WASHINGTON — The number of soldiers discharged annually for “unsatisfactory performance” in the U.S. Army has dropped by 95 percent in the past three decades, but experts say it’s not because of questionable retention standards. Instead they credit significant improvement in overall quality in the ranks.
The Army discharged 697 troops for poor job performance in fiscal 2010, down from 14,253 in 1983, the military said. As a whole, the Army shrunk by about one-third during that period, from 2.1 million to 1.4 million soldiers, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
“I don’t think there’s a problem with the integrity of the system,” said retired Col. Steven Bucci of the Heritage Foundation, a respected conservative think-tank. “I don’t think the Army’s keeping them in just to keep their retention numbers up. That would be a bad assumption based on the data.”
Soldiers failing to meet discipline or performance standards “should be separated in order to avoid the high costs in terms of pay, administrative efforts, degradation of morale, and substandard mission performance,” according to the Army regulation handbook.
Involuntary bad-conduct discharges, aka other-than-honorable discharges, are often handed down when a soldier performs poorly, fails a fitness test or tests positive for drugs. They’re different from dishonorable discharges, which are given in response to what the Army calls the most reprehensible criminal actions within the military justice system, such as murder, sexual assault or desertion.
The paperwork necessary for an involuntary discharge has to be initiated by a commanding officer and approved by a military lawyer.
When retired Lt. Col. Gordon Rudd served as a commanding officer at Fort Riley, Kan., early in that decade, he said none of his sergeants had even high school diplomas.
“I think what we’re getting today is a higher quality soldier,” said Rudd, now a professor at the Marine Corps University in Quantico, Va. “The vast majority of soldiers are high school graduates, and in terms of what you enlist in the service, that’s the baseline delta. It’s not so much intellect as it is responsibility.”
Three decades ago, the Army had only recently shifted to an all-volunteer model, Rudd noted. It hadn’t offered notable pay upgrades in decades and was still plagued by negative feelings about the Vietnam War.
“Service was not nearly as fashionable or acceptable as it is today,” Rudd said. “Even to get a date in uniform was difficult. Now it’s not a pejorative thing at all.”
Many soldiers enlisted simply because they lacked skills and responsibility, and couldn’t find employment elsewhere. Many of them couldn’t effectively use a typewriter or drive a car, Rudd said.
What Rudd called the “hollow army” started to shape up in the early 1980s, said retired Lt. Col. Conrad Crane, a military historian.
“One of the key reforms that allowed the Army of the ‘70s to transform into the great force of Desert Storm in 1991 was a change in personnel policies, as the ‘80s opened, that made discharging problem troops easier,” Crane said.
With the implementation of these policies, drug-abuse discharges accelerated from one in fiscal 1983, to 376 in 1984, to 5,219 by 1986. The Army discharged 3,032 drug users in 2010.
(Drug-abuse discharges are a separate category from unsatisfactory performance discharges, but nonetheless indicative of overall soldier quality.)
The Army discharged another 4,493 drug users in 1983 after rehabilitation programs fell short. That number fell to 92 by 2010.
Rudd commanded one company in the early 1980s that was supposed to number about 150 soldiers, but an Army-wide shortage in the continental U.S., along with general discharges, shrunk the group to about 60, Rudd said.
“If I threw all my guys out who smoked pot, I wouldn’t have any left,” Rudd recalled one of his colleagues saying.
Rudd oversaw one particular soldier whom he caught with marijuana four or five times. A military lawyer, contacted by Rudd, asked if the soldier had done anything other than smoke pot. When Rudd said no, the lawyer made it clear that he didn’t have time to process marijuana charges. He was too busy dealing with murder and hard drug charges, Rudd said.
Bucci remembered instances in the late 1970s and 1980s when the Army retained soldiers who got DUIs.
“We used to joke that a guy couldn’t make major if he didn’t have one or two court-martials on his record,” Bucci said. “Now if you get one DUI, you’re gone.”
The problems peaked in the mid 1970s, when some officers faced the possibility of encountering knife fights upon entering their barracks, said Col. Robert Cassidy.
“It was bad juju,” Cassidy said.
After the Army began shaping up, military lawyers didn’t see quite as many hard cases, so they could be more vigilant about relatively minor infractions. One military lawyer during Desert Storm told Rudd that the most common reasons for punitive activity were consuming alcohol or fornicating in a combat zone.
“The response,” Rudd said, “is much more Draconian.”