The All-Volunteer Force at 50
Is America's military capable of fighting the next war?
In today’s Atlantic, Jason Dempsey and Gill Barndollar, a retired Army infantry officer and former Marine officer, respectively, argue “The All-Volunteer Force Is in Crisis.” After some preliminary background, they get to it:
As it turns 50 this week, the all-volunteer force appears unsustainable. It is threatened on three fronts: cost, capacity, and continued ability to find enough Americans willing and able to serve.
A military that has to compete with the civilian job market for workers is extremely expensive. Military pay and benefits make up the single largest category in the Defense Department budget. These costs have skyrocketed since 9/11, rising by more than 50 percent in real terms. In 2012, the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a defense think tank, projected that if personnel costs continue to grow at that rate and the overall defense budget remains flat, military personnel costs will consume the entire defense budget by 2039. A worsening recruiting environment has led to enlistment bonuses of up to $50,000, and retention bonuses as much as 10 times that amount for pilots and other crucial personnel. And this is all without mentioning the Department of Veterans Affairs, whose budget is approaching half the size of the Defense Department’s.
These issues are not new. I was writing about the crisis in personnel costs a decade ago, if not before.
Because of its cost, the AVF is too small to handle a major war or emergency. When faced with two medium-size campaigns, in Iraq and Afghanistan, the AVF was seriously challenged to provide sufficient troops, despite constant mobilization of reservists, the enlistment of local allies, and the deployment of copious contractors. A major conflict would break the AVF—an open secret in defense circles, but something that few in Washington want to discuss. Over the past year of fighting, Russia and Ukraine have both taken casualties equal to at least half the active-duty U.S. Army. (U.S. military doctrine says that a force is destroyed after sustaining 30 percent casualties). Selective Service, subject to even less scrutiny than the AVF, remains on the books because if we ever enter into another major conflict, we will need a draft again.
One of my constant predictions, going back to the constant deployments to “peace enforcement” missions during the Clinton administration and throughout the GWOT era, was that the constant call-ups of the Guard and Reserves—in essence treating large swaths of them as though they were active duty—was that we would break the Reserve Component. It never happened, despite what seemed to me an obvious violation of the social contract that we had made with those who joined the RC that they were a “break glass in case of emergency” force.
But Dempsey and Barndollar are right: we have a highly trained cadre force that wouldn’t last long in a WWIII scenario. At least if WWIII looked anything like WWII or even the Russo-Ukraine war.
The current recruiting crisis has become the most pressing short- and long-term challenge for the AVF. All-volunteer force is a misnomer: the U.S. military should be described as an all-recruited force. Each young American who ships off to boot camp is the result of intense effort by an enormous recruiting and marketing apparatus. The Army alone has assigned more than 10,000 soldiers, equivalent to about three brigades, to recruiting duty. In the Marine Corps, the joke is that Marine Corps Recruiting Command eats first: The Corps’ recruiting and marketing budget is sacrosanct. Ballpark bomber flyovers and “Be All You Can Be” don’t come cheap.
Again, this is undeniable. I’m much more familiar with the Marines these days and their recruiting command is a well-oiled machine. Because they’re so small and have created the illusion that they’re an elite force, they’ve always managed to make mission. But it’s an intense pressure cooker for those assigned that mission, as they have to hit their targets month in and month out.
The Army, which is much bigger and more diverse in its mission set, mostly sells itself as a way to pay for college and get training that will pay off in the civilian world after one’s hitch is up. They’ve struggled to meet recruiting goals in times, like now, when the civilian job market it good. Or, as was the case in the aughts, when there’s an unpopular war going on.
The stark fact is that most young Americans can’t currently serve and even fewer want to. Since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, just 23 percent of Americans ages 17–24 are eligible to enlist without a waiver. Obesity, medical and mental-health issues, or a history of substance abuse prevent most of their peers from being able to serve. The switch to a new military health-records system, MHS Genesis, is also making recruiting tougher by revealing the actual mental and physical health of recruits, after decades of half-truths and fudged standards.
The last is indeed a new wrinkle that has come at an inconvenient time. But some of this is self-inflicted: there’s just no reason to reject folks who are on ADHD drugs or have used marijuana, now legal in most states, recreationally. And slimming down obese recruits was done routinely in the draft era; we can do it now. Just change the damn standards.
The overall propensity to serve is even worse than the eligibility. Most of those who are eligible to enlist are currently enrolled in college. Just 9 percent of young Americans would seriously consider military service, near the all-time low since the AVF began. COVID restrictions made it tougher for military recruiters to find and meet this extremely small tranche of young Americans; online efforts have been a poor substitute for in-person recruiting.
The want to is indeed a huge problem. It’s been true for quite some time that those who are military-connected are far and away the most likely to join. If a parent or other close relative served, the kid is much more likely to see service as a good option. But even that’s changing now that the military is caught up in the culture wars and targeted as “woke” by Fox News and company.
These trends have been exacerbated by historically low unemployment rates. Any perceived negative of military service is amplified when there are more opportunities to stay home and live comfortably. The result is that 2023 is likely to be the worst year for military recruiting since the AVF began. Most of the services have already said that they will fail to hit their recruiting targets. The Army, short 15,000 recruits last year and facing the same shortfall this year, is shrinking. The Army’s top enlisted leader, Sergeant Major of the Army Michael Grinston, recently warned that trying to do more with less is putting “an enormous strain” on soldiers and their families.
We saw this throughout GWOT, particularly when the Iraq and Afghanistan fights were at their height. We expanded both the Army and the Marine Corps somewhat but they were still small by wartime standards. And this meant that the deployment-to-dwell ratios were at levels that threatened the psychological health—not to mention the marriages—of those asked to shoulder the burden of those wars.
The response to these challenges takes the usual American form: throwing more money at the problem. But higher pay and more bonuses have their limits. Total compensation for military service is already in the 90th percentile for equivalent civilian work for enlisted personnel in their first decade of service. Pay is now secondary to lifestyle concerns for many service members debating another enlistment.
One would think the “lifestyle” issue would be largely solved at this point, as we’re no longer in a big war.
There are also long-term structural challenges that counter the appeal of increased compensation. Foremost among these is that the profession of arms has become a family trade. A declining societal ethos of service, coupled to the tendency of mission-focused military recruiters to “fish where the fish are” by focusing on high-yield geographic areas, has made multigenerational military families the norm. In 2019, nearly 80 percent of Army recruits reported having a family member who had served. For almost 30 percent, that person was a parent. Since the end of the draft, the American republic has quietly, steadily acquired a military caste. Any significant decline in this caste’s willingness to continue serving—a foreseeable event in the wake of two failed wars and the increasing influence of partisan politics on the military—will pose an existential threat to the AVF. There are signs that this has already begun to happen. A 2021 survey by the Military Family Advisory Network found that just 62.9 percent of military and veteran families would recommend military life, down from 74.5 percent two years before.
The caste is particularly strong among officers. But it’s not surprising that there’s now more resistance. Those who served over the last two decades faced the aforementioned strain of constant deployment, something that hasn’t been the norm since the frontier era.
They also point to something I’ve complained about for years:
The other structural challenge facing the AVF is that it is still based on the career and family norms of the 1950s. In an era of increased career mobility and dual-income households, the military is still designed for a world of single-income families with the civilian spouse playing the role of supportive camp follower. President Biden’s recent moves to support the careers of military spouses will help, but can only have a marginal effect. Military spouses will still be subject to an itinerant lifestyle that regularly moves them to predominantly rural areas where professional opportunities are in short supply. With more women than men completing college and pursuing professional careers, the pool of families willing to take on the burden of military service under this model is steadily dwindling.
For officers, especially those in command, there remains the expectation that the wife take on a huge, unpaid support role acting as the head of the support system for the other wives. (I use gendered language intentionally here; as far as I can tell, there’s no parallel expectation for husbands.)
The military career model also assumes that senior leaders will be with the same organization for 30 years or more, making the institution an extreme outlier among large employers. This limits the talent pool to those who find such a commitment palatable. In a world where drones and artificial intelligence will likely dominate future conflicts, the isolated and heavily bureaucratic professional-development models of the military will struggle to keep up with the pace of innovation. Congress has authorized lateral entry measures—enlisting those with needed skills at far higher initial rank and pay—to break open this closed labor market, but cultural resistance from the services has prevented these policies from making much impact.
I don’t even know how a different model would work, to be honest. There’s a long history of direct commissioning for service support specialists (especially physicians, dentists, lawyers, chaplains, and the like) but even there it’s rare to enter the service higher than the O-3 pay grade (captain in the Army, Marines, Air Force, and Space Force and lieutenant in the Navy).
The AVF’s problems should give pause to any politicians or policy makers who are somehow still sanguine about America’s ability to win wars. In any major conflict, the military will have to dramatically expand and adapt in ways the AVF cannot manage. America has not even begun to have a conversation about what comes next.
The ostensible answer is a return to the draft in case of a massive war. Despite its end 50 years ago, registration with the Selective Service continued another two years until President Ford ended it by executive order after a minor controversy when it was revealed that his son, Steven, failed to register. But President Carter resumed the requirement in July 1980 in response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and it hs been required for all American males over 18 ever since.
For 50 years, most Americans have had the luxury of ignoring their military, even as they paid its large and growing bills. Through Cold War peace and post-9/11 wars, the all-volunteer force has consisted only of those who chose to join it. But the deepening recruiting crisis and the structural threats to the sustainability of the AVF make the future of our all-recruited military a crucial national-security issue. Private Stone is unlikely to be America’s last draftee.
Realistically, though, there’s next to no appetite for conscription and it’s not at all clear that a vast expansion of the number of junior enlisted personnel without a similar expansion in experienced leaders would be all that useful in modern warfare. And, given the lethality of modern weapons, it’s not obvious that a war with another great power would last long enough for the force to get trained up, anyway.
Well thought and written. Like you, I don’t have any answers, but you’ve given me food for thought. I’ve pondered this off and on for years, since I was in the queue for scenic SE Asia in high school.
My son is coming off 20 years in the Army this month as an E7, and I think he’d be surprised that recruiters are still saying that military service prepares you for a job in the private sector.
The 1950s reference is apt, and military policies assure that many, many service members get married right after basic training – nearly always too young, lest they be separated thousands of miles from their partner.
Of course, removing the draft meant that no “fortunate sons” had to serve, and it reduced pressure on the president to stay out of wars by assuring that only the serving caste was affected, along with the obligatory “thank you for your service” that everybody serving stateside gets to hear, and that most view with eye-rolling contempt (those serving overseas have a very different experience).
In my view, South Korea gets it right with short-duty mandatory national service. Everyone I know, myself included, would have benefited from a short stint in the military at that fork-in-the-road age.
National service mandates also have a ton of other downstream effects on society that I think would serve us well.
No.
And they made it harder by getting rid of the one incentive that kept people around no matter what bullshit the militarythrows at you: the 20-year retirement at 50% base pay.
Oh,
Used to be true in my day but is no longer an expectation (maybe still in the Marines). Technology and spouses groups have subsumed the traditional Commander’s Wife role. I have a relative in Command now and he mentioned that one of his officers’ wives run a kick ass Spouses group and is the defacto mother spouses hen. His wife has her own career and only participates in his extra duty obligations for formal dinners or maybe visiting a sick troop
@Tony W: Would be a huge benefit…but would never happen because of “Muh Rytes”
@Jim Brown 32:
Yeah, I still don’t really get it. The money they saved on that is surely more than offset by giving TSP to everyone who serves at least two years and the increased recruiting costs. That said, the cost of pay and benefits was obviously unsustainable a decade ago.
Yes, still very much a thing in the Marines. I’m shocked at the number of our LtCol faculty and Col directors with stay-at-home wives.
@Tony W:..mandatory national service…
When the eastern bloc nations did this during the Cold War we called it forced labor.
My youngest daughter would have been a likely prospect, and I thought about it for her. What stopped me was the numerous stories of sexual harassment and rape. Maybe stop the raping and more women might enlist.
@Mister Bluster: I’m sure we did.
Americans prefer the sort of labor that is not blatantly forced, just compelled to survive. Then we label it “voluntary” and wash our hands of responsibility.
@James Joyner: Anecdotally in my circle, nearly every enlisted person who makes it 20 years qualifies for 100% disability anyway, which makes the 50% thing moot.
A mandatory national service program is something I’ve long advocated. While it wouldn’t necessarily solve the military’s recruitment problem, it would vastly increase the recruitment pool.
Though I’d note a significant problem, would be to develop and manage non-military opportunities that provide the country a level of value that the military does. It would be too easy for the non-military programs to become 2 years of joke service.
@Sleeping Dog: Many of our national parks and forests are long neglected, and much of the existing infrastructure came from the old WPA days. Many hiking trails have been closed for years because there’s nobody to maintain them and no funding.
Similarly, our federal highway system could use a refresh on points of interest, rest stops, and other infrastructure. There’s no money in it – so private enterprise won’t ever take it up – but it holds value to the people.
Something I’m not sure of:
How does the American AVF compare to our potential adversaries?
Do the Russian or Chinese armies have similar or different problems?
A reflection by a general who held an army together in hard times:
One major problem today is the military has gone “Woke” in many respects. A valid choice, but one that causes “toxic” masculinity men to chose not to place themselves under the orders of such officers. Misgender someone while under the UCMJ and your cancellation can include less than honorable discharge and all the lifelong implications. Better to not sign on the dotted line unless you are a hardcore believer in the ideology. I’ve met several young men who DORed in Basic because of the “touchy-feely” training.
From many reports, it seems unlikely that the current leadership climate is likely to command the souls of the type of men and women who enlisted just 20 years ago.
@Tony W:
When we changed the law so that 1) those who had successfully served 20 years were considered presumptively fit and 2) VA benefits were paid on top of retirement rather than offset dollar for dollar, we essentially incentivized mass fraud. People spend 20-30 years hiding weaknesses and then suddenly become cripples when they start the retirement process.
I’m all for giving people who were injured in the line of duty or whose knees and back were wrecked by humping 150-pound rucks while jumping out of airplanes for a living compensation. But we’re basically declaring people with the normal wear and tear of people in their 40s “disabled” even though they’re doing office work, not working a construction job.
Of course, if there is a real worry about having a competent pool of fighters in the event of a real war, there should be support for not only widespread ownership of AR type weapons for familiarity which would transfer to select fire weapons of DoD, but also subsidized ammunition and gun range memberships for practice. Paintball groups could be supported that trained to tactics.
All, incompatible with the desire to disarm the American public.
@James Joyner: It’s true – to an extent. The people I’m familiar with have bodies broken far beyond what a normal 38-year-old would experience unless they worked in an oil field.
Alas, if they don’t hide their injuries they will be kicked out at 15-17 years with broken bodies, and never get a dime of retirement pay. So the injuries get worse, untreated, because people are trying to survive to retirement.
The broken body situation might well be different for commissioned officers than it is for NCOs though.
@JKB:
Show us a single instance of this happening.
I dont know how they get around solving the spouse issue. It’s hard enough sometimes to find a place to live where both spouses can have a decent job. Then add in moving, child care, no relatives around etc. I think they need to relax the weight measures and the history of drug use should be addressed. As you noted you can get people into shape. A lot fo jobs dont require great conditioning anyway. Unless they were selling pot by the ton they shouldn’t be kept out. Actually, maybe they would be useful for the logistics folks.
Steve
@JKB:
Fat old fucks in MAGA hats who stockpile AR’s for the ‘coming race war’ are not in any way, shape or form, capable of useful service.
Prove that there is no real risk of this happening over the next 4-6 years of an enlistment. You make choices based on risk in the future, not the past.
@JKB:
Moron.
“Prove that my paranoid fantasy will never happen.”
Fukkin idiot. Go away.
DoD tweet at 7:49 pm Jul 2, 2023
A perfectly fine thing to celebrate but it does inform those who might join as to the priorities of today’s Department of Defense. Anyone not fully onboard with such should not be looking to join. Presumably, thousands of service recruiters released a collective groan when they saw this. That’s the marketing that is happening.
None of this is new, part of it is cyclical, but some of the more fundamental things have worsened.
In particular, are military spouses and the constant moves which make it difficult to impossible for a spouse to have a career. My wife and I experienced this, and we know many people who quit military service because it wasn’t compatible with modern dual-income families. The services have played with various forms of “homesteading” to allow fewer PCS moves and more stability, but they’ve all failed because so much depends on that PCS cycle.
Like much of the federal government, the military bureaucracy is still living in the 1940’s and 1950’s. We need a new, more radical Goldwater-Nichols level of reforms, which we will not get from Congress.
The reserves and guard have been transformed from a strategic to an operational reserve. Ironically, many people get off active duty and enter the guard/reserve for family stability reasons. That’s what I ended up doing while my wife remained on active duty.
All the problems described aren’t helped by partisan political dysfunction and incoherence when it comes to the military and military policy. Democrats and especially Republians don’t have a coherent vision for the US military, much less transforming it from the status quo.
Finally, even if peacetime conscription was remotely possible politically, it’s a bad policy for a whole host of reasons. It’s one of those ideas that sound good in theory with rosy assumptions – but the reality is much different. And, contrary to conventional wisdom, a draft does not make politicians less likely to engage in wars of choice – rather the opposite. The Vietnam war, for example, was only possible thanks to the draft. Had their been an AVF, political leaders would have had to make a strategic choice between holding the line against communism in Europe and Korea and fighting in Vietnam. The draft allowed the Johnson administration to do both.
The inability to raise force levels in the 2000’s similarly forced strategic choices that policymakers would not have had to make with conscription.
Conscription is something that is necessary to plan for in the even of an existential war, but it is not a good tool for peacetime, nor is it appropriate as a tool for social engineering, which is folly IMO.
I retired out of the Air Force in 2000. Worked for the AF in various capacities for another 22 years. Raised 3 kids, now grown but later in the career so they never moved much. Probably not the stereotypical military family.
I’ve gently suggested the military as a career but they never really considered it. The youngest is applying to PT school and suggested he explore the military as a way to pay for it. No go.
Even back in the 199os and 2000s, in the AF at least, wives were already in the workforce, and the social scene on stateside bases were rapidly declining.
Another sign of the times. A couple of years ago, a married officer couple I worked with were looking at their careers and determined that the wife had greater promotion potential so he got out, became the primary caregiver for their two kids and eventually got a job as a civilian.
A lot of change has occurred in the last 40 years I’ve been involved in the military. I think the rest of the US believes that what they see on TV and the movies is the reality. And that will keep us from moving forward.
@JKB:
Depression and suicidal thoughts are not good for fighting form, right? I would think making sure that those involved in the war effort are mentally fit for duty is among the highest of priorities for the military.
And since when does anyone need to be “on-board” with someone else’s personal decision to express their identity that has zero effect on them?
@Michael Reynolds: Not fair! If the Supremes are going to rule on hypotheticals, he should be able to argue them here.
[…]
Sorry, but I see no particular cognitive dissonance with the Western, “civilized” nation that was among the last to outlaw slavery and, even in the wake of emancipation, created sharecropping, literacy tests and poll taxes, and the Klan to address the loss of chattel slavery as best it could deciding to also create a “serving caste.” What else are the betters to do? Go to war themselves?
Well, yes.
[Should this comment have had a CRT TRIGGER WARNING!!!!!!? Am I getting sloppy on providing this key service to readers?]
@Michael Reynolds:
How much cannon fodder does the Army need?
@Andy: Not in the military, didn’t get drafted, so I have no idea and am asking simply out of curiosity. How much of PCS in the modern military is a function of a specific tangible need and how much is “we’ve always done it this way?” The equivalent function–though not a close comparison by any means– is shift rotation in some civilian industries. My inner Marxist has always thought that rotating shifts are as much about the ability of management to force conditions onto labor as it is about putative “fairness,” but I also was fortunate enough to not have to accept rotating shift work until I moved to teaching–where as an adjunct, I needed to work 16 hours a day to make roughly half of what a tenured teacher made.
@JKB:
Anyone who thinks one tweet about one transgender servicemember encapsulates the “priorities” of the Defense Department is a stupid idiot who should not be looking to join voluntarily.
Anyone who has a meltdown over one tweet about one transgender servicemember is a stupid idiot + too mentally weak and fragile to serve as any other cannon fodder drafted in wartime. Shades of modern “conservatives” tantruming over Bud Light sponsoring *one* Instagram post by one trans person. Pathetic crybabies.
To the non-idiots: a few years of “national service” would not necessarily mean military service, right? I doubt a country that sees a $10,000 student loan writeoff as too costly is ready to pay its young people enough to make this viable, though.
@Tony W:
Oh the need is there, but the challenge is in organizing and managing the projects.
@Just nutha ignint crackerd:
I’d estimate it’s a bit if both. The PCS system does have real advantages but the trade offs are much larger and more relevant today than they used to be. And so many systems in the military are premised on a PCS cycle from evaluations, to promotions, housing, deployments, etc. That’s why it would be very difficult to change, because you’d have to change a lot of other stuff too.
Here’s a similar article straight off army.mil from June 28
The problem is that today the high school grad has had 12 long years of “America bad”, patriotism evil and masculinity is toxic. Oops.
@JKB: Yet it wasn’t “today’s high schoolers” who launched a toxic, unpatriotic terror attack on January 6th 2021 to destroy our democratic republic and assassinate politicians based on hate and disinformation. Oops.
The problem is that unlike our grandparents and great-grandparents who understood that their personal prejudices and bigotries had to take a backseat to saving Western democracy from fascism, the modern right is comprised of mentally-weak, insufferably-stupid, easily-manipulated beta males who 1) lie constantly and 2) hate the queers and the blacks more than they love America.
@DK:
That’s pretty much what I said. If you are potential recruit, you look at what the Army is prioritizing and decide if you want to sign up for that. Knowing that you are obligated for the best years of your young life, if we believe the college fetish hype. Maybe you go become an electrician instead.
But now, we see the rumblings of a return to the slave army since too many are exercising free choice against enlisting
@JKB:
That’s not what you said. You misidentified the Defense Department’s priorities based on one tweet that triggered your feeble-minded bigotries, because your brain has been broken by dumb Fox News outrage-bait you aren’t smart enough or decent enough to reject.
If childish hysteria over “wokeness” and a transgender tweet are indeed why many are declining to sign up, you have inadvertently identified yet another way Rush Limbaugh, Rupert Murdoch and their acolytes have weakened our national security and Western democracy with their nonstop lies and fearmongering hate.
@JKB: Priorities like helping service members battle depression and suicidal thoughts?
What’s wrong with that? These problems are actually pretty common in the military.
Or do you just hate servicemembers?
@JKB:
So your theory is that we can either have an army, or we can turn the clock back to a time when gays and trans were closeted and women knew their place. Because only under those circumstances can manly men be manly men.
I wonder how the real soldiers and vets here feel about your insulting and belittling view of American soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines. Because the lifer soldier who is my father is a kind, decent, gentle man who has never needed to step on anyone’s neck to feel like a man, or to earn a bronze star during two tours in Vietnam.
Do you understand that you’re broadcasting your own insecurity and weakness? Do you understand that real men laugh at poseurs like you?
@Michael Reynolds: I have always felt like for those who believe being gay is a “choice” – it is.
That’s why they are so surprised/outraged when they learn that they were born that way and have to fight it every day in order to remain in their social circles.
Just to drop this bit of chum in the shark tank:
European countries are split between those that don’t (the majority) and do conscript.
IIRC those that still do include Finland, Greece, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Austria, Switzerland, Norway, Denmark, Sweden (recently reintroduced), Netherlands, Spain and Portugal (but those last three only nominally).
Poland and Romania are both considering reintroducing conscription.
A bit of a difference was that most European versions work on the basis of universality . Conscientious objectors can get alternative, but there’s never been a lottery system, as far as I’m aware.
@JKB:
I recommend you read actual thoughts about military service from actual veterans.
One good source is the memoirs of Gen. William T. Sherman, particularly this part found in Vol II, pg 387:
“…whoever has commanded an army in the field knows the difference between a willing, contented mass of men, and one that feels a cause of grievance. There is a soul to an army as well as to the individual man, and no general can accomplish the full work of his army unless he commands the soul of his men, as well as their bodies and legs.”
You’re welcome.
@Michael Reynolds: @DK: @Michael Reynolds: I do think JKB is adjacent to a point. Like it or not, the Army, in particular, recruits disproportionately from the Trump-voting, Fox-watching parts of the country. We’re probably running off more folks who are uncomfortable with LGBTQ folks than we are replacing with gays and transwomen.
I don’t know what the hell to do about that, though. The latter have a right to serve and, by extension, a right to serve without harassment and intolerance. But it’s a problem—just as the transition to a desegregated force was. It took years, if not decades, for that to be (largely) a non-issue.
@Michael Reynolds:
I asked upthread about the armies of our potential adversaries because I recall vividly how they were portrayed during the Cold War, and how that portrayal was largely a myth.
The American army in the post-Vietnam era was portrayed as a bunch of effeminate pot-smoking slackers, while the Red Army was a fearsome juggernaut of hardened disciplined warriors poised to roll across Europe in an unstoppable wave.
We see echoes of that today with the dude-bro crushes on Putin and the videos of barechested Russian soldiers
performing Village People dance routines, or Chinese children breaking down and reassembling an AK-47 in seconds.None of the “American weakness” arguments ever seem to account for actual performance, like how the Red Army was frustrated in Afghanistan, or ground to a stalemate in Ukraine.
@James Joyner:
To re-purpose Jefferson, if I have to choose between, an army without human rights, or human rights without an army, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.
The core function of the military is to preserve the rights and freedoms of the American people. However those rights are defined. A military not able to handle that task as instructed by its chain of command, is not an army but a rabble.
I’ve written here many times that I saw a crisis of masculinity coming long ago, and thought it would become a major problem. But the solution will not be to diminish the very rights the military is intended to preserve. Men are going to have to find a way to define themselves without turning back time. We live in the future, not the past, no matter how many weak-ass pseudo-macho troglodytes want to drag us back.
@James Joyner:
Be glad that we are reducing the number of bigots who are well-trained with weapons of war? Rejoice that they are not trying to recruit other soldiers into their far right ideology of hate? Cheer the decline of Christian Nationalists in our armed forces?
Timothy McVeigh was in the military. If having to serve with LGBTQIA+ folks would have caused him to screen himself out, I’m ok with that.
(He’s the highest profile example of Christian Nationalism in the armed forces coming back to cause problems, but there are lots of others)
@Michael Reynolds:
Like most online folks JKB really has no real experience and no idea about the military. I’ve made it my policy not to respond to the ignorant and the lame because it is a waste of time.
BTW, I am a fourth generation member of the military. Two British army (one a lifer) and two American (one a lifer-me).
@Chip Daniels:
It’s the old conundrum of bigots claiming both superiority, and an inexplicable helplessness in the face of their inferiors. See: Jews. See: Blacks. See: women. See: gays. See: trans. Inferior people seem always on the verge of entirely dominating their betters. Sort of like how the New York Yankees live in fear of being dominated by the Toledo Mudhens.
The US military in WW2 was belittled by adversaries as being all about the masses of gear. But when you look at Guadalcanal, to pick just one example, the American military was pretty damn good at the one-on-one, bayonets and grenades level, too. The Nazis thought we were effete, so did the Japanese, so did the North Koreans and the Chinese, so did the Vietnamese, so did the Taliban, and Saddam Hussein of all people.
Yet here we are today as the world’s only superpower, with a military that would quite clearly go through the Russians like a hot knife through butter.
@James Joyner:
I would have to see some real numbers and analysis of this assumption. Because my experience living in Texas is that the current generation (the people we’re recruiting) are far more tolerant of all cultures than their parents. Despite the daily propaganda thrown at them.
I share many of your takes in this article, James, but I have to disagree on this one. The obesity epidemic is not reversible by early morning calisthenics, and you would not gain enough additional recruits to notice if you only reduce the standards by an amount that is simply a case of not yet being in shape. The shameful fact is that a huge portion of the population that ought to be the primary market for military recruiting — namely, the people with no better way out of welfare poverty — are being poisoned from birth by the diet their parents can get access to and afford to feed them. The cure for that is not politically feasible at this time, if it ever will be again.
If the concern is about trying to do more with less maybe we… try to do less.
@Chip Daniels:
Back in 1980, when I was going through Officer Training School, we received a classified briefing entitled something like: “So You Think This Soldier is Ten Feet Tall”. About the Soviet military. The Americans knew the Soviets had deep weaknesses, similar to what we are seeing today. But publicly, the American people were told to fear them. I always remember that.
Another thing I remember from the 80s, was that the pot smoking, unionized Dutch armed forces regularly won the NATO competitions. They were thought to be tough and creative.
@James Joyner:
It’s not just the LGBTQ issue, but also the forced vaccination. As you remarked then, members were under orders. But if you don’t want to risk being forced to take an experimental drug, then don’t sign up. Similarly, 20 years ago, many learned that they could be held on active duty, unilaterally.
Do your duty or resign, or don’t sign up in the first place.
These incidents have made traditional recruiting pools to stop and think if they want to be under such rules.
It’s similar with the transathletes in women’s sports. If the “old fashioned” women just stop showing up for the competitions, the NCAA, and other governing bodies will fix the issue since it will start costing the old people who run these organizations money.
@JKB:
This is literally your dumbest take ever. The military vaccinates everyone. If you can’t prove you were vaccinated as a kid, guess what, you’re getting ALLLLL of those vaccines again. It’s seriously stupid to complain about this. At all.
@Jen:
You seem confused. James wrote many articles on the service members who refused the mandatory COVID vaccine. Here’s one the military’s rushing denials of exemptions.
Such behavior did not go unnoticed among those in the traditional pools of recruits.
@Andy: I’m not suggesting that it even can be changed–and certainly Congressional action being a requirement makes change unlikely. I was only curious. Thanks.
@Michael Reynolds: I am the guy who signed up ( and would again ) to volunteer my talents to destroying the enemies of the United States. I had one simple litmus test for my fellow brothers/sisters in Arms: ‘are you down to fuck up the Adversary?’ If yes, I don’t need to know anymore. I’ve help kill Terrorists shitheads with liberal and conservative whites, Asians, rednecks, Ls, Gs, Bs, Ts and Qs. Very few people serving care and the ones that do leave the military.
I have nothing but disdain for people that characterize the military as woke. The modern military has no use for people that can’t play nice with others and those using the dog whistle ‘woke’ are nothing but sociopathic fools who have no desire to coexist with others.
Screw ’em
@JKB: Wow! Three comments in one day. All equally simplistic and facile, but when I was teaching, getting students to say more* things–regardless of content–was a step in the right direction. So, good job!
*More is a constant in teaching. More reading is always better than less. More computation, more writing, more opining in class, all the same principle. Education is labor intensive more than anything else.
@JKB: I’m not confused. My father graduated from West Point and was in the military for a number of years before joining the government. We lived abroad and even *I* have a vaccination record that is multiple books stapled together.
Mandatory vaccinations against illness are a force readiness issue. You can’t have a highly contagious illness ripping through your troops and be ready to respond if needed. The military should vaccinate everyone and kick out anyone who turns them down.
I read James’s earlier posts. There’s absolutely nothing that will convince me that having a bunch of Fox-News-watching feckless MAGA troops whining about having to get vaccinated is a good thing for our military.
@JKB:
No, it isn’t even close enough to wave at it across the horizon. But 4 comments in one day shows promise. Next step, listening to what your actual words mean–in terms of what the audience hears rather than what you think you said–and listening to what they actually reply as opposed to what you’d like to construe.
@JohnSF: Again as I said to Andy earlier, wasn’t in the military, have no expertise, just curious: is there also a correlation between the types of service conscripts do for their countries and things that we can’t manage in the US because they’re “too expensive/not cost effective?”
@Jen:
The matter under discussion is why the services are falling short in recruitment. If you don’t want Fox-watching, MAGA whatever service members, then you’ll need to find another pool to draw recruits from.
My argument is there are several issues that are causing those in the traditional pool of recruits to be reluctant to join. And that has the same solution, find another pool of recruits.
A Draft would only bring in many of these people you say the military is better off without, only they’ll be pissed at being pressed into service against their choice when there is no existential threat to the nation, just foreign policy ideas.
@DrDaveT: Indeed!
@James Joyner:
Who is “we” here?
As I said, the point that you and JKB are making is that the bigotry, lies, and hatred peddled by Trump and Fox News is running them off. I’m not part of that “we.”
If the desegregation of the military ran white racists out of the military, it wasn’t blacks that ran them out of the military. It was their own hatred, amorality, and lack of patriotism that ran them out. No matter how much many don’t like holding the Keconomic Kanxiety Kult accountable for their own lack of decency and morals.
They’re still plenty of racists of all backgrounds in the military. Some are in my own family. It’s (largely) a non-issue because we refuse to cater to them: they were told to suck it up and do your job or get out and give up the paycheck and the benefits.
Guess what? They took the check and benefited. That’s how to deal with the beta boys who can’t handle a tweet about a transgender servicemember: raise military pay and benefits. And If you’re too stupid, hateful, and weak to handle that, you can’t serve and you don’t get the goodies. Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.
Maybe they can go join Putin’s failing, laughingstock non-woke military instead. Lord knows Russia needs the help.
@JKB:
We had ships stuck in port because too many sailors had Covid.
All you are showing is that the people who spread lies about the vaccine hurt our military.
And, in fact, the antivax lies have been pushed by Russian social media operations. Not that we don’t have a homegrown group of lunatics also spouting that vaccines cause magnetism.
@JKB: For the life of me I cannot understand why, but I am going to try one more time.
Do you realize that what you are proposing, specifically as it relates to willingness to be vaccinated, is simply trading one form of lack of readiness (not having enough recruits) for another, probably more damaging form of lack of readiness (troops who would be felled by a virus, and as a bonus have demonstrated they aren’t interested in following direct orders by commanding officers)?
@JKB:
Or have a smaller military.
People always seem to forget that option — our military doesn’t have to be as large as it is.
I’m talking, of course, about opening enlistment opportunities for people experiencing dwarfism. I suppose we could also have fewer people in the military.
A large military encourages military solutions when diplomatic solutions are still open. And having to depend on allies, at least a little bit, could reign in some of the worst American imperialism.
We’re doing pretty good wiping out the Russian military with no soldiers, after all.
@Gustopher:
These extremist faketriots don’t care about our national security.
@James Joyner:
The aren’t enough LGBTQ people, much less enough that are interested in military service. The bigger issue is attracting a representative cross section of American society, especially socially liberal people who have historically been more skeptical of military service. The current trend of zero-sum social politics and political sorting is almost certainly not helping. On one hand, there may be some on the conservative side who, as JKB alleges, are less willing to join because of (IMO wrong) perceptions about “wokeness” while on the liberal side there is still this perception – as evidenced by some of the comments in this thread – that the military is a breeding ground for extremists (also, IMO, a wrong perception).
I’m concerned the military won’t be able to attract that cross-section of America if it gets drug further into the culture wars.
@Michael Reynolds:
I think that is entirely incorrect. The military is for fighting foreign enemies. As Jim Brown 32 notes, the purpose is to kill and destroy American’s foreign enemies.
You do not want the military significantly involved in domestic political questions about rights, much less the guarantor of them. Once you grant the military the responsibility for preserving domestic rights and freedoms then you’ve turned it into a powerful domestic political actor and we have plenty of examples in other countries for how well that works out.
@JKB:
Heh. All you current and former members of the party that (nominally) subscribes to free market capitalism, yet y’all oblivious to an obvious solution: money.
The military as an employer faces in part a similar recruiting problem private sector employers face. The jig is up with Gen Z and the youngest millennials, who aren’t interested in working tough jobs for the 2023 equivalent of slave wages — and good for them.
Start throwing cash (real cash, not corporate crumbs) at recruits along with actual financial incentives. And watch how those deeply-held concerns about vaccines and wokeness melt away.
My Florida Man brother had all sorts of hangups about serving…until my disabled vet dad and Pentagon-connected aunt promised they get the military to build my brother a house if he served under X, Y, Z conditions. Did my brother enjoy his time in the service? No. Did he like everyone he served with? No. But he loves that nice big custom 4-bedroom house our tax dollars paid for.
Money talks, bs walks. But as I already said, a country that can’t even stomach giving some of its youth a measly $10,000 loan write-off is not ready to set the remuneration levels necessary to recruit the best and brightest. We ain’t serious.
@JKB: You. are. an. idiot.
To think a group of paintball warriors with an AR-15 would last anymore than 5 minutes against a squad of trained infantry only goes to show how infantile your thinking is.
@JKB: Fortunately, capitalist economic policies will bring the recruits from Red States. No worries.
@DK:
The military doesn’t build anyone a house as a benefit if service.
What you get access to (for honorable service) is a VA loan that allow veterans to buy homes with no down payment. This benefit is in the form of a loan guarantee, not payments to veterans and certainly not to pay for a house.
@DK:
Speaking of money talking, one can get those loans paid off (and a lot more than $10k) by joining the military.
@Andy:
You know what? You’re right. That is a much clearer and more accurate framing.
@Michael Reynolds:
Thanks Michael, I appreciate you saying that.
@Andy:
As a former dependent I was getting ready to be a little resentful. There was seldom available base housing and when there was. . . oy. Mostly it was garden apartments with stairwells smelling of piss.
@Gustopher: Yeah the fewer white supremacists joining the military to prepare for the “coming race war” the better….
@Scott: I was amazed when I moved to Texas and saw gay people being open about being gay (I didn’t move to a major city). I came from a very rural northern state where such things weren’t allowed. You had to hide such feelings until you moved out of town. Meanwhile the people still left in the ever shrinking town continue to complain that no one wants to stay…
@Andy:
Hehe. It’s amusing that someone who called for me exercise restraint here continues to demonstrate a near-pathological obsession with disagreeing with me, typically with overly-confident assertions (from limited information) that are imprecise.
I won’t go into too many details to protect my brother’s privacy, except to say that he was obliged to leave the service with 100% disability — as more than a few predicted he would for reasons that will also remain private — for various conditions and is no longer on active duty.
The VA offers different housing grants — not loans, but grants — to such veterans. Some of these grants can be combined and specifically used to add-onto or build a home, which is exactly what my brother did with an additional assist from his generous monthly disability check from the military.
No, I didn’t make it up. And I’m guessing details about these grants are easily findable with a simple Google search, negating our apparent need to argue for no good reason lol
@Michael Reynolds:
Military housing has improved from that in most places, but it is still seldom available in many places.
The government privatized and contracted most base housing a decade or two ago which has had mixed results. The benefit is fewer 1950’s era structures that smell like piss, the downside is the contractor as middleman.
@DK:
First this:
Well, that makes things much clearer. I now understand exactly what you are talking about. When you said “until my disabled vet dad and Pentagon-connected aunt promised they get the military to build my brother a house if he served under X, Y, Z conditions” that indicated to me the military (not the VA) offered a house for serving under specific conditions, such as length of service, AFSC/MOS, etc. I did not realize you were actually speaking about the disability grant programs mentioned in your second comment. So I think it’s reasonable to chalk this up to a simple misunderstanding.
Secondly,
I disagree with a lot of people here. I have a reputation as a contrarian, which I admit is probably annoying for some. The idea that I’m in any way obsessed with you or obsessed with disagreeing with you is not accurate – especially considering there are several times when I’ve agreed with you here. And there are also many times I don’t agree with you (and other commenters) but don’t bother to respond. And obviously, you don’t know when that happens.
So you are not at all special in terms of my engagement on this blog, which goes back almost two decades at this point, long before you arrived here. You can ask any long-time regulars here about my bona fides if you won’t take my word for it.
It’s been a while since i have been in the service, longer than Scott or Andy, but I think some things dont change that much. There have always been social issues of some sort that the military pushes, either service wide, something your base commander pushes or your unit commander. So when i was enlisted there was a big push to find gays and get them booted out. I still remember some of the things were supposed to look for. High achievers who weren’t married who volunteered to pick up extra weekend work if needed. (I wondered why we would want to get rid of people like that.)
So it turned out that 2 of our young nurses were living together and everyone knew they were gay but no one cared. They also happened to be our best nurses and good people so all of us enlisted guys decided we were ignoring the push. Which is all a long way to say for those in the service we by and large knew how to ignore the kind of stuff and working with good people and supporting each other mattered more than anything else. The gay nurses were going to help us save lives. I have a bunch of vets working for me and some folks still in the reserves. When I talk with them about this kind of stuff they say it hasn’t changed.
So for people already serving I dont think it’s mostly that big of a deal, though there are always a few. I do think James may have it right and at the margins it may affect recruiting since some people are probably reading the stuff about being woke and believing it, but spousal issues are a bigger concern.
Steve
Rather timely. The book, Jarhead, is being banned by @JKB’s anti-woke pals.
You were saying, @JKB?:
@Michael Reynolds:
JFC the stupidity of that.
@OzarkHillbilly: True story, I went to a friend’s wedding in rural Maryland. He wanted to play paintball before the night festivities to, err, benefit single mothers and women paying their way through college.
They broke us up into 2-man teams. The field of play was a few acres…lightly wooded with some wooden structures sprinkled in for additional cover and basing.
The first game I got shot in the face but I was just kinda screwing around. As we took a breather before the next round, I learned I was smoked by the top player at that facility. He was a smug little hillbilly shit.
As the next round began, I told my friend to follow my lead: Using simple 2-man maneuvers I learned in pre-deployment training (basically drive thru quality tactics they hope non-shooters never have to use) we smoked about 5 pairs before the round ended. And yes, it was I who meeted payback on our smug hillbilly little shit. Right in the visor.
Those guys had never encountered anything like that before…and they “played” Army all the time. Cos-players do not understand–that the Soldier is the weapon. The rifle is merely a tool.
@Michael Reynolds: @Andy:
I’m curious what these people think happens during a war.
Swafford says the part of the book most often denounced is the “field fuck” scene. One line made me laugh.
Hasn’t Sesame Street been under the microscope at some point recently?
Anyway, these people don’t seem to want to exist in the world. They claim to love patriots and America and the flag and whatever but it’s only some fantasy notion of them. I can’t even call their view of those things idealized, because it’s not even that. It’s utopia, the dictionary definition of the word, not the literary genre. The latter would require description and they can’t muster that.
Slogans signifying nothing.
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
Absolutely no idea! Either what other things Europeans may do with national service folks, or what you cannot afford.
🙂
UK dropped conscription back in 1960; little chance of it coming back at present.
What is interesting if you look at Europe is that the pattern seems to be the Scandinavian/Nordic social democracies and the neutrals are most inclined to conscription.
@JKB: “Prove that there is no real risk of this happening over the next 4-6 years of an enlistment. You make choices based on risk in the future, not the past.”
So, no.
@JKB: “It’s not just the LGBTQ issue, but also the forced vaccination.”
Considering how many shots one gets, this is rich.
Also, the COVID vaccine is a deliberately created issue by the GOP.
@Michael Reynolds:
My respect for posting that sir. And this is why, while arguing/debating with you sometimes annoys the hell out of me, I’ll continue to do it. Because you read and think about things from time to time.
🙂
@JKB: So I’m supposed to believe that someone who refuses to take a vaccine that has been proven safe is somehow going to follow orders that will likely result in their death.. Charge the machine gun nest? sure! Take a proven safe drug to ensure the readiness of the military? NOOO I”M SCAREDD MOMMMYYY!!11
It’s so stupid..