Military Personnel

Will Buckner

The United States Needs National Military Service

Last updated 06:07 AM EST • Read time: 7m

Will Buckner

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There comes a time when the traditional way of doing business no longer meets the requirements of the day. This is clearly the case when it comes to how the U.S. recruits its military. Ever since Richard Nixon ended the draft in 1973, the United States has maintained an all-volunteer force model, with our enlisted service members and officers proudly displaying the professional skill level no other armed forces in the world have been able to match. But this model is no longer capable of generating the numbers and reserves the country will need should we be forced into a war with Russia and China, not to mention potential further escalation in the Middle East or the Korean Peninsula. If the rates of attrition for equipment and personnel witnessed in Ukraine over the past two years are any indicator of what the next major war might look like, it is clear that even with America’s advantage in air power and precision weapons, in order to prevail in such a conflict the nation will need to have a pool of readily-available reserves.

During the last phases of the Cold War, generous defense budgets allowed the all-volunteer model to meet the nation’s defense need. This was in part because of the very size of the defense budget, but also that the United States confronted only one superpower adversary, the Soviet Union. U.S. defense spending during the Cold War peaked at close to 9.5% of GDP at the height of the Vietnam War, but even when it declined it averaged 6.9% of GDP between 1960-1990.[i] In contrast, after the Cold War U.S. defense spending between 1991-2021 ran on average around 3.9% of GDP (it currently stands at around 3.2%), while the cost of ever-more sophisticated weapon systems – to say nothing of the numerous campaigns America fought over the past twenty years during the Global War on Terror – has relentlessly reduced the purchasing power of those numbers.

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But the dollars and cents spent on defense tell only part of the story. The other critical aspect is the numbers of service men and women that the United States has been able to field post-Cold War. Throughout the Cold War the combined personnel numbers of our military never dropped below two million, and in fact peaked at 3.5 million during the Vietnam war, which still relied on the draft to fill the ranks.^[ii] In contrast, the overall size of the active U.S. military authorized end strength is today just over 1.3 million,[iii] with every service, save for the Marine Corps, having failed to meet its recruitment targets.[iv] And when one considers the readiness level, that number is smaller still. At the same time, while the United States faces potentially two simultaneous conflicts in the Atlantic and the Pacific, current personnel targets for the Russian military alone are set to create a force of 1.5 million[v], while today China boasts the world’s largest military estimated at over two million personnel, with increasingly sophisticated capabilities. There is also a mismatch in the amount of money we spend on defense relative to that of our two principal adversaries. The defense budget Vladimir Putin just signed has put Russia back at Cold War levels of spending while China is running the largest military expansion project in history, especially for the People’s Liberation Army Navy.

But it is not just about the personnel needed to generate a winning force in case of war. Another reason America must shift to national military service is the increasingly corrosive societal aspect of relying solely on the all-volunteer force. This has bred a culture of “security consumers” that has replaced the civic responsibility for national defense that the framers of the Constitution envisioned. For too long we have lived under the illusion that national security and defense are not among the key responsibilities of American citizenship. Over the past several decades we have created a consumer culture when it comes to national security, or – as an interlocutor told me recently – a “I-pay-my-taxes-so-the-common-defense-is-not-my-problem” view of national service. Setting aside the fact that such a view of the military profession is more fitting to the job description of a security guard at a shopping mall than the thousands of men and women who make sacrifices in life and limb to serve their country, it offers a blinding insight into the absence of any sense of shared obligation to fellow-citizens that the post-Nixonian military recruitment system has fostered. The Constitutional provision that the “Congress shall have power (…) to raise and support Armies”[vi] speaks directly to the American ideal of the citizen-soldier – one that we have largely forfeited. In a nation as diverse both in terms of ethnicity and wealth, we desperately need a place where young men and women serve together, rediscovering that there is a larger nation out there and re-learning that as citizens they owe the nation and each other a level of solidarity and support that has been all but driven out of our political discourse.

A national military service requirement makes sense on multiple levels. First, it will generate both the force and the reserves we need (and at a much lower cost). Second, it will foster a sense of national cohesion that we need more than ever at a time when the country could be pulled into a general war. Third, it will send a powerful deterrent message to our adversaries that the United States has awakened after three decades of strategic slumber, and that it stands ready to confront the challenges of an increasingly unstable and dangerous world. Finally, it will send a message to our allies, especially those in NATO, that their all-volunteer system needs to be replaced as well with one built around national military service, in order to generate the forces and capabilities that Europe needs to field if it is to forestall a wider war on the Continent.

Most politicians will consider the idea of introducing a mandatory national military service requirement to be a poison pill, and I realize full well that advocating for such a sea-change in how we generate our military power will be an uphill battle. But like so many aspects of our return to reality following three decades of post-Cold War delusions about the way the world works, this is about getting back to the basics when it comes to national power. The rapidly deteriorating security environment worldwide and the challenges it presents to America’s national interests makes it imperative that we speak plainly about what needs to be done. Simply put, as we rediscover the old verities of state-on-state competition, including readiness to wage war, we can either pretend that everything is fine and that the system is working as intended, or our political class can face up to the challenge and do the right thing.

There is no time to waste.

Andrew A. Michta is senior fellow and director of the Scowcroft Strategy Initiative at the Atlantic Council of the United States. Views expressed here are his own.