Of course, it doesn't exactly say that ... Two decades ago, when the military was at the height of its prestige during the first Gulf War, 7% (I believe) of the generals in the U.S. Army were black. The #1 and #3 generals in the Gulf War (Colin Powell and Calvin Waller) were black.� One... Read More

You always come across smug dismissals of The Bell Curve as being discredited, but you never hear explanations from them of why the U.S. military has put such emphasis on cognitive testing for several generations now. In fact, I once interviewed the retired head pscyhometrician of one of the major branches of the military, who... Read More

The newsapers are talking about the new study saying only 1 in 4 youths is eligible to enlist in the military. Of course, the study doesn't break it down by race, but the information is readily available. A 2007 Rand Corporation report prepared the Office of the Secretary of Defense, Military Enlistment of Hispanic Youth:... Read More

As I've mentioned, one of the rules of polite journalism in discussing testing firefighters is to assume that paper and pencil tests must be irrelevant to the obviously moronic job of spraying water on burning buildings. Never refer to the voluminous data assembled over the decades by the Pentagon on the relationship between performance on... Read More

Fred Kaplan writes in Slate in Dumb and Dumber: The Army Lowers Recruitment Standards ... Again:The "aptitude" test is the Armed Forces Qualification Test (AFQT), which is a highly "g-loaded" fun

McCain, Obama, Clinton, and Giuliani have all called for more soldiers for them to play with when they come President. Why? We spend 48-49% of the world's military budget. We have near absolute air supremacy and, in the unlikely event that an enemy tank army ever takes the field to challenge our tanks again, the... Read More