Is the All-Volunteer US Military in Crisis?

I think not. Three reasons the sky isn't falling.

Credit: The Atlantic

Seems we’re coming around to that season again, which we do with depressing regularity, wherein various narratives about the US military’s All-Volunteer Force (AVF) are wheeled out from short-term storage and paraded in the popular media. The purpose of these narratives is to stir alarm about whether America’s fighting forces are at risk should it find itself in a major kerfuffle. They are typically injected into popular consciousness by parties with a vested interest in continued and expanded investment in what already stands as history’s most massive and formidable military force.

This latest iteration of hand-wringing, opportunistically catalysed about a year ago as the Russian invasion of Ukraine reached its crescendo of American interest, evinces all-too-familiar tropes. These include, but are not limited to:

• Not enough young Americans are qualified to serve

• Not enough qualified young Americans are motivated to serve

• Therefore, we might not meet our massive recruitment goals

• Therefore, national security might be at risk

I will pause here to emphasise how this discussion never actually publishes its own assumptions, much less transparently question or assail them. To do this might compel us to ask a series of important questions. Like why we need to recruit 150,000 Americans into military service every year to sustain our force levels, and whether the quality of life in the ranks is sufficient to retain experienced individuals rather than accept 10% annual turnover. Or whether the qualifications we’ve declared for service are still the right ones, having changed precious little in several decades.

We might even ask deeper questions. Such as why we need a standing military force of 1.4M to defend a nation not currently engaged in any major or minor conflict. And if we do, why we’ve extended and exposed ourselves to global instability to an extent requiring such a massive and expensive force. Or perhaps why the huge size and budget of our military seems impervious to changes in context. Whether at war or in peace, it is remarkably thirsty for the best part of a trillion dollars year-in, year-out, typically gathering a budget between 3-4% of US GDP whether the nation is at war, not at war, or in multiple wars at once. This suggests spending is not keyed to readiness so much as to the static costs of running any massive organization.

With that context, let me provide three reasons why it’s actually okay and maybe even a good thing that we’re having trouble feeding this machine.

1. It’s Not a Crisis. One thing you can believe with total confidence is that if the military services were at risk of not achieving their mission, to include their estimated/projected mission in a foreseeable conflict scenario, the generals and admirals charged with assuring US national defense would be jumping up and down about it. Legislative agendas would be crowded with readiness issues, media would be reporting about it, and direct public pronouncements from military and defense leaders would be notorious. Even before these developments, you’d see internal shifts in spending and priorities within the services, who play an internal game to fund their favoured projects at marginal risk to readiness and sometimes substantial risk to the experience of their troops. I wrote about this recently; our services will generally make a priority out of weapons and programmes which suit their visions of themselves until they are forced to make a priority out of people.

2. To The Extent It’s a Problem, It Will Bring Focus. George W. Bush famously quipped to reporters in 2006 that if he’d had to wage his war in Iraq with conscripts rather than volunteers, he’d have been impeached. This sort of dark humour aligns perfectly with military sensibilities, but is really not funny for the nation. We have for too long been afforded the tragic luxury of waging reckless and elective wars that give birth to countless litters of ideological and electoral pets for politicians and their lackeys, but make our world less stable and secure while taking advantage of the intrinsic motivations and soul-emblazoned patriotism of the American rank-and-file. Congress has abetted by occasionally interrupting its perpetual torpor to transfer money from American wallets to the grubby hands of defense contractors under the guise of funding American security. If we suddenly didn’t have unlimited volunteers propelled by unlimited money, we might stop waging war on an unlimited scale and timeline. We might focus on which priorities truly matter to our defense. The services might be forced to stop bleeding talent and actually clarify and resource their missions with greater clarity instead of having the luxury to promote pet projects. I have long held that the best organizations and systems are self-limiting, because an organization without limits will become self-referential to the point of abandoning its core values. The AVF is an example of this. Service today is not nearly as good a deal for young Americans as it once was, and for those of us who served during the elective war after 9/11, there is a painful awareness that the services stopped working hard to deserve America’s best and brightest long ago. Perhaps some reasonable limits will bring focus and change.

3. It Says Something Great About Young Americans. I definitely don’t understand why it would be a bad thing that only 9% of Americans of service age are interested in fighting and killing as a profession. That’s a good thing. Undoubtedly, a few percent more are ambivalent enough to be drawn into the notion. Let the services do a better job of persuading them by making service life attractive enough. But let’s not look past the encouraging headline that despite the recent coarseness of its politics and general combativeness of its society, America’s future is interested in tranquility.

Every few years, consultants, think tanks, retired politicians, and other various chicken littles start clucking about how we’re destined to see a foreign flag hoisted over our Capitol unless we’re willing to part with another trillion dollars to address the dire emergency in our AVF. But what I have noticed is that the actual fighting we conduct is unaffected by all this vacuous jib-jab.

There is no crisis. There is more than ample capacity to deal with the defense threats to the US, albeit with a continued commitment to revising how we think about threats and posture ourselves to deter and, if necessary, defeat them.

But if all this breathless yapping helps bring attention to some aspects of the AVF which could do with some TLC, then hey, I’m all for it.

Tony Carr is a retired US Air Force Lieutenant Colonel and former Senior Editor of Harvard Law School’s National Security Journal. He is passionate about the plight of the US military veteran in the post-9/11 era and about America’s relationship with war.