Almost 100 Million People Aren’t Smart Enough to Enlist in the Military
10th April 2013
I, for one, am not surprised.
Because the pundit class in America is related to so few people who want to enlist in the military, there’s negligible media awareness of how hard it has become to join up. A major hurdle is scoring high enough on the AFQT cognitive test.
The Pentagon isn’t in any hurry to make its intelligence requirements explicable to the media. The conventional wisdom is that intelligence testing is a racist hoax or it just applies to academia, not the real world, or whatever. The fact that the military is obsessive about cognitive testing is something that simply isn’t in the reigning worldview, and the military is fine with that. It likes testing and it dislikes outside interference, so the more convoluted its jargon for talking about its intelligence requirements, the better.