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Corps to ban recruits with prior sex offenses

With the expansion to 202,000 active-duty Marines now complete, the Corps will cut recruiters in the coming year and ban anyone with a past sex offense from joining the service, Recruiting Command’s top officer said.

Maj. Gen. Robert Milstead said in early October that the Corps will no longer allow anyone with a felony or misdemeanor sexual offense to enlist, even if there are extenuating circumstances, and will admit far fewer recruits who perform poorly on the Armed Services Vocational Battery test.

“We’ve tightened up for this year. We just won’t take them,” Milstead said of those with a previous sex offense. “It’s just not worth the churn. Even if it’s a great guy, it’s just not worth it on this playing field with the media. We just don’t need it.”

From October 2006 through June 2008, the Corps allowed eight recruits to enlist with felony sex convictions on their record, according to statistics released by the Marine Corps through the Freedom of Information Act. Milstead said that in some of those cases, the Corps decided to give a recruit a second chance after discovering the crime involved an 18- or 19-year-old having a romantic relationship with a girl who fell short of the legal age of consent. That won’t be happen anymore, he said.

The decision is part of an adjustment to refine recruiting across the Corps. Next year, the mission is to find 35,868 enlisted recruits, the fewest in at least five years. Aided in part by robust retention, the Corps got so far ahead of the curve in meeting the 202K recruiting mission that it was reduced from more than 40,000 to 36,696 during 2009, Marine officials said.

Overall, the Corps exceeded the 2009 goal with 37,114 enlisted recruits. And many more are coming in with a high school-equivalent education. That figure rose to 98.5 percent this past year, up 2.2 percentage points from 2008 and the highest percentage in at least four years.

As part of the post-202K reality, recruiting command has volunteered to release 284 of the 600 recruiters added to help with the buildup, including 134 this year, Milstead said. It won’t be a problem, he said: The Corps has thousands of recruits scheduled for all of its boot camp slots through the end of January, and has a large group of poolees, meaning recruiters can be more selective on who is shipped.

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