The Army General Classification Test (AGCT) of the United States has a long history that runs parallel with research and means for attempting the assessment of intelligence or other abilities.
Subsequent testing targeted aptitude in order to better fill roles, such as those provided by officers who obtained commissions from other than the United States military academies, or to meet the need for increasingly complicated skills that came along with technological progress, especially after World War II.
The first intelligence tests were created during World War I to screen the thousands of soldiers being recruited by the United States military.
[This quote needs a citation] Overall, the Army Alpha and the Army Beta tests were designed to find the mental age of military recruits and to assess incoming recruits for success in the US Military by testing one's ability to understand language, to perform reasoning with semantic and quantitative relationships, to make practical judgments, to infer rules and regulations, and to recall general information.
39 years later, where Flynn effects would have predicted a systematic inflation of nearly 12 points, what was found was a simple fluctuation of the sign of the difference between the tests throughout the range.