i.e., college graduates),
labor market conditions, and the ethnic, racial, and gender composition of incoming
officers. We find that the dominant correlate with the declining GCT scores over
time is the expansion of the pool of potential officers as the ranks of college grad-
uates have risen over the past three decades, showing how changes in society in
general are mirrored in their armed forces.
We check the conclusion by analyzing the test scores of young people who
participated in the 1979 and 1997 National Longitudinal Surveys of Youth (NLSY)
and find both a significant increase in the proportion of individuals earning a 4-year
college degree and a corresponding significant decline in average test scores for

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Cancian and Klein
221
those with a college degree across the two surveys. Notably, there is not a similar
significant decline in Armed Forces Qualification Test (AFQT) scores across the
two surveys for the full set of respondents.
The GCT
The military developed new aptitude tests at the beginning of World War II in order
to classify incoming servicemen during the huge buildup of forces. The Army GCT
(initially called the AGCT to distinguish it from the navy’s test but subsequently
called simply the GCT) was given to all entering service members due to its utility in
sorting initial entrants into the military. By the end of the war, over 12 million men
and women had taken this test. The GCT was designed to have a mean score of 100
and a standard deviation of 20. Those who took the test were placed in one of the five
categories, with Category I being those with the highest scores. In a 1946 Science
article, one of the creators of the test, Bingham (1947), stated that the average score
for college graduates was 130, which was the lower boundary for a test taker to place
in Category I.
The link between aptitude, as measured by the GCT, and military performance
was systematically studied during World War II. Research found that enlisted sol-
diers in Category IV or V (those with GCT scores below 90) were not able to learn at
the same pace as soldiers of average mental ability, and special training units were
established to prepare these men for basic training. Studies also showed that the GCT
was a powerful tool for predicting officer performance in basic training. In World
War II, enlistees in the army without a college degree who scored above 110 on the
GCT were considered for Officer Candidate School (OCS), which was used to train
and screen potential officers (those with a 4-year college degree could be commis-
sioned without taking the GCT). A candidate’s GCT score was found to be highly
correlated with his or her success at OCS (Palmer, Wiley, & Keast, 1948). In fact,
there was much debate about whether 110 was a sufficiently high minimum score for
enlistees to enroll in OCS since most of the failures at that school were from
candidates who scored between 110 and 115 (the marine corps had a higher mini-
mum score of 120).
The GCT had been replaced by the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery
(ASVAB) by the time the AVF began in 1973 for all branches of the services. Out of
all the services, the GCT is still only administered in the marine corps and there also
to officers only. The GCT was found to be highly predictive of officers’ success at
The Basic School (TBS), a 6-month training course that all new marine officers take
in Quantico, VA (Stoloff, 1983). At some point, the GCT stopped being directly
influential on Military Occupational Specialty (MOS) selection, but those who take
it continue to treat it as a serious and important requirement.2
All candidates to become officers in the marines, except those coming from the
Naval Academy, must complete OCS in Quantico, VA, as well as complete a 4-year
bachelor’s degree. There are several programs that may take an aspiring officer

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Armed Forces & Society 44(2)
candidate to OCS, such as the Reserve Officer Training Corps or the Platoon Lead-
er’s Class.
OCS represents the primary screening tool for marine officers, with grades deter-
mined through a combination of physical fitness, academic, and leadership evalua-
tions. There is usually a 40% attrition rate at OCS. Failure is not often due to
academic evaluations; in fact, academic talent is not a good predictor of success
at OCS (Stoloff, 1983). Rather, most failures come from orthopedic injuries that
arise because of the physical intensity of the course or from failures to exhibit
leadership.3 Those candidates who successfully complete OCS are commissioned
as second lieutenants upon receipt of their bachelor’s degree (or upon completion of
OCS if they already have their degree). One could offer a simple formula for creating
a marine officer in the years of the AVF: OCS completion þ 4-year bachelor’s
degree ¼ an officer.
After commissioning, all marine officers take up a 6-month course called TBS in
Quantico, VA. Newly commissioned lieutenants attending TBS learn infantry tactics
and general knowledge about the marine corps. It is here that lieutenants take the
GCT at a consistent time in their careers and in a consistent environment (as opposed
to, say, being administered by a recruiter in varying...