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.
