Veterans' Day without most veterans?

the crisis in who serves for US

Every trip I have ever made to the Vietnam Veterans’ Wall on the National Mall instills the same pride and sadness in me resulting from reading the 57000+ names engraved there: those who served in that war came from many ethnic, religious, and socio-economic backgrounds. The Vietnam wall illustrates that the veterans from that conflict represented an astonishing snapshot of the country yet we know the veterans from that conflict did not include many who were avoided service for a variety of reasons. Some got deferments for family or academic reasons while others received medical reprieves for homosexuality, bone spurs, or other reasons. The overwhelming majority who served the nation, whether enthusiastically or not, responded to the nation’s call known as draft notices but they did indeed respond.

President Richard Nixon’s ended the conscription service that had drafted men for the U.S. armed forces. In 1973, the United States went to an all volunteer military instead. The services all changed dramatically in the following forty-nine years in virtually every way; the country coincidentally changed in many ways during precisely that same span of time.

Today we confront a substantially different world and a fundamentally different crisis in military service. Over the summer of 2022, the Navy, Army, and Air Force leadership each acknowledged failure to meet their recruiting goals. The Marine Corps successfully achieved its numbers as did the miniscule Space Corps but the other three services woefully missed targets. These were not inconsequential concerns as the United States is in an era of ‘great power competition’ but who in uniform will be actually competing?

The recently booming job market incentivises many to go into private sector jobs so the armed forces don’t seem as lucrative a career. The pay for services increasingly offer recruiting bonuses to increase the ranks but those are targeted at certain fields and still may not be enough to counter options in the private sector for something like pilots. Rose L. Thayer, 'Military faces generational challenges as it struggles to meet recruiting targets', Stars and Stripes, 22 August 2022

I recently heard a Lieutenant General state unequivocably that the services (and it turns out the Centers for Disease Control which keeps statistics) three-quarters of the youth in service age are ‘unfit’ to don the uniform because of health, criminal record, drug use, and/or educational achievement disqualification—fully 77%. A recent op-ed argued these negative factors lower the available pool dramatically from 31.8 million individuals between 17 and 24 years olds, down to roughly 465,000. Tom Jurkowsky, 'The military has a serious recruiting problem-Congress must fix it', The Hill, 21 June 2022 One must ask how we are going to crew ships as the United States gears up for greater involvement in the Asia Pacific if we don’t have sufficient forces to do so? Are our aims outstriping not only our number of ships but the number of enlisted and officers for those ships?

We must broaden the desirability of public service to include and highlight the armed forces. Baring arms is an incredibly noble profession. It is an honourable profession. It is a rigourous commitment requiring sacrifice for the whole of the nation. We need message that all of us are responsible for serving this country, not merely a few. We need explain why the nation’s veterans chose to be part of something bigger than themselves. But we cannot approach the concept of defending this country as the responsibility of a few for fear we concentrate power in the hands of a few who can in turn decide they have a monopoly on deciding how we would use that military. Latin American militaries have historically arrogated to themselves the determination regarding what within the patria to protect and what to eradicate within their societies rather than leaving those decisions to the society as a whole under civilian rule. We do not want to toss these life and death, war and peace decisions only to a few because we would rue the results long term.

Many of our discussion revolve around thoughts of what is owed to us but not always sacrifice we owe back as being citizens. Public service, an incredibly fulfilling goal, needs be something we discuss proudly rather than as something done by others about which we really don’t want to be part. We must see the work that ultimately leads to someone being seen as a veteran as a norm in society rather than an outlier.

I did not serve nor have my children, both of whom are still age eligible and meet the other criteria for service but chose other paths. I still hold some hope they may serve as they grew up learning much about veterans because I spent so many years teaching students in uniform or often retired from the military. My friends outside of the Beltway have rarely have any connection to the armed forces except for the aging veterans who they may have known from prior eras. I don’t see hostility but just a lack of knowledge of what it means to be serving the nation as someone in uniform.

We must make sure we have people who serve in uniform to meet the needs of our stated national security objectives. We need to have veterans because they have played an important role in securing the future of this country. Those we honour today have done that but the path ahead looks harder on this than many people realise. Thank you to those who served honourably and I look forward to being able to say that for a new generation willing to share responsibilities in the future. FIN