Friday's New York Times carries a thorough piece by Jim Dwyer and Bob Worth on the history of Private Steven D. Green, who now stands accused of rape and murder for the grisly killing of a family near Mahmudiyah, Iraq:

On the last day of January 2005, Steven D. Green, the former Army private accused of raping a 14-year-old Iraqi girl and murdering her family, sat in a Texas jail on alcohol-possession charges, an unemployed 19-year-old high school dropout who had just racked up his third misdemeanor conviction.

Days later, Mr. Green enlisted in a soldier-strapped Army, and was later assigned to a star-crossed unit to serve on an especially murderous patch of earth.

He arrived at the very moment that the Army was increasing by nearly half the rate at which it granted what it calls “moral waivers” to potential recruits. The change opened the ranks to more people like Mr. Green, those with minor criminal records and weak educational backgrounds. In Mr. Green’s case, his problems were emerging by junior high school, say people who knew him then.

Mr. Green’s Army waiver allowed a troubled young man into the heart of a war that bore little resemblance to its original declared purposes, but which continued to need thousands of fresh recruits.

Now, there is shame and rage in the Army — from the ranks of the enlisted to the officer corps — over the crimes attributed to Mr. Green, who was discharged in April on psychiatric grounds, and four other soldiers charged with a rape and four killings in March in Mahmudiya, a town about 20 miles south of Baghdad. A sixth soldier was charged with failing to report the matter after learning about it.

It's a tragic case in nearly every respect — but especially for the Iraqis involved, and for the effect this atrocity will have on our efforts to secure and rebuild Iraq.

It did not have to be this way. The Army has incurred substantial risk over the past few years by adjusting its recruiting and retention standards in order to make ends meet. As Owen West and I wrote in "Dismissed!" for Slate in June 2005, this has the potential for serious blowback:

Now comes a new Army directive that attempts to alleviate the personnel crunch by retaining soldiers who are earmarked for early discharge during their first term of enlistment because of alcohol or drug abuse, unsatisfactory performance, or being overweight, among other reasons. By retaining these soldiers, the Army lowers the quality of its force and places a heavy burden on commanders who have to take the poor performers into harm's way. This is a quick fix that may create more problems than it solves. [Emphasis added]

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Make no mistake, however—these are not soldiers who field commanders want to retain. One lieutenant colonel currently commanding a civil-affairs battalion said these troops were the ones "who eat up my time and cause my hair to gray prematurely." A former infantry officer said he could "not recall a single soldier chaptered for the reasons identified ... that I would have wanted to deploy with."

We wrote this story about retention, but it applies to recruiting as well. Obviously, not every soldier with a GED and an arrest record is going to be charged with committing an atrocity such as Mahmudiyah. But as Morris Janowitz and many others have shown, smarter soldiers make better soldiers. So too do soldiers without criminal backgrounds. They survive longer on the battlefield, and they make better decisions under fire. In an environment like Iraq, where soldiers must have the ability to conduct complex counterinsurgency tasks, and rapidly transition between high-intensity combat and low-intensity nation-building, the quality of our soldiers is ever more paramount. Reducing enlistment and retention standards to make ends meet sacrifices quality for quantity on a grand scale. Ultimately, this decision accepts a great deal of operational risk at the tactical level where these soldiers will operate. Given the nature of this conflict, and the imperatives of counterinsurgency to conduct operations with precision, transparency and great skill, this risk may not be acceptable.