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“It made sense for the United States to transition from this mixed force of conscripts and professionals to an All-Volunteer Force. It has enabled us to develop a truly professionalized force. It's a professionalized force that's a lot smaller than what we saw during the draft era. And the implications of that is that it can detach the military from society or society's understanding of the military.”
That was Katherine Kuzminski, director of studies at the Center for New American Security, speaking last Wednesday at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) as one of the editors of the book, Bend But Do Not Break: Shaping the Future of the All-Volunteer Force.
Appearing with Kuzminski in what became a wide-ranging discussion of the military and All-Volunteer Force were co-editors Jason Dempsey, a former US Army Infantry Officer who's with the Center for Veteran Transition and Integration at Columbia University, and Jaron S. Wharton, a career infantry officer who recently commanded a brigade in the U.S. Army's 82nd Airborne Division and is currently a visiting fellow at CSIS. Moderating the panel was Eliot Cohen, Arleigh Burke Chair in Strategy at CSIS and former Counselor of the Department of State.
Early in the conversation, Kuzminski pointed out that while “the shift to an All-Volunteer Force, which would enable a more professional force, there was ‘a caveat,’” It was “supported by a standby draft. So the draft is actually still on the books. It would require Congress and the President to pull that trigger, should we need it.”
Wharton picked up on that saying, “The All-Volunteer Force’s success or continued success is not a foregone conclusion. It requires a lot of maintenance and sustainment. And because it's been so long since we've enacted that draft, it's not in people's [minds]…And so that almost makes it a relic. And that's a muscle that we can't allow to atrophy, especially in the worst contingency, if you might believe, for example, that we're on the verge at some time in our future of a large-scale combat operation, that would dwarf the absorptive capacity of the All-Volunteer Force.”
Wharton went on to point out “Most problematic with the public's understanding is the very term All-Volunteer Force because this is not a gang of volunteers. Everybody is paid. And so it's interesting that you know when we started out there were economic concerns…and they were largely couched around individual freedom…people should not be forced to do something they don't want to do.”
Dempsey added, “What the public misses now is this [the All-Volunteer Force] is a costly enterprise and nobody is serving for free. Nobody is a true volunteer and so if we actually start peeling back and interrogating those costs I think we come to a better understanding on the strength, resilience, or fragility of the system.”
Dempsey went on to point out a major change the All-Volunteer Force has created.
“The black population saved the All-Volunteer Force,” Dempsey said explaining, “When, you know, it turned out that they relying on young white males to fill the conscription [draft] Army. And then once that went away, the folks who looked at the opportunities and the economic incentives present in the military, and the ones that started flocking to it, were young blacks, and a lot of black women.”
He added, “You know, it's ironic that much of our enlisted ranks for over 20 years were dominated by senior black women in leadership positions, because it was all part of that cohort from late 70s, early 80s who saw a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for economic mobility.”
At that point Moderator Cohen noted, “What about immigrants? I'll tell you one of the things I remember during the Iraq war. I was over there on a fairly regular basis going to a naturalization ceremony in one of Saddam Hussein's gaudy palaces. But it was an amazing and deeply moving sight just how many men and women in uniform, who had not been citizens, were becoming citizens in the middle of a combat tour.”
To which Dempsey described enlisting immigrant volunteers as “Hugely important and we've seen massive growth of the Hispanic population over the last 15 years in the military.”
At one point, Wharton noted, “Women in the military were once capped at 2%...If you had a female service member that was married to a civilian male, that female service member wouldn't get a full housing allowance with dependents. That's actually not that long ago, if you can believe that. And over time that 2% cap has grown to we're about 17% [women] in the aggregate.”
He added, “What wasn't anticipated is not just the family dynamic, but the role, the prominence of women. So let me be clear, women have saved quantitatively and qualitatively the All-Volunteer Force. This experiment would not be sustainable without them in our ranks.”
There also was extensive discussion of the impact on deployments thanks to the All-Volunteer Force.
Kuzminski said, “I don't think that in 1973 [when transition to the All-Volunteer Force took place] they were thinking about the impact of the size of the Reserve component and the competition for talent among the Active Duty and the Reserve. The Reserve component was orders of magnitude larger with more relevant recent military experience back at the transition…So we had a more sustainable kind of backbench of folks that we could tap into should we need to.”
She said, a cultural change was needed because before 1973, “It was easy for the Active component to say, ‘Oh, our little brother, the National Guard, or you know, the Reserve component isn't at the same level as us.’”
The change took place as Kuzminski explained, “We certainly saw a heavy deployment and a use of the operational Reserve in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, both for the Reserve component and for the National Guard. But when we look at our recently retired or inactive Reserve it's much smaller than what we had in the past. And that is kind of the first line of defense should we have a truly existential crisis.”
That led to what Kuzminski described as, “We've had to bend the rules sometimes or bend this construction of a truly All-Volunteer Force to have elements of compulsory service that is separate from how the broader society is thinking about deployment.”
In a way, she said, “We had compulsory service. It just looked a little different. So, the Army shifted from 12-month deployments to 15-month deployments while people were downrange. The recall of the Retired Reserve was implemented…They thought they were, you know, completing their contract and turns out that they weren't.”
Wharton raised the question about “a [future military] conflict that would require some sort of mobilization of broader society, and over time we've seen that that actually hasn't been the case. Now, would that be the case if we were fighting a near peer? I think that forces potentially an entirely set of different conclusions. But when you're fighting someone that is not a near peer, you can rely, at least we've proven that you can rely with some policy changes on the margins, the All-Volunteer Force to sustain that.”
Dempsey, referring to the current concerns caused by the Iran War, said, “We constantly look at the defense industrial base and everybody wants to talk about how many shells we can produce, you know, how many interceptors we make. And I think we really need to spend some time on the human dimension of all this, because one of the things that those of us who study this constantly talk about are two factors uh, eligibility and propensity.”
“The All-Volunteer Force, as currently built, requires a very educated force, a very disciplined force and folks that kind of want to be there,” Dempsey said, adding “And so in terms of eligibility, we know that because of rising obesity rates, drug use, lack of educational attainment, we're down in the 20s [percentage of males who qualify for military service]…We, most Americans, aren't even eligible to join the military.”
Dempsey continued, “So among those who say yes, I want to join,…you have a very, very, small subset of Americans who are willing and able to serve.” That led, he said, “at the height of Iraq and Afghanistan was a lowering of standards, waivers. And I will tell you having been in an operational unit at that time, you know, your waivers always account for your biggest disciplinary problems.”
Although the military services say they are filling their new enlistee quotas this year, Dempsey asked, “How are we going to restructure this force to accommodate people who maybe don't have the educational attainment, maybe are slightly overweight unfit, and what incentives we have to give them?...Short of a draft, how much money would we have to throw at the American public and our youth just to get a small bump in a short period of time.”
Dempsey went on to talk about “If the military is the most trusted institution, let's just make everybody join the military or let's do National Service, or all these things that somehow we can extrapolate from the military to solve all the rest of these societal ills.” To which he responded that “is not the military's mission, right? We're not a character-building summer camp for wayward youth, right? Our mission is to fight and win wars. And so people lose that and want to use the military for all these other things.”
Wharton brought up talk about “this growing warrior caste,” about which he said, “It is 100% real…I'm blanking on the data point at the moment, but there is a greater [number] than you would expect…In part that's because youth growing up in a military family are exposed to opportunities. It is not that different from families of doctors, families of firefighters.”
But Wharton went on to say, “We should be leery if there happens to be a nuance in this data where you start to see a veteran [military] population -- and there has been some evidence of this -- where they don't support necessarily their children going. Or they don't want them to [join], but once they go in they do choose to support them and there has been some evidence. Please correct me if I'm wrong that that is actually starting to be the case.”
Looking to the future, Kuzminski said, “I think it takes understanding the population that we're actually trying to recruit, versus those who are in service right now, and sticking to what would incentivize them.”
She noted the recruitment problems with Gen Z “who you know now are actually towards the upper end [of their time in military service]” and “now we're thinking about Gen Alpha who is coming up behind them.”
“When we think about what has motivated their [Gen Alpha] career decisions,” Kuzminski said, “it's been a desire to be mission-focused in the work, whatever it is that they do. It’s a desire to have multiple jobs over the course of a career” She then pointed out, “Over the course of a 40-year career in the military, you live in multiple different places, have multiple different roles, you grow through the organization. When the military is functioning at its highest ideal good, it is a mission focused organization that does look different from the rest of society. I think we just need to find a way to match the reality of that military service with what it is that those we're trying to recruit are looking for.”
On the future, Dempsey said, “Right now we're very, very, comfortable both as a nation and as a military where whenever there's a issue just throw more money at it. And right now we're able to throw $1.5 trillion at our military. I'm not sure that's sustainable, and so I'm not sure how long we can keep putting off some of these third-rail hard conversations about what real structural reform means” when it comes for the All-Volunteer Force.
Wharton said of the future, “I'm optimistic absent, with a heavy caveat, of an existential crisis because that fundamentally changes the game…This [the All-Volunteer Force] is an enormous cost to maintain, this experiment, and it requires change on the margins.”
One thing is clear, the All-Volunteer Force, the National Guards and Reserves need further study, along with some understanding of who in the future will be willing to undertake U.S. military service. Or does the U.S. need to return to a draft?
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