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.
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.
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.