recruiting and the AVF

a powerful problem

Many people who follow national security issues wax on about the need to prepare for war against China; Iran and even Russia come up in some conversations as potential military adversaries. Certainly China and the United States appear to be diverging in important ways, possibly heralding an extraordinarily dangerous conflict between two states armed with nuclear weapons. It is far from a desirable option but one that national interests could require. Sunday’s Washington Post highlighted a stunning internal challenge making that possibility even more uncomfortable.

The opening scenes of the war for Americans proper focused on Japanese bombers deployed off carriers north of Oahu on 7 December 1941. The Navy’s Victory at Sea films from World War II highlighted the sheer prowess of our aircraft carriers vital to our war efforts in the Pacific. Ships also provided escort service to our allies crossing the Atlantic and the Baltic over those same years, trying to avoid German U-boats. Machine guns, tank battles, and the fierce struggle between Allied scientists and their Nazi counterparts in hopes of building atomic weapons all play prominent roles in our memories of that epic, global struggle. Indeed, the war concluded seventy-four years ago today following the detonation of a uranium bomb over Hiroshima and a plutonium counterpart three days later above Nagasaki. Technology and armaments often seem the heart of military power.

But armed forces are made of women and men serving their countries, whether voluntarily or under conscription. The resilience of Ukraine’s fighters against Russian conscript invaders offers a powerful reminder that passion, quality, training and equipment are a constantly balancing set of conditions in a conflict. Ample additional examples come to mind.

At the same time, numbers do play a role in any military’s successes or failures. The Post article by Greg Jaffe and Missy Ryan, thus, is a wake up for policy makers and pundits seemingly divorced from the realities that recruiters for the armed forces confront today. One of the profound but under appreciated aspects of twenty-first century life in this country are the significant and growing obstacles to creating a force able to act upon our behalf.

Each of the services offers different challenges to its personnel so I readily acknowledge the cited article focuses primarily on the Army. However, I can start with two stipulations worth noting in this overall topic. The Marine Corps, the service of “The Few, the Proud, the Marines” and associated slogans targeting selectivity and challenges (among other things), is a smaller service which does indeed have far less trouble recruiting. Doctoral theses on why this is the case fill bookshelves in those few schools still focusing on military history or national security studies. Second, the Air Force (I have not seen separate data on the newest service so I continue treating space as if it were still a part of the Air Force) and the Navy similarly have not met their recruiting goals in the past year, giving credence to a hypothesis that the challenges the Army confronts are broader than theirs alone.

Recruits for the Army generally are between 17 and 24 years old. Statista.com, a statistical website, cites roughly 21.64 million men and women between 15 and 19 years while 21.5 million (I am working off a graph so I acknowledge a small rounding error possible) between 20 and 24 years old. In other words, the overall pool of recruits before any other factors come into play is roughly 43 million Americans out of our overall population of 349 million. A range of problems make this extremely tough, however.

The initial problem any recruiter, an actual active duty assignment in each of the services since the military sees people rather than technology as its biggest investment and requirement, confronts that only twenty-three percent of American youth between ages 17 and 24 are qualified to take the oath to serve. 23% of the women and men conform to educational, physical, or moral standards or 9.89 million. That still sounds like a huge number but the percentage is pretty scary.

Army personnel need a high school degree as the increased technological emphases of military performance presupposes a pattern of logical thinking learned through education. Does the potential recruit have sufficient grounding to operate within the Army’s environment today? If not, then should we just always default to exempting them on that condition?

Granting exemptions for lack of a high school diploma highlights two other potentially worrisome questions for someone entering a rules-driven, hierarchical organization. Did someone not finishing a diploma program depart because she or he could not follow rules? Does the individual ignore or disobey rules? Discipline is absolutely central to military life, whether for a senior officer or a buck private. Rules and discipline are fundamental to creating trust among those who rely on each other to survive. A comment I have heard about the discipline problems common through the “failed military” of the final years of Vietnam was that decisions to lower standards to produce more personnel was central many of the operational challenges the services faced.

Too many are overweight, with ever more misunderstanding how high their weights actually are. Clearly weight management is an extraordinarily complex interrelationship between many factors but the Army has set fitness and weight guidelines recruits must meet. The push to allow waivers for being above those targets do not merely incur more paperwork but lead to the same series of societal tensions within any unit should someone be above the norm. That is neither a pass on bullying nor a justification for retribution but a statement of the effect within a job scenario where both physical agility and presentation are often seen by friends and foes as evidence of readiness to execute the tasks necessary both to perform at maximum unit efficiency and survive in combat.

Perhaps equal to the weight and fitness problem is the moral deficit this article cited. Legal drug consumption, handled on a state by state basis under federalism, means that Colorado decriminalized recreational marijuana twelve years ago as have twenty-three other states; the number for medical use is up to 38 of 50. Marijuana, however, remains a drug for which urinalysis is conducted within the Army (and federal government) as an illegal activity—period. There is no decriminalization of pot or any other illegal drug (although I must confess I don’t know whether that applies to medical use). But, using marijuana regularly is a criminal activity under current federal law, not one desirable for recruits. Again, the drug-clouded days of the 1970s provide ample evidence that this behavior undermined basic tenets of a functioning military organization.

Some drugs used to treat depression, another national epidemic among our youth, fall in the prohibited list of substances, according to Jaffe and Ryan, further limiting the pool of candidates. ADHD rates increasing also depresses possible recruiting. But more of the recruit pool is afflicted by these issues.

But, recruiting faces a harsh reality: the vast majority of appropriately-aged citizens simply do not want to serve in uniform. The article highlights Hispanic-Americans, many legally born here but not wanting to call attention to their native language as Spanish or their poor preparation for Army life. The same problems appear in other populations of migrants recently arrived (relatively).

But, the American experiences over the past decade further thwart recruitment, whether it was the Iraq and Afghanistan wars undermining our sense of invincibility or the seemingly relentless political fracturing of our national sense of a national ethos both produce obstacles. Military life is not for all but nor is it an unfettered path to a better life.

Many Americans pursue college careers in hopes of advancing financially. The All Volunteer Force (AVF), including of course the Army, offers incentives for recruits to join (or potentially to reenlist) but does not provide the lifestyle many envision for themselves. The repeated deployments to Afghanistan and Iraq weakened many young recruits, whether during those tours overseas or afterwards when the repercussions of war hit home for too many recent veterans and their families. College, even junior college, appears a more stable path for many. The decrease in men in higher education may offer the services a path forward but too many of those men not preferring college face ineligibility for the reasons noted above.

Repeated reporting on poor benefits, particularly problems at Veterans’ Administration hospitals, cannot help matters. While service benefits reward loyal service, many of those benefits relate to education, not always a priority for those who struggled there earlier in their lives. If the VA assistance is not helpful, some potential recruits may ask why joining is a good idea. That coupled with the instances of PTSD cannot make for a pretty picture to a twenty-one year old woman who thinks she might have better chances by not signing on Uncle Sam’s dotted line.

Rhetoric by political figures about the successes of our military leaders rather than focusing on the failures of the policy makers to set realistic goals is a further deterrent to some wanting to volunteer. Anti-military rhetoric is hardly new but has certainly been a by-product of questionable policy aims over the past seven decades. In an era of echo chambers and online chats about micro issues, I suspect many people prefer to play war online rather than in front of their faces, especially in a profoundly divided this country.

In short, the AVF, celebrating its fifty-first anniversary of ending the draft in the fall of 1973, is at a point of crisis. Certainly the booming economy after the pandemic has made recruiting harder but no one in the military doubted this moment was on the horizon. As a Republican Congressman said fully twenty years ago when he participated in a wargame in which I was a facilitator, he could not explain to his sister why her son would need go to Taiwan in a crisis when she was asking why that son kept having to return to Iraq. I heard that statement fifteen months into the Iraq conflict and less than three years into Afghanistan, both of which went on for several more years with frustration and failure to meet our stated objectives by their closures.

What does all of this mean for recruiting and for foreign policy? We are not talking about scaling back our commitments overseas. FPOTUS raises the policy of “America First” but even many of his most committed supporters appear horrified at that prospect of a world run by anyone by Americans. I struggle to grasp how this would that work for a country so accustomed to believing it makes the best policy for all to follow, particularly from what we assume is a pure motive.

No politician seriously raises the question of reintroducing the draft in the United States. While the generation who served when conscripted or fled to Sweden is rapidly passing from us, the national acceptance of volunteer service en lieu of conscription strikes me as every bit as strong as it was forty years ago as we began the modernization against the Soviets.

Yet the structural problems of both the AVF and the recruiting pool are real and intensifying. The Congress could dramatically increase recruiting bonuses but that seems unlikely. Significant incentives exist today to retain quality personnel but to incentivize too far seems counter-intuitive to me. Not everyone can succeed in uniform so promising too many benefits upfront could backfire spectacularly; actions do create consequences, often unintended if well-meaning.

We increasingly look unlikely to match the needed volunteer recruits to match the wide-ranging policy aspirations across the globe. It’s easy to focus on the financial commitments required; those commitments are actually shocking when you consider many people believe we are vastly underspending at $850 billion annually.

But military service needs to be representative of the country it serves. To do otherwise, relying on a small, self-appointed military caste threatens democracy itself as Latin America long experienced. As the country changes demographically, perhaps the commitment to military service will also evolve although I am far from convinced.

So, the article Sunday in the Post strikes me as a clarion call to look at who and what we are committed to as a nation. I think that nationhood problem is so profound yet one we are hoping will disappear, just as the burgeoning debt will go away through application of fairy dust or something. As long as we continue putting off serious national conversation on these issues, we are not being serious about the future, providing only more problems for those who follow us in history. Actions and consequences again.

I welcome your thoughts as I most definitely don’t have any more answers to this than I had yesterday to the horrors in the Israel-Hamas conflict. We need creative, open conversations to solve these problems rather than standing behind barriers afraid to acknowledge the ends+ways=means equation must balance. I hope you will chime in as many of you have strong feelings on the questions.

Thank you for taking time to read this today or any other day. Please feel free to circulate if you find it of value. Because of the nature of the subject, feel free to drop a comment in the discussion section. Thanks so much to subscribers who support this newsletter with financial assistance.

Annapolis is surprisingly cool today with much activity on the Creek. I hope you have had a superb Labor Day and take a minute to thank all those who labor in any manner.

Be well and be safe as the school kids head out and home daily. FIN

Greg Jaffe and Missy Ryan, “Selling America: The Army’s fight to find recruits in an angry and divided nation”, Washingtonpost.com, 1 September 2024: A1, A10, A11.

Haley Weiss, “Teens are Increasingly Underestimating their Weights”, Time, 7 July 2023, retrieved at https://time.com/6292901/teens-weight-underestimating/