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Comment by hunglee2 | Hacker News Reader

This is a good move - academic qualifications are an inadequate proxy for the skills and mentality needed to succeed in combat roles. Just look at the enemies that the US has fought over the decades - rice paddy farmers in Vietnam, illiterate goat herders in Afghanistan - all were formidable opponents who fought the US to a standstill, likely with a single SAT between them.

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While this might well be correct, the argument is missing that academic qualifications conditional on growing up in the US (as supposed to in Afghanistan) are still a proxy for potentially useful skills. In other words, some of the enemies might have had comparable academic qualifications had they grown up in the US.

fair comment - thanks

> are still a proxy for potentially useful skills.

This is tautological. It's a good measure because it's a good (proxy) measure. This is not a truism, stated this way.

> In other words, some of the enemies might have had comparable academic qualifications had they grown up in the US.

Maybe they would have all been geniuses. This is a wild guess about what intelligence/behavior results in superior combat troops, on average.

No, eg (Corr(A, B) = 0) and (Corr(A, B) > 0 | f(A)) can say something nontrivial about f.

Kind... of. Both won by having enormously higher stakes and will to fight. Plus a ton of foreign aid. And neighboring friendly or at least too-disorganized-to-resist countries the US was reluctant (but not always wholly unwilling) to engage.

Both got badly stomped on a sheer damage-and-casualties-inflicted front, but didn't give up and had relatively safe space to retreat into and carry on logistics through (and foreign aid) that kept them from being counted out no matter how many times we punched them. But they were getting punched a lot, and hard, and weren't landing a ton of blows in return.

If one expects to be on the historical US side of an encounter like that, it's not clear to me that shifting to less-educated troops is going to help. The current approach kicks absolute ass—from a sheer military perspective. Especially against non-modern militaries (and there are very few fully modern ones—the training and equipment requirements to field a modern army are immense, expensive, and require a level of delegation of power that many kinds of states can't securely achieve). Uneducated farmers may have won those fights (while doing a hell of a lot of dying, and delivering rather poor damage in return) but I don't think it follows that the US military would be well-served by poorly-educated soldiers.

actually agree with everything you've said - aside from the last line. Educated is hugely over rated for the vast majority of combat work. Look at Ukraine / Russia - which has devolved into an attritional battle of conscript soldiers, many of whom are educated but uselessly so.

This is a matter of trade offs. 1 for 1 an educated soldier is probably better than an uneducated one. But when you factor in the cost of educating that soldier, then spending resources in assessing against skills developed in educational setting, you are probably better off just opening the doors and taking the rough with the smooth

Most people in the navy dont perform combat roles, most people are processing radar contacts, doing maintenance on highly sophisticated fighter jets, reprogramming radios, managing extremely dangerous fluid systems, operating an extremely high performance nuclear reactor. The doctrine the navy operates under necessitates a highly technically adept and well coordinated crews on several ships, anyone aboard that isnt qualified to be there is a threat to themselves and everyone around them.

Were this a hypothetical matter we could speculate what might happen if we lowered the standards; however, I will point out that the state of todays navy is that sometimes young airmen get cut in half by aircraft arresting cables, sometimes navy ships crash into cargo vessels, most maintenance hasnt been done to standard sometimes for over a decade, sometimes people fry the reactor plant control console. It would be difficult to argue in that light that we should lower the standards, I would instead propose some combination of the following -raise the pay to attract qualified candidates -shrink the responsibility of the navy, congress sets the op-tempo -increased use of drones specifically, the navy has a proven track record of not keeping up with industrial automation and it is unreasonable to expect that to change given command structural doctrine, but drones can be fully self contained weapon systems that are installed onboard simply

I disagree, as does the DOD. Smarter troops do their jobs better, such as better accuracy and faster trainability, and making better inferences. This is what the AFQT , ASVB shows based on decades of data among hundreds of thousands of recruits. Less intelligent recruits are a burden, which is why they are not recruited except during shortages during war time, and only sparingly.

Even if no GED/diploma req., they still must pass the AFQT and related tests

"Smarter troops do their jobs better"

agree with this but academic qualifications do not map to being smart. There are different ways in which intelligence can be measured, I am sure the DOD will be using more effective measures to replace the education qualifications

From the article:

> The decision follows a move in December 2022 to bring in a larger number of recruits who score very low on the Armed Services Qualification Test.

It sounds like they really are just scraping the bottom of the barrel. The Navy is not a competitive employer right now given the ops tempo, living in close quarters on a ship, and poor compensation. Even for those who are inclined to join the military, why pick the Navy over the Air Force?

Very much agree. One of my best sailors was an E-3 Seaman who was dropped from electronic tech training for a DUI and became an undesignated seaman, the worst job you can get in the navy. He was better at certain things than the chief who’s been doing them for years but wasn’t the sharpest tool (he was awesome, I feel bad saying it). I ended up recommending he be reintroduced to the electronic tech program but he loved being in the deck division and ended up becoming a boatswains mate. I bet he was the best damn BM ever too.

You arent comparing like for like you are comparing a guerrilla soldier to a trained professional. I’d imagine if the US switched to that sort of doctrine we wouldn’t have the totally lopsided casualty counts we’ve had in recent conflicts.

Have they tried higher pay?

I think reducing qualifications is bad move.

Sure, we've seen some pretty funny videos of how idiotic the enemies can be, that isn't a good argument for saying our soldiers can be just as idiotic.

To win we should be better. Smarter.

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