As soon as I got to San Diego, I briefed all of my Marines on my command philosophy, part of which is, “Do the right things for the right reasons.” I told them, “We're not going to allow this to be about quantity over quality,” because there had been this “shit in, shit out” mentality.
For lack of a better term.
This was at the height of the war in Iraq. The surge—or General David Petraeus's move to flood Iraq with American troops as a show of force, but also to enact his counterinsurgency measures to build trust and hope among the local people—had resulted in some successes. But it had also meant an increase in Americans being killed and injured by homemade bombs. The Marines we sent in had to be good, not only for the sake of military success, but also to keep themselves alive.
And they had to make it through boot camp.
We're always looking for the high school student who's on the sports teams, who's on the honor roll, as opposed to the kid who's coming into your office to avoid going to jail.
Yeah. That's a thing.
So, right from the get-go, from the day I started, I wanted to shift that mind-set. The recruiting station had a lot of potential, but it had become known for recruiting in bulk. It had a reputation for turning out big numbers, rather than focusing on low attrition and sending the right kids to be recruits. Rather than seeing the applicants as real human beings, it was common to call them “bones”—as in “roll them bones.” This was inexcusable, particularly since many of these young men and women would see combat just months after they completed recruit training.
“Attrition rate” refers to the percentage of recruits who sign up for a set amount of time—say, four years—but don't make it through their training because of injuries, because they fail their tests, because they're not a good match personality-wise for the Corps, or because they physically can't complete the training.
Before I arrived, the recruiters in San Diego tended to be rewarded based on how many people they could get to sign a contract, and there was a lot of pressure—especially at that time—to get high numbers. There was little scrutiny on waivers across recruiting command. During the biggest buildup for the war years, the military issued waivers to allow people in who normally would not be allowed in. The waivers were for drug use, for being overweight, for not meeting education requirements, for having children as single parents, for having prior mental or physical issues, or for having felonies. I knew from the analysis I had done on my previous recruiting tour that recruits who required waivers had much higher discharge rates for disciplinary and mental-health reasons. In my mind, if we cared about the Marine Corps, we should focus on enlisting kids who would stick around and complete their four-year obligations honorably.
Think about it: Almost as soon as a new recruit gets off the bus, there's a drill instructor screaming about how many recruits won't make it. It's supposed to toughen you up, make you feel proud of your success, build the tradition of the Marine Corps as the elite military branch.
Well, that's a waste of resources. It's a waste of taxpayer money. And, holy crap, it can't be good for the self-esteem of a person who walks around for the rest of his or her life thinking, “I failed.”
Let's say you have to sign up ten recruits per month, as a baseline. You sign up your ten, but two don't make it through boot camp. The next month, you have to sign up twelve recruits to make up for the two who didn't make it. Not only have you put hours and hours of work into the two who didn't make it, but you now have to spend hours and hours replacing them—on top of your normal base. Well, if you're now struggling to get twelve recruits, you'll take anyone with a pulse. So how many don't make it to boot camp the next month?
What a waste of time. Many of our recruiters had recently been deployed, so they thought that recruiting duty would be a break from deployments. The reality? The recruiters were so stressed out trying to meet their numbers that, at one point, the rate of military recruiters killing themselves was three times higher than the rest of the military.
In the corporate world, a good CEO would probably look at those issues and work to fix them. But changing that mentality in the Marine Corps was hard. It was so important to me, though, because (1) it was about the quality of the Marine we were making for the institution, and (2) it was about giving quality of life back to our recruiters. (We say “making a Marine” to describe the process a person goes through from a civilian to a fully trained, physically fit, confident Marine.) For every discharge, for every kid who signs up and then decides not to go to boot camp, you have to make that up. You have to sign up another recruit on top of the next month's numbers to make up for the previous month's failure.
There was another problem: Some recruiting stations were doing well, but if the district didn't perform well as a whole, that didn't matter. So the recruiting stations that performed better were trying to bring in extra numbers to make up for the stations that didn't perform well, so they could help the district meet its mission.
Man, were they stuck on those numbers. Everyone was happy if we came up with more warm bodies to help them make mission, but, in the end, the Marine Corps suffered as an institution because the high-risk kids weren't shipping to or graduating from boot
