The Military and Veterans' Room
Right now we have a serious recruiting crisis. Will the all volunteer force go away? Considering that we are spending about half of DoD's budget on pay and benefits we could save a great deal of money, or direct it to weapons systems, if we returned to the draft.
Does the All-Volunteer Force Have an Expiration Date?
Thomas Gates, chairman of The President’s Commission on an All-Volunteer Force in 1970, appears to have been an adept wordsmith. Supporting President Nixon’s own predilections, Gates wrote in his final report to the President that the commission “unanimously believe that the nation’s interests would be better served by an all-volunteer force, supported by an effective stand-by draft, than by a mixed force of volunteers and conscripts.” What he did not say, was that there was not unanimity on the viability of the concept. Crawford Greenewalt, chairman of the Finance Committee of E.I. du Pont de Nemours and Co., thought there was something immoral in “seducing” young people to die for their country with money, and was concerned about the impacts of turning honorable military service with all its risks into “just another job.” General Lauris Norstad, another commission member, shared Mr. Greenewalt’s concern that an all-volunteer armed force would not be representative of the total population and would only recruit from narrow segments. They were also distrustful of econometric projections and shared worries about rising costs with the Department of Defense and Joint Chiefs of Staff. Greenewalt actually suggested the wording Gates used to hide the differences among the commission members. When Secretary of the Army Stanley Resor met with the commission, he kept referring to the proposed volunteers as “mercenaries.” Eventually frustrated member Milton Friedman responded with “Let’s make an agreement. If you promise to stop calling my volunteers ‘mercenaries,’ I will promise to stop calling your draftees ‘slaves.’” But as the concept moved forward, the different perceptions remained. And while even draftees deserve to be adequately taken care of, the move to an all-volunteer force accelerated and magnified increases in pay and benefits.
With the current recruiting crisis, it appears that those concerns about the long-term viability of the AVF expressed more than fifty years ago were well founded, and have been joined with others. In FY2018 for example, military pay and benefits were the single largest expense category for the DoD budget, comprising more than one third. If total compensation funding, including for civilians and contractors, is tallied, that consumed half of the budget. That amount was matched by personnel expenditures outside the DoD budget, for the Department of Veterans Affairs and Treasury payments for retiree pensions and TRICARE for Life. Without counting Social Security payments to veterans and retirees, pay and benefits for DoD personnel and veterans accounted for about 15% of the total federal budget of 4.1 trillion dollars. That was an even larger percentage of discretionary spending. But such costs are unevenly distributed among the services, not surprisingly the Army had the largest expenditures for military pay and benefits, bearing 42% of the total. People are expensive. Over 69 billion dollars of 178 in the Army’s FY23 budget request are for military personnel costs, and there are other associated expenditures in operations and construction categories. (As a point of comparison, the whole DoD budget in 1971 was about 78 billion dollars.) After an increased trajectory of compensation designed to close pay gaps with the private sector overshot the mark by 2010, DoD executed a number of reforms to reduce personnel costs, including accepting reduced raises and increasing TRICARE health care expenses. In the Army, Morale, Welfare, and Recreation (MWR) activities were cut back and forced to pay their own way. Despite assurances from Army leadership, many groups have expressed concern about the impact of eliminating thousands of service medical billets. Complaints by veterans groups managed to reduce planned DoD cuts in medical billets by 2027 from 17.000 to 13,000, but they still remain concerned about long term impacts.
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.
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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."
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Originally Posted by MisterVeritis
