The godfather of the All-Volunteer military, Martin Anderson, died a few days ago at the age of 78. Anderson was a colleague of mine at the Hoover Institution, but he was working to end the draft before most of us were born. In 1967, he urged presidential candidate Richard Nixon to support the All-Volunteer army in the form of a 27-page technical memo and relentlessly nudged Nixon to make the issue central to the 1968 election. As another colleague, David Henderson, documented, “Anderson wrote the anti-draft speech that Nixon gave on CBS radio during the 1968 election.” After the election, Anderson was the key White House adviser that overrode Pentagon resistance, that organized the famous Gates commission, and that coordinated the legislation ending conscription once and for all in January 1973.
Martin Anderson is a role model for policy wonks–both a brilliant scholar and a successful practitioner who made America a more perfect union. And yet, a staunch few critics still doubt the wisdom of voluntary military service. In the last month of Anderson’s life, two major magazines published cover stories questioning the change. The modern Pentagon personnel system has some alarming flaws, to be sure, but the question is whether we go back to a coercive, conscripted “citizen” army or go further forward to a total volunteer force that gives even more agency to soldiers.
James Fallows is concerned about the cultural chasm widening between Americans who choose to serve in the military and the citizens who don’t or can’t. His cover story for the Atlantic shows a toy soldier, of the monochrome green plastic mold, dropping his rifle, limbs splayed in agony under fire, backlit on black space, overlaid with a promise to explain inside why the “Best Soldiers in the World Keep Losing.”
As a veteran, I can say that Mr. Fallows has our attention. If for no other reason, we’re curious, what does he think we lost? Bosnia? South Korea?
The essay is in places brilliant, poignant, insightful, and flat-out informative. One line to savor: “Of Americans born since 1980, the Millennials, about one in three is closely related to anyone with military experience.” In contrast, three-quarters of Baby Boomers were. This fact is central to the important and ongoing national conversation about the civilian-military gap.
Unfortunately, Fallows makes some large leaps of logic trying to connect that fact to his thesis, which is that America has become a Chickenhawk Nation, in his words. Chickenhawk is a derogatory term applied to politicians who support war but avoid(ed) or take care that their children avoid military service. There’s a whole chickenhawk sub-plot to the never-ending debate among Baby Boomers, some who avoided the draft (e.g., Bill Clinton, Dick Cheney, and Fallows, who wrote about his shame famously in 1975) and others who didn’t (e.g., John McCain, Colin Powell, John Kerry). So, let’s set that aside. What is unfortunate is the logical overstretch: Chickenhawk Nation is ridiculous and tautological all at once.
The tautology is that Fallows thinks the All-Volunteer force (AVF) is a failure because it makes war too easy to start and then too easy to ignore. So if you support violence but don’t practice it, you’re a chickenhawk hypocrite. By extension, you cannot support police unless you personally hunt criminals.
Fallows claims the voluntary nature of military service fosters a public far too safe and cozy and therefore careless about military spending and unwinnable wars. He further asserts that Iraq and Afghanistan are being lost, which is the responsibility of a disengaged democracy. This is where the argument is open to ridicule.
First, the American public was hardly indifferent to the plight of their military in 2004 or 2008, elections centering largely on the Iraq war. In fact, a sign of the piece’s inherent inconsistency is when Fallows himself writes “Hillary Clinton paid a price for her vote to authorize the Iraq War, since that is what gave the barely known Barack Obama an opening to run against her in 2008.” Central premise, self-refuted.
Second, Vietnam was a far less winnable war in the 1960s and ’70s when the draft was in place. Iraq, in contrast, was largely won because the AVF generation of generals (James Mattis, David Petraeus, and many more) pushed the White House to change strategies after 2006. Indeed, Iraq was lost only after 2012, for reasons that have nothing to do with the composition of the force. It has everything to do with who was commander in chief, his withdrawal of all U.S. forces from the country, and his impatience with long-term engagement.
I respect the judgment of those who question the strategic value of America’s troop presence in Iraq and Afghanistan, even though I disagree. But let’s at least consider some partial successes. No repeat of 9/11-like attacks, albeit for now, is victory. More importantly, no human on earth doubts that America’s enemies are in grave danger, nor that attacks on our soil will be not be doubly answered. That’s credibility.
A deeper kind of success about which I have recently written here in COMMENTARY (“The Good Country”) is that the American strategy of patient, forward deployment, even and especially when it is not self-interested, has benefitted our allies and the world. America’s engagement in Asia and Europe since 1945 created a security umbrella fostering peace and unprecedented prosperity. If this model were applied to the Middle East–supporting allies rather than hunting monsters–it would reshape the Middle East’s future, and on this Fallows might agree.
The best part of Fallows’s reporting is how the Pentagon personnel bureaucracy has become risk-averse and careerist, a transformation invisible to the admiring public. This arguably feeds into a military-industrial complex far harder to crack than Eisenhower could have imagined. His in-depth coverage of the F-35 cost is fantastic. But ask yourself this: Would weapons acquisitions be more efficient and transparent in a conscripted military? Not likely. The real answer, I believe, is that acquisitions officers should be given more autonomy and flexibility, exactly the kind of expertise that could develop in a Total Volunteer Force.
Fallows reports some good news for reform: a new, bipartisan crop of federal legislators after the 2014 elections will double the number of veterans in Congress. There is a raging debate inside the ranks about how to fix the Pentagon personnel system. Most everyone favors a talent management evolution to fix what Secretary of Defense Robert Gates called the “institutional concrete,” and these new legislators will be the key to breaking it up. Freshman Congresswoman Martha McSally (R-AZ), a retired USAF officer and of America’s first female combat fighter pilot, spoke in favor of the total volunteer force concept at a Hudson Institute forum in early 2013 and could be the legislative champion that active duty troops have been hoping for.
The Atlantic cover story rightly challenges Americans to think carefully about the civilian-military gap. My own mind is not made up about the gap, not how to fix it nor even sure how serious it is. But I have a sense that fixing the gap and fixing the personnel system are opposite sides of the same coin.
One thing I am confident about, though, is that Fallows’s preference for a return to the pre-1973 practice of conscription is the wrong direction. Over 90 percent of active duty troops and recent veterans are of the same mind–we do not want to serve alongside conscripts. A draft army is less competent, making the nation less secure as it makes service more deadly because it relies on constantly turning over two-year enlistees instead of 20-year professionals. Draft proponents want the public more hostile to foreign wars by threatening its children with coercive service, at the price of making army life more lethal to all soldiers because of draftee incompetence. Is that a moral tradeoff?
It is worth deconstructing the Fallows essay here, which opens with the author watching a televised speech by President Obama while waiting for a flight at Chicago’s O’Hare airport. The speech concerned Syria’s civil war, a flash point of debate nationally and within the White House about whether and how to engage with American ground troops. It is an explosive issue. Fallows was riveted. So were the 1.4 million men and women on active duty. In contrast, his fellow air travelers barely cared; they “went back to their smartphones and their laptops and their Cinnabons as the president droned on.”
The entire essay hinges on this moment. Fallows equates the other travelers’ disinterest with the president’s speech to indifference with the military. More likely, most Americans had tuned out what an omnipresent, unpopular president was saying during the 2014 campaign. He suggests that Americans’ deep admiration for the troops is counterintuitive proof of their indifference. In this narrative, civilians admire too much. Where’s the evidence? He cites a handful of distinguished veterans who agree that civilians are fawning, therefore uncritical, therefore (here’s the error) indifferent. That’s a bridge too far.
What Fallows offers next is a comparison of movies and TV shows during the Boomer era versus the modern era. We’re told that 1970s films M*A*S*H and The Deer Hunter show a balance of respect and skeptical insight whereas this decade’s Lone Survivor and Restrepo show an imbalance of admiration and ignorance. Really?
I’m torn here. I find myself agreeing, as many veterans do, that the public is not critical enough of the Pentagon. I think there’s a valid point that public admiration greases wasteful spending. One irony is that overspending on hardware means underspending on people in uniform, with very serious long-term consequences for military manpower. That said, I just don’t buy the argument that the public is out of touch with the military. Deconstructing Hollywood is glib and subjective at best. But even using Hollywood as a barometer, Black Hawk Down and more recent films strike me as telling the same story as the 1970s classics: good men and women bonding together through the adversity of war and the incompetence of the larger bureaucracy, sometimes triumphantly, other times tragically.
The argument that a smaller, professional military also fuels indifference does not wash. Fallows notes that American farmers outnumber soldiers three to one (a stock versus flow comparison, but I quibble) and therefore are exotic territory to the public. By this measure, professional athletes are exceedingly rare. So also are astronauts and Olympic athletes. Are we indifferent to them?
There is a gap between civilians and the military that should worry us, but it’s the opposite of what worries Fallows. The military’s AVF shift toward multi-decade service careers means that senior officers have become self-segregated, not from society, but definitely from modern workplaces. They have adopted the worst of modern bureaucracy but none of the nimbleness of contemporary entrepreneurial culture.
My favorite example of the current Pentagon rigidity is that George Washington would never be allowed to serve as a general in today’s Army. He was a farmer for over a decade before rejoining the ranks and leading the Continental Army. Today, anyone who leaves the ranks is not allowed back in, with rare exceptions. Eisenhower, Lee, Nimitz–none would make flag officer today. This is where we should focus our attention on closing the gap.
If the military was open to re-hiring veterans, even those out of uniform for a decade, it would create what people in the Pentagon are calling a “continuum of service” that could quickly and flexibly supply critical skills–think cyber, database management, cryptography, and bio warfare. It would also break down the wall between civilian and military experiences.
Another sophisticated critique of the AVF comes from James Kitfield: “For their part, members of Congress have not exercised their constitutional prerogative to declare war since World War II. They increasingly seem inclined to cede decisions on the use of military force to the executive branch, preferring to criticize and score political points from the sidelines. For the generations of Americans who have come of age in the all-volunteer era, war has become an abstraction, something best left to the professionals.” Kitfield’s lengthy cover story in National Journal last month was titled “The Great Draft Dodge,” and it also worries about invisible troops, echoing his essay’s protagonist, retired Army three-star General Karl Eikenberry.
The desire to reinstate conscription is based entirely on a vision of a fairer sharing of the burden of military service. Kitfield describes “the accumulating burdens of a decade of conflict.” Fallows talks about the “burdens placed upon” the American military tribe.
In theory, a draft would randomly select young men and women, treating everyone from every community fairly. Advocates ignore the reality of conscription which, in all countries and eras it is utilized, exploits poorer and less educated citizens by granting numerous exemptions. That was the Vietnam experience. I challenge anyone to read Fallows’ powerful 1975 story about escaping the draft and wish its return. “They walked through the examination lines like so many cattle off to slaughter…. While perhaps four out of five of my friends from Harvard were being deferred, just the opposite was happening to the Chelsea boys.”
Critics warned that the volunteer force would be even worse. A young James Fallows, among others, called attention to the skyrocketing percentages of poorer, less-educated enlistees throughout the 70s. He wrote in 1980 that America needed to return to the draft. The fairness critique evaporated, however, when the newly elected Reagan administration gave volunteer soldiers significant pay raises. By the time Reagan left the White House, the quality and reliability of our volunteer troops was far superior to previous eras, and has stayed high ever since, a point President Obama makes all the time. Instead of the low-quality recruits Fallows and other AVF critics warned about, a valid point in 1979 when half of enlistees had no high school diploma, modern enlistees have more education than the typical civilian.
So the critique has changed, if not the critic. Now, we are given little sermons about the “burden.” Always the burden. What if the troops who volunteer don’t think of their service as a burden, but rather think of it as an honor? To wear the Marine uniform is not imposed on any American today. Quite the contrary. Most Americans cannot qualify, let alone attempt to earn the stripes that Marines wear.
The simple truth is that a draft is a burden, but voluntary military service is a privilege. Certainly for the past decade, the millions of Americans who enlisted did so by choice. They chose to fight these wars. I think we who discuss military service should keep that in mind and speak a bit more respectfully about it. To be sure, serving in uniform is hard work, but it’s not a yoke to be shared in the way that so many writers assert.
America is a free country. Freer by definition when military service is voluntary. Any other kind of service isn’t service, after all. It’s servitude.
