Also I want to add that the standards for all ARMY schools have deteriorated dramatically from when I went in. When I went to sniper school, it had one of the highest attrition rates, higher than Ranger school for it's respective time period. And they don't just send a kid to sniper school, they literally have try-outs for a sniper platoon, and when they hand pick the best soldiers they have for the position, they spend months training him, preparing him for sniper school. You don't MAKE your Ghillie suit in Sniper school, you make it at your unit, long before you go to the school.
Despite all of this effort, the failure rate in sniper school was still huge.
Flash forward to now, my friends who stayed in, most of which were admittedly terrible soldiers but super like-able, sociable guys, which is why I still talk to them to this day. Almost all of them are now sniper qualified because they essentially made the school accessible to anyone, and made it to where you can no longer fail.
We even had a soldier (who again, I'm still friends with), who was so bad that everyone wanted to have him chaptered out of the Military. Even though we were friends with the guy, we recognized that he brought the unit down and was a liability to have in our unit. He never met the standard for anything, wrecked a humvee on an interstate after getting super drunk, causing massive collateral damage to civilian vehicles, lost his rifle, had negligent discharges, pissed hot for drugs 24/7. He was just a terrible soldier.
This same kid later became Special Forces. Not because he suddenly turned his life around, but rather because the standards got reduced dramatically, and they desperately needed more African Americans to meet their quota.
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