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Comment by VLM | Hacker News Reader

As an example, during the surge volunteers could get enlistment waivers for almost anything except Celiac disease or peanut allergy. Minor felonies, not so minor felonies, fat, ASVAB test results worse than filling out the score sheet randomly, school dropout, addiction history, well, OK if you really want, but no food allergies.

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Do you by any chance have a reference for how much standards were lowered during the surge? I knew they were lowered some, but I thought it was a little bit, not a huge amount.

USAREC works in mysterious ways. The exact legal definition of waiver vs standard vs requirement is complicated and fuzzy. This link from NYT (a fake news source, but sometimes accidentally factual) gives some insight in that the number of waivers roughly doubled.

https://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/14/us/14military.html

The effect on the army is unclear. Note that even during the surge more than ninety percent of recruits required no waivers. So you can spin the story as the number of recruits with clean records dropped from 98% to 96% which doesn't matter, or its a crisis that the number of troublemakers doubled.

A single example of this was Bo Bergdahl. Generally speaking, washing out of another branch of the service for psychologcial reasons like Bo did (coast guard) is a huge red flag and would have disqualified him at another time.

This is a personal ancidote from my experience only, but it was generally understood that during the Iraq period circa 2003 If you have a pulse, you were qualified to enlist.

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