Does the All-Volunteer Force Have an Expiration Date?

Some of those changes may be contributing to the current crisis, with a decreasing opinion of the quality of military life. A 2021 survey by the Military Family Advisory Network revealed that only 62.9% of military and veteran families would recommend military life, down from a 74.5% result only two years earlier. That is a particularly disturbing statistic since military service has become more and more a “family business” with a 79% of enlistees having military family members who served. Most cited reasons for not recommending military life included that it is not family friendly, pay is low compared to the stressful demands from work, bad leadership, inadequate healthcare, and too frequent moves and deployments.  Those negative perceptions also contribute to a recline in retention, another part of the problem set.

For recruiting approaches, the Marines emphasize their Warrior Ethos, the Navy presents images of adventure and service to the world, and the Air Force and Space Force exploit their technology. Of all the armed forces, the Army’s advertising has gone the furthest towards presenting service as “just another job,” emphasizing learning new skills and self-actualization. Why should American youth pick a job that can get them killed or injured if it is nothing really special? I recently watched a Sunday night professional football game. During the broadcast there was one military recruiting commercial. There were also four different appeals from wounded warrior groups for financial support, with graphic images showing maimed veterans. I once visited a friend who commanded the transportation brigade at Fort Eustice when that branch school was there. He related to me that many of his school staff and instructors were wounded veterans of Afghanistan and Iraq, transferred from combat arms to remain on active duty. Some had lost limbs, others were recovering from other visible traumatic injuries. He told me that he believed their presence was good for retention, showing that the Army took care of its own. But the impact on recruiting was catastrophic, as he watched parents drag their sons and daughters away from venues involving his wounded comrades.  

This perception of the broken veteran permeates our culture. We proclaim “disabled” or “wounded” veteran on our license plates. We celebrate their victories in the Paralympics and make ourselves feel good with news stories about charitable contributions to build or improve their homes. Movies and novels are rife with characters with PTSD. There are literally thousands of registered charities benefitting injured service members, veterans and their families. A large percentage of those casualties are infantrymen and Marines. At a recent Heritage event, the current head of Army recruiting, Major General Johnny K. Davis discussed the difficulty the Army was having recruiting infantrymen and other “maneuver, fires, and effects” specialties.  That is despite a $50,000 bonus for infantry recruits, and a further $35,000 that can be earned during that first enlistment.  Between 2002 and 2013, 30% of Army recruits failed to complete 36 months of service.  Perhaps recruiters should be rated on how many of their enlistees finish their term instead of just how many they get to start it. Marine Corps advertising has monopolized the focus on combat, presenting itself as the service to deal with the most dangerous threats to the nation’s security, aiming to attract those recruits most willing to face risks fighting on the battlefield. A recent Army decision to return to “Be All You Can Be” as its recruiting theme is not going to entice a young person to risk their lives in the most dangerous occupations.   

In the second volume of his lengthy History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon described how the motivations for military service changed over the course of a society’s development. “Barbarians are urged by the love of war; the citizens of a free republic may be prompted by a principle of duty; the subjects, or at least the nobles, of a monarchy, are animated by a sentiment of honor; but the timid and luxurious inhabitants of a declining empire must be allured into the service by the hopes of profit, or compelled by the dread of punishment."  In a Fall 2020 poll of American youth ages 16-21, when asked the question ”In the next few years, how likely is it that you will be serving in the Military?”, only 11% answered “definitely” or “probably”. By gender, the numbers were 7% for women and 14% for men.  By far the two most important reasons not to serve were the fears of suffering physical injury or PTSD. A Quinnipiac poll earlier this year that asked the question of Americans whether they would be willing to defend the homeland if it was attacked by Russia. 38% of total respondents said they would flee instead. Only 55% said they would actually fight, 40% of Democrats. While I suspect that those numbers would change if there was an actual attack, without one those who profess no desire to fight now are not likely to support military service by themselves or family members. This is not a unique problem to just our prosperous democracy. Others with much smaller militaries have the same problem with recruiting. The Germans have had to lower their enlistment age to 17 to try to find enough citizens to serve.

To further complicate the situation, those sections of the United States with the strongest anti-vaccination sentiments and resulting mistrust of government are in areas and among groups that have historically been most acceptant of military service.    The military response to COVID might also have been a factor in that significant drop in satisfaction with military life. Facing queries from skeptical Congressmen, DoD and the Army continued to downplay any impact of COVID mandates on recruiting and retention, while the Marine Corps moderated its restrictions.   The Marine Corps Commandant admitted that vaccine mandates were making recruiting especially difficult in the South. Eventually Congressional action forced the Pentagon to drop the vaccine mandate, and there is even consideration now for restoring backpay for some who were discharged because of resistance to it. There are precedents for backing off from vaccine requirements, as DoD was forced to do with anthrax two decades ago.  Recently appeals have been granted for restoration of benefits for veterans discharged for refusal to take that vaccine.           

As Crawford Greenewalt realized, military service is not just another job. The Army especially should adjust its recruiting pitches to better reflect the essential services it performs for the nation, and to emphasize the honor of being a soldier. A parent in one of the Army-Navy football game pregame introductions on CBS stated that the contest is the only game where everyone who is playing in it is willing to die for everyone watching it. We need to rejuvenate Gibbons’ concept of duty in a free republic to inspire military service. The Army, which has the biggest recruiting shortfalls, is the American “Swiss Army knife” for all kinds of service opportunities to exploit a desire to meet obligations to the nation and the world. 

But to return to the question asked at the beginning of this essay, my own opinion is that while the All Volunteer Force might not have an imminent expiration date, it does have a reduced capacity to generate manpower that might not sustain current force levels. Any legislative initiatives offering free college will take away another incentive for service and create even a deeper crisis. As part of the Unified Quest Human Performance Seminar in 2016 looking at the requirements for future soldiers, I headed the Physical Attributes Working Group that recommended to the leadership of Training and Doctrine Command that the Army vary its physical requirements by specialty, instead of making everyone an infantryman. We were strongly rebuffed then, but that idea deserves consideration now.  Cutbacks in MWR support and medical staffing should be relooked to combat negative perceptions of military quality of life. The services need to pursue initiatives with robots and artificial intelligence to replace people. While Russian tanks are more vulnerable than ours because of the open ammunition storage for an automatic loader, that does reduce crew requirements for each tank.  Can we make similar, but safer and smarter, adjustments to our own weapon systems? Perhaps the Army especially needs to look at a different mix of active and reserve forces, and we shall have to wait and see if the elimination of vaccine mandates helps both components.  However, the nation has to avoid settling for the national security strategy that it can afford instead of the one that it needs. Policy makers need to consider some sort of hybrid approach involving national service opportunities.  Or else the nation may have to resign itself to undermanned ships and hollow ground forces that endanger our security.

Even the Gates Commission realized that their AVF needed an effective stand by draft for emergencies. Court decisions supporting male-only registration were based on a combat exclusion rule that no longer exists, and Congress recently came very close to requiring women to register also. Other Congressmen have been trying to abolish the draft completely. Either course will have significant political repercussions that need to be resolved before the nation faces a future crisis requiring expansion of military forces. The 2022 NDA required DoD to appoint an Executive Agent for National Mobilization and prepare a report by this past December on how it would induct, train, equip, and integrate as many as a million new service members brought in through the Selective Service System.  That agent has still not been appointed, and if the required report was ever done it was based on many bad assumptions.

Though today’s situation is unique, many of these concerns about the long term viability of the All-Volunteer Force have been voiced before. The conclusion of a voluminous RAND study of the evolution of the AVF, written in 2006 when the AVF was under fire from a number of directions, is worth citing in closing. “Ultimately, however, the ability to grow the all-volunteer force will depend on the willingness of young men and women to join. Increased incentives have always proven to stretch enlistments, but there is a limit. So far the all-volunteer force has proven to be very resilient, but the all-volunteer force does not lend itself to guarantees."

Conrad Crane is the senior research historian at the Strategic Studies Institute of the Army War College. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not purport to reflect the positions of the War College, the Department of the Army, or the Department of Defense.

The views contained in this article are the author's own and not that of the U.S. Army or the Department of Defense.