WASHINGTON, June 10 - The Army is having to turn to more high school dropouts and lower-achieving applicants to fill its ranks, accepting hundreds of recruits in recent months who would have been rejected a year ago, according to Army statistics.

Eight months into the recruiting year, the percentage of new recruits in the Army without a high school diploma has risen to 10 percent, the upper limit of what the Army is willing to accept, from 8 percent last year. The percentage of recruits with scores in the lowest acceptable range on the standardized test used to screen potential soldiers has also risen to 2 percent, also reaching the Army's limit, from slightly more than a half-percent last year, reaching the highest level since 2001.

The number of lower-achieving recruits is a relatively small part of the more than 41,000 recruits who have signed an enlistment contract or entered basic training since October. Officials emphasized that this year's recruits still met or exceeded the Army's quality goals, and that the service would not lower its standards to meet its overall enlistment target of 80,000 recruits.

But as the Army formally announced Friday that it had missed its recruiting goal for the fourth consecutive month, military personnel specialists said the profile of this year's enlistees raised questions about recruit quality, and whether the Army would fail to reach its annual recruiting goal for the first time since 1999.

"The overall quality of the force today is lower than it was a year ago," said David R. Segal, who directs the Center for Research on Military Organization at the University of Maryland. "It means they can anticipate more problem situations with recruits in the training cycle."

Several recruiters, in interviews over the past six months, said they were told in February to start accepting more recruits who are ranked in Category 4 on the military's standardized aptitude test - those who score between the 10th and 30th percentiles on the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery.

A recruiter in Washington, who insisted on anonymity to protect his career, said that at the time, he was concerned about whether these recruits could handle the increasingly high-technology tools of combat.

Another recruiter, in New York, who insisted on anonymity for the same reason, said this month that the Army seemed to care less about quality than about filling the holes left by soldiers who decline to re-enlist. "It's about one thing: numbers," he said.

Recruiters and Army officials say news coverage of the violence in Iraq and Afghanistan has caused many parents, coaches and other adults with influence over young people to warn them against a military career.

The active-duty Army is not the only branch of the armed services suffering recruiting woes.

The Pentagon also said Friday that the Army National Guard, Army Reserve, Navy Reserve and Air National Guard fell short of their targets last month for shipping new recruits to basic training.

The Marine Corps shipped its quota of new recruits in May, but for the fifth straight month missed its monthly contracting goal. Prospective marines who sign a contract are sent to basic training sometime in the future, and the military uses the contracting figures as an early indicator of trouble.

"We don't have a sense of crisis or desperation," said Lt. Gen. Robert Magnus, deputy Marine commandant for programs and resources. "Understandably, American moms and dads read the newspaper and watch TV, and may or may not have special interests and concerns as their sons and daughters consider becoming soldiers or marines."

To help, the Army has added 1,000 recruiters since September; offered a new 15-month enlistment, instead of the previous minimum two-year term; and run new advertisements aimed at parents.

The Army is also considering plans to double the top cash enlistment bonuses for recruits in some specialties to $40,000, and to begin a pilot program to provide up to $50,000 in home mortgage help to recruits who enlist for eight years of active duty. The proposals were first reported by USA Today on Friday.

The quality of recruits is a delicate issue for the Army, which halted recruiting for a day last month to review practices after some recruiters were found to have broken or bent rules to meet quotas.

According to an Army spokesman, Lt. Col. Bryan Hilferty, in the first eight months of this fiscal year, 10 percent of the recruits the Army accepted earned a high school diploma by passing the General Educational Development test, or G.E.D., instead of graduating. For all of 2004, the Army accepted 8 percent of applicants without a high school diploma.

In addition, the Army has so far recruited roughly 800 recruits - about 2 percent of all enlistees - who are deemed Category 4, the lowest level. Last year, the Army accepted only about 465 recruits in this category.

Some lawmakers and independent military specialists defended the practice, saying it made sense to accept some low-achieving applicants so long as overall numbers remained within the Army's standards.

"I'm not totally naïve, but I have faith in recruiters," said Representative Joe Wilson, Republican of South Carolina. "There may be higher dropout rates. But a lot of times they're extending opportunities to minorities who wouldn't have opportunities otherwise."

Damien Cave contributed reporting from New York for this article.

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