Well, of course it's a bad idea, right?
Hmmm. Mebbe not. At least, not as bad as those who look for bad things want to spin it to be.
Gosh, maybe there was some utility, in years gone by, when Judges told young offenders - "Enlist or go to jail."
Mind you, it's a delicate balancing act. The services really don't want, nor need, hard-core cases.
But a lot of kids get in trouble because they have poor self-discipline, are too smart, and don't take direction well, because the direction is oft-times applied badly. This is even more true as we as a society seem bent on criminalizing more and more trivial putative "precursor" behaviors, because 1 out of a thousand or so who offend in certain ways go on to offend in more serious, sometimes spectacularly so, ways.
So, the Army did a study on the impact of lowering some of the enlistment standards.
The AP got ahold of a copy of an internal Army study not yet released to the public (I'm trying to get a copy now, via PAO channels). According to the AP, the study found that -
WASHINGTON (AP) - Soldiers who need special waivers to get into the Army because of bad behavior go AWOL more often and face more courts-martial. But they also get promoted faster and re-enlist at a higher rate, according to an internal military study obtained by The Associated Press.
The Army study late last year concluded that taking a chance on a well-screened applicant with a criminal, bad driving or drug record usually pays off. And both the Army and the Marines have been bringing in more recruits with blemished records. Still, senior leaders have called for additional studies, to help determine the impact of the waivers on the Army."We believe that so far the return outweighs the risk," said Army Col. Kent M. Miller, who headed the team that conducted the study.
Such soldiers are a leadership challenge. Ones that good leaders relish, because there's material there you can really mold and shape. Weak leaders hate that kind of soldier. And you can't handle too many of them at once.
But many of the better NCO's I served with during the early years of my career had come to the Army with checkered pasts. But they would freely admit that the Army, by giving them structure, goals, and setting limits, had gotten them through their wild phases and had molded them into leaders who could lead - and lead the troublemakers.
They were also invaluable because they could really help you winnow the salvageable from the un-salvageable, and guide a young Lieutenant through those early minefields, where my mostly-among-officers upbringing had left me some rather large gaps in my understanding of soldiers - and saved me from trying to rescue the terminally self-destructive, and take chances on soldiers who simply infuriated me. How dare they challenge by Lieutenant-level wisdom, after all?
No, it doesn't always work - but for the nonce, at least, it appears to work more often than it fails, and is worth the paperwork and dollar costs of booting the incorrigibles.
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