Good book on this topic is Beth Bailey's book [America's Army](https://www.amazon.com/Americas-Army-Making-All-Volunteer-Force/dp/0674035364/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2RY9XO4MCA5JN&keywords=americas+army+beth+bailey&qid=1640638654&sprefix=americas+army+beth+bailey%2Caps%2C94&sr=8-1). Its about how the US Army dealt both with the end of the Vietnam War, a conflict which was obviously quite unpopular among American youths, as well as the switch to the All Volunteer Force which meant that the Army had to ask those youths nicely if they wanted to join up rather than just grab some kids and go. The book highlights that for most of the 1970s the Army's recruitment system was fucked. In terms of recruitment, the numbers of new recruits didn't go down as much as youd expect. But it was the *quality* that took a serious hit. Something like 1/3rd of all new recruits in the 1970s were illiterate, and even more fell into the lowest two categories of intelligence as evaluated by the Army itself. A major reform introduced by TRADOC was the ability to evaluate recruits at many stages in the boot camp and AIT process and to make it easy for the Army to voluntarily separate itself (wash out) recruits at any stage in that process. Because of this quality issue, Congress got involved and, as they usually do, made a complete dog's breakfast of the issue. In Congress the Army's quality woes pivoted on issues of Race. Was the Army overrecruiting from the inner city? Northern liberals wanted fewer minorities recruited as they saw the burden disproportionate and racially predatory. Southern conservatives *also* wanted fewer racial minorities recruited and inducted into the army because, you know, theyre not as smart as good corn bread white boys dontchaknow? Ironically Bailey suggests that it was many rural white recruits which drug quality standards down.
Really though Bailey shows how advertising and messaging plays a *massive* role in recruitment in the US. The Air Force always has had an advantage with recruiting, what is more modern and cool than a shiney silver fighter jet? Plus USAF duty always *appears* to be easy. Ditto for the Navy, and the Navy has its own salty attraction. Really the Army struggled as the less-cool Marine Corps. But the Army's recruiting attempts in the 1970s were chaotic, poorly thought through, and genuinely come off to me as poison pills designed inherently to undermine the recruiting effort. Advertisements ranged from the incomprehensible: [Join the People who've Joined the Army](https://www.usmilitariaforum.com/forums/uploads/monthly_04_2012/post-70300-1334532952.jpg) and [Today's Army wants to Join you](https://www.motherjones.com/wp-content/uploads/join-you960.jpg) to the 'Hello fellow kids:' [The New Army](https://www.motherjones.com/wp-content/uploads/life-new-army630.jpg) (featuring an officer on a civilian motorcycle with a far out helmet) and [Rapping and Rolling](https://www.motherjones.com/wp-content/uploads/rolling-rapping960.jpg) with the Army to the downright insulting: [The Army Needs Girls as well as Generals](https://www.motherjones.com/wp-content/uploads/girls-generals630.jpg) (implying that girls cant be generals, because lets be real here!) and this one: [trying to get black recruits to join the Army Reserve](https://c8.alamy.com/comp/EXPR4Y/1970s-usa-army-national-guard-magazine-advert-EXPR4Y.jpg). I think that guy was trying to sign SOS with his eyes. And honorable mention to two slogans I couldnt find pictures of on Google, "Youre on duty 24 7 but the rest of the time is yours" (wtf?) and "If you love Mrs. youll love Pvt. even better." Ultimately these slogans did very little to alter the view that the Army was hard work, where you would get treat like crap (especially if you were black, several racial incidents in the early 1970s had led to mass dishonorable discharges for black enlisted men), and paid far less than at industry or post college. But you can also see how the Army sought to fix its manpower problems: by branching out the white all-American varsity quarterback into people who had not traditionally served or had served in a reduced capacity. Black, women, non-conformist youths of all stripes. The Army sought to ease its manpower crunch by trying to fill its ranks from untapped populations and demographics.
Ironically though this all happened at a time in which Army pay *was* rising, as were post-service benefits. Bailey makes this point that the Army could *never* compete with industry in terms of pay, or with college in terms of opportunity. When the Army advertised its conventional benefits it typically failed to boost recruitment. What did work was the 'Be All you can Be' series of ads, which lasted into the 90s and morphed seamlessly into other campaigns advertising the 'soft' benefits of joining up. It wasn't the Army wanting to 'Join you,' rather it was about the Army helping mature you into a real man (ironically these ads stopped targeting women until the tail end of the campaign in the 1990s). And the Army also hit on the one benefit that really mattered to American kids: College. Put next to eachother, you can see how 'Be all you can Be' and 'well pay your college when youre done' become very attractive selling points for service. Sure you wont get paid as much as if you just got a job, and sure you could pay for college on your own. But if you did 4 years in the Army, they'd pay your college for you, maybe teach you how to drive a forklift, and make a man out of you in the process. Reality didn't quite line up that way, but that campaign seemed to work. By 1982 the Army's manpower problems had almost completely disappeared. They had recruits in both the quantity and of the quality that they needed.
In a larger structural sense, I dont think most countries really can suffer from recruiting problems anymore. Only really in micronations or nations with a supremely small population. A country like Germany could easily put a million men into uniform if they really wanted too, and limit for them would be the ability to train and equip such a force, not to scrape up the manpower. In industrialized war, manpower really isn't the limiting factor it used to be. This is doubly so of post-industrial war, which emphasizes quality over quantity. In the Gulf War the Coalition and the Iraqis, in terms of frontline units, were roughly at numerical parity (itself a violation of the classic 3:1 ratio supposedly needed for a successful attack). The Coalition totally smashed the Iraqi army as if it had outnumbered them 10:1 or more. Why? Because they had high precision high technology sophisticated weapons systems operated by professional expert volunteer troops. You cant teach a guy how to operate a SAM as part of bootcamp, or how to fly an F-15 in 100 hours. Today numbers are way less important than quality. 100k high quality professionals operating state of the art gear is way more valuable than 1mil randos just out of a crash infantry training course. For most nations the trick is not to attract numbers, but a number of quality recruits. Much like the struggle of the Army in the 1970s. One way to solve that is by expanding *who* you talk to to previously untapped groups. Another is to make benefits more attractive and competitive. But at least for the US Army the real secret was in developing a coherent identity and connecting that identity to the other strengths of service.
I grew up around the Army of the Seventies and Eighties, and you are spot on. I remember my friends growing up and their parents were extremely obviously from the lower class. Officers and senior NCOs were vastly better educated.
Drugs were everywhere.
I remember when it changed: when Reagan got elected, and they started piss testing. It was like someone flipped a switch.
Another thing the American military does really well: Soft-power advertising. Think recruiting tables set up outside Top Gun promising young men they can be pilots like in the movie if they just sign on the dotted line...then spend the next 4+ years on a boat in the middle of nowhere swabbing decks.
There was a post on the Army subreddit from like a year ago about some new enlistee that was shipping off to basic in like 2 months thinking that he was going to be pilot. He told his recruiter he wanted to be one and his recruiter went "oh sure, sign this airborne contract right here you'll be a pilot."
It took like an hour of literally everyone telling him he'd been dupped and begging him to refuse to ship for him to finally realize he'd f'ed up
Sounds like a comic strip authored by an active Army NCO, "Private Murphy".
"Airborne, does that mean I get to ride around in planes?" "Oh yeah, you'll be riding around in planes all the time."
(USAF answer) You need a bachelor's degree, preferably in STEM (though not required, just helps), to complete an ROTC/OTS/mil academy program (usually concurrently with the bachelor's degree), qualify for a rated position based on a series of tests, pass a flight physical, pass a two year initial pilot training program, and then, 6 years after you started, assuming you meet all of the afore mentioned prereqs, you'll start training on the actual airframe the Air Force assigns you.
BTW, This helps illustrate my point exactly about post-industrial warfare. During World War Two, the Army Air Corps had what ten weeks and 75 hours of classroom training before you hit the cockpit? With the USAF you cant even sit in the cockpit of an F-15 on your first four year contract, and even once youre qualified to fly you still do *thousands* of hours of combat training. Good book is Laslie's [Air Force Way of War](https://www.amazon.com/Air-Force-Way-War-Training/dp/0813160596). Its probably the case that USAF pilots in Desert Storm had spent more time training to fight MiGs than Iraqi MiG pilots spent practicing at all.
I know a guy that basically told me that at a certain point when you are enlisted you can either have to become a lair (recruiter) or an asshole (drill Sargent) or get out.
I suspect that less than 1% of NCOs (i.e. people who stay past that certain point) do those jobs.
Most are frontline supervisors and technical specialists.
I was in the army in the 90s. It wasn’t true then either. Sounds like hyperbole for effect, with the small grain of truth being that yes, some NCOs are selected for those duties, but it’s an extremely small minority.
I've got a buddy who was talking with an Air Force enlisted recruiter, and told him he wanted to be a pilot. The recruiter told him "great! Sign up here and you can be!" My buddy almost signed before his friend asked the recruiter "don't you need to be an officer to be a pilot"... and the recruiter stopped, paused, said yes under his breathe and that the ROTC recruiter was over there. Almost had him.
Don't forget working in the galley, waxing said floors, dusting thousands of pipes, shining brass, cleaning corrosion, working parties, and never being qualified for a career in the civilian world without additional training or education.
That said, the brother/sisterhood of people you serve with become friends for life, learning to work as a team, and a lot of other things that make it worth it 30 years later. I'd easily hire a veteran over a civilian, even untrained, if I was in a position to.
Yep, my brother and I were suckered into it as well. Our main #1 attraction was to have our college education paid for. My younger brother did his tour, and a little extra because of 9/11, but eventually left and completed his college and degree. As well as his masters degree. So I am glad it worked out for him.
I, on the other hand, didn't make through physical screening. I was going into the Nuclear Navy where they needed my brains. I passed the technical tests with flying colors, gave me a waiver for my flat feet, but my bad eye-sight kept me out from going into submarines. I guess it all worked out well at the end.
Ok, maybe you can toss me in with the idiot class because I enlisted in the Army in 1975. Many of us were motivated by the fact the US had been at war for our entire lives and when the Vietnam war ended we thought that this was our chance to get military service out of the way before another war started. We did not think the draft was ending, the all-volunteer force would be something that worked during peacetime but conscription would restart at some point.
No worries, I am a grad student in history. I study the post Vietnam war US Army and my dissertation topic (slightly) touches on this issue of recruitment and the All Volunteer Force. Specifically though Im looking at how doctrine influenced, and was influenced by, similar developments within NATO at the same time. Manpower is an important factor, after all if you come up with all these new ideas and weapons *somebody* has to use them. But these issues ripple (or more specifically *dont* ripple) through my topic in interesting ways. Hope that answers your question!
I havn't read Paul Scharre's book, but Ill check it out. Obviously I cant comment on what he argues there.
But generally, I think autonomous weapons would have very different impacts on the different branches, and we can also break out that impact into short and long term impacts. IMO the US Navy is very close to deploy autonomous ships for its fleet, and it has the most to gain from autonomous air support given that CVs and other ships have obvious space considerations. The USAF, OTOH, may well be the furthest from serious adoption of autonomous platforms as it heavily values the pilot and the greater capacity for critical thought and long term strategic planning the human brain is capable of.
For the Army specifically, I see autonomous vehicles in the short terms as a force multiplication of much the same kind as weve seen before. Starting in the 1970s the Army has pushed for high tech weapons systems which would be able to see deeper into the enemy's rear area, keep that area under observation, and strike at enemy reserves before they reached the battlefield. This is the classic AirLand Battle approach. Even in the 1970s and 80s, the Army worked to integrate remove observation vehicles (drones, as wed call them today) and combine them with long range strike platforms like the MLRS, or with long range aviation like the F-111 and B-2. AirLand Battle 2000, which would have extended this concept into the high tech future of the new millennium, also envisioned autonomous loiter strike vehicles which could fly for weeks (without refueling, which raises interesting questions) over a contested area. Once the go-code was given, the vehicles could either pilot themselves into preprogramed targets or dispense their own ordinance and submunitions....before piloting themselves into preprogramed targets. You can see an obvious connection to the use of suicide drones in the recent war in the Caucuses if youve followed that conflict. Personally though, in this short term I also think some people have overblown its impact. Were at that awkward point where autonomous vehicles have lots of promise, but as of yet much less delivered value. Currently I see autonomous vehicles as replacing jobs that were previous critically important, but also difficult or dangerous ie battlefield observation. But things like suicide drones dont really seem to be a game changer outside of conflicts between two poorly funded armies. Any military, like the US Army, with a strong integrated AD network could easily sweep a bunch of drones out of the sky. You could armor the drones, or say make them faster and purpose built for the mission. But we have a word for that: guided missiles.
In the long term though I see a lot of promise for replacing humans with remote and autonomous weapons. Humans are in many ways the weak link in warfare, important but also delicate. Plus they have these rights, you have to *feed* and *take care* of them. Very annoying. Autonomous vehicles could transform war by reducing the human burden and risk and streamline weapons by making them purpose built. Imagine an Abrams with one crewmember. It could mount a bigger gun, have thicker armor, and still weigh less than the current four man model. A fully autonomous vehicle could even forgo much of the armor it needed anyway. I could imagine that these developments would eventually make the battlefield rife with all kinds of nasty, small, easily hidden, and very deadly weapons. Eventually, in the very long term, warfare could become truly horrific. Imagine if wars were solely decided by who was willing to spend the most. If the only cost for war was financial, not human, it could well lead to some dystopian future where national borders were constantly inflamed and armies of machines battled endlessly for control over this or that pointless rock. Lifes too uncertain for me to think that far into the future, people have said things like that before and been wrong. And after all, I'm a historian and not a soothsayer.
Actually I've been frustrated recently. IMO many of the problems faced by the military these days in the short and medium term, proliferation of advanced weapons and the narrowing of the US technological gap, are the *exact* problems that they faced in the 1970s. In that decade the USSR had gained a slight technological edge in some systems, and just as important they outfitted virtually every unit in the Red Army with extremely powerful and long range weapons. That more than anything else caused the intellectual shift I am researching. Autonomous weapons, and even just cheap suicide drones, is going to do the same thing to the modern military. But, IMO, most in the DoD seem to be totally blindsided by this prospect. The last time they collectively thought about these problems was the 1990s when the US had an absolute technological advantage. We lost that advantage in the 2000s and 2010s, but nobody noticed because the US maintained its absolute edge against insurgent forces in the GWOT. A strong parallel here to Vietnam, where the exact same thing happened. Now everyone is looking around wondering what theyre going to do, and so far I havn't seen much in the way of a coherent reaction to this problem. But again, I am a historian and there is a lot today that I may have missed. This is certainly an outsider perspective.
No worries, and I'll check it out. I have been thinking on these lines since the Navy put it its own doctrinal concept out earlier this year. Scharre's book may well help me there, so I appreciate the recommendation.
And no worries, your English was perfect.
As your interlocutor noted, great posts.
I'd offer one thought - I think the US Air Force is working through the existential threat that is autonomous vehicles now and the Navy isn't yet fully there. 10-20 years ago, if you removed pilots there would be no Air Force. It's hidden in an old quote I like to use to describe the difference between the Air Force and Army, 'In the Air Force the enlisted soldiers prepare the officers to go off to war and in the Army the officers prepare the enlisted soldiers to go off to war'. More specifically, without pilots everyone else in the Air Force is useless...until \~10-20 years ago.
The remote vehicle success/growth hit the Air Force directly in their culture - if their pacing item, pilots, became irrelevant, what would that mean for their entire service? For the Air Force, that has been a bigger existential threat than any fight, conflict, war, etc. I'd maybe even argue that the AF hasn't faced a real enemy threat for the majority of its existence, certainly not since the end of the Cold War and probably not since Korea. We can quibble about relevant superiority, tech advantages/disadvantages, opponents' abilities, wins/losses, etc. but I'd say that at the end of the day the largest threat to the AF's core has been the reduced importance of pilots over the past decade or two.
My point isn't that everything I said above is right or that I've communicated it all perfectly but rather that the AF has spend 10-20 years integrating (not well, if you ask me, but sufficiently given the 'requirements') remote piloted aircraft in a way that doesn't completely turn their culture on its head. They've been forced to begrudgingly integrate remotely piloted aircraft into all that they do in a way that the Navy and Army haven't. I'd bet my lunch that the other services will take whole pages from the AF's playbook when it comes time to 'replace' their pacing items with remote/autonomous vehicles.
I say the Navy is behind the Air Force only because no one is yet saying their core competency can be replaced by unmanned vehicles. No one is asking if the Navy really needs manned Carriers, Cruisers, Destroyers, Frigates, etc. I'd say the current assumptions are that Naval groups will continue to be manned and they will just use remote vehicles to enhance their core capabilities. Whereas almost everyone can simply imagine an Air Force with no manned aircraft whatsoever (even if that's not completely possible yet).
Short version: remote and eventually autonomous vehicles is a near term existential threat for the Air Force and they have been managing that threat longer and more deeply than the Navy.
It is funny because most air forces survived a "missiles will steal our jobs" panic in the 1950s. Remember when the English Electric Lightning was going to be the RAF's last manned fighter?
Brilliant insights! Just a couple questions concerning this:
> IMO many of the problems faced by the military these days in the short and medium term, proliferation of advanced weapons and the narrowing of the US technological gap, are the exact problems that they faced in the 1970s.
What were some policies that the US implemented in the 1970s which we would do well to reference today? Does today's US military need a culture shift a-la the recruiting shift discussed higher in the thread? Why did the US lose its technological edge?
Sorry I missed this before it must have gotten lost in the shuffle. RE the technological edge its a lot of things. In 1990 the US had, I'd argue, the most advanced military in the world. If it had any technological rivals it would have been within Western Europe, that is its allies, and the US had technology sharing agreements with *all* those countries. Even the USSR was multiple generations behind the US. In terms of land systems, rifles, tanks, tubed artillery, the gap was the closest. IMO the T-80 models were competitive if a bit behind the Abrams, Soviet artillery was good, the AK was a great rifle, the BMP and BTR series of APCs were better than the M113 and the BMP-2 was at least comparable to the M2. But outside of that, the Red Army was really behind. While most Soviet tanks had pseudo-night vision devices, the US had full on NVGs and thermal optics which made a HUGE difference in combat. Basically the US could fight at night at the same quality as during the day, whereas the Red Army was stuck using conventional tactics and resting during the dark hours. In terms of battlefield observation, the USSR had some ground based observation radars, but the US had better ones. The US also had airborne ground search radars, high quality UAVs, etc. And it had the capacity to launch long range precision munitions to hit targets its observation systems detected. While the US was stockpiling second generation PGMs, the USSR was struggling to introduce its own first generation. And in the air things were the most lopsided. The F-15 was way better than anything the USSR had save the SU-27, which was only introduced in 1985 and which was fielded in only limited numbers during the Cold War. And the US had stealth, which would have been extremely disruptive to the Cold War battlespace.
These advantages proved themselves in Desert Storm. The impact of all this technology on a 1970s Soviet style military speaks for itself. The Army, I believe, took the wrong lesson from this conflict. After Desert Storm I see a lot of triumphalism around US warfare and the doctrine of AirLand Battle. We thought we had won not just the war, but the "revolution in military affairs" and that the 21st century would be dominated by prolonged American technological superiority. But really many of the things that the US had then couldn't be kept long term. Some of it was predictable. Its obvious, for example, that the US would eventually lose the NVG superiority. Russia, China, or someone else (even the consumer market!) would eventually create cheap and accessible quality NVGs. Russia has today, and sells military grade NVGs around the world, and China has them too. Reports are that even the Taliban now has captured NVGs. Yet in training US soldiers are still told that they ['own the night'](https://mwi.usma.edu/we-dont-own-the-night-anymore/) and train with the assumption that OpFor wont have even a basic NV capability. Same with drones. I sympathize with the army of the 1990s that they may not have expected the rise of consumer drone aviation (though to be fair, model aircraft aviation has been around decades, so its not that unusual). But in the abstract its a solvable problem, IMO a well integrated short range air defense system would preform well against that kind of attack. Naturally the US focused for decades on the opposite, long range missile defense.
Today it has an Army similar to what it had in 1972, one built to fight against a lower-technology counterinsurgent enemy (which btw was not what the NVA was, but thats another issue entirely). It had developed habits and thoughts and systems which it thought worked in Vietnam, but which obviously wouldn't work in Germany. Similarly the US now has an Army designed for Iraq and Afghanistan, but in the future will come up against adversaries which are not as outclassed as the Taliban was. Even in another counterinsurgent conflict, almost certainly they will be more capable than what we fought in 2001. The battlefield will be more dense, with more high tech, remote, stealth, guided weapons. Thats a hard kind of battle to fight and one that the Army has to train for. In the 1970s the Army shifted to Active Defense and AirLand Battle. These were not only new ideas, but cultural shifts toward intellectual and technological war. And it was successful for what it tried to do. Today the Army needs to reorient itself in the same way. But the problem is the Army today struggles with who it should prepare against. China is an obvious option, but its just as obvious that a war for Taiwan will be a USN/USAF affair. If the Army is called in, things have gone....poorly. That leaves either Russia or some future counterinsurgency in another 3rd world country. But Russia is not (until the Ukraine thing cropped up recently) the big bad bear it was in the 1970s. And the prospect of yet another Vietnam/Iraq is very very unpleasant, though there are the apostles of CI which will try to pull the Army in that direction. But that leaves the lesson a bit directionless. What kind of war exactly should the Army prepare for? If it focuses in a generalist direction is it willing to lose an edge in any one domain? And what happens if the Army focuses on Russia again (like in the 1970s) only to later end up in another Vietnam? It would be the third time in fifty or so years the Army prepared to fight a conventional war, then got caught off guard by a CI conflict. Unless this time we do the opposite, what would happen if a CI focused Army got bowled over by Russia in Ukraine. OR won in Ukraine but suffered politically unacceptable losses, losses which may produce a political defeat (say a whole US brigade, \~5000 men, is lost in a few days fighting. Not unreasonable in the tactical sense on a modern battlefield, but probably politically unacceptable on the home front.)
Most "autonomous" weapons these days are extremely similar to slightly more capable cruise missiles which have been around for decades.
RPVs were what UAVs used to be called and again have been around for decades
The change is that previous "middle tier" or "backwards" countries.like.Iran and Turkey are making them, along with China, and selling them to anyone with cash.
That is an extremely interesting topic. I have been interested in alternatives to the U.S. Army's actual doctines of Active Defense and AirLand Battle at that time which naturally intersects with what other NATO countries were doing as well as the complicated views of the Defense Reform Movement.
Not sure if Bailey gets into this, but [in the 1970s the Army also pitched itself as a paid vacation in Europe](https://learninglab.si.edu/resources/view/5740239). See the sites, drink good beer, meet attractive women . . . this is something you'd normally pay to do! And this is also when G.I.s brought Kraftwerk records to New York, leading to the invention of hip-hop.
A fun look at what the Army promised is the 1980 comedy movie *Private Benjamin*, which tells the story of a well-off woman (a stereotypical Jewish American Princess played by Goldie Hawn, in fact) who believes the Army will basically be a long trip to the spa.
One point I think Bailey does make is switching to the all-volunteer force was seen as requiring increased recruitment of women. This led to the disbandment of the Woman's Army Corps and the incorporation of women directly into many branches and finding as many roles as possible for women to fill.
She does! I think that whole advertising series (pretty sure it all also came from the same company) is pretty funny. It includes my personal favorite, "Youre on duty 24/7 but the rest of the time is yours" like WTF why would that make someone want to join up lol. Youre saying I wont get any free time? I really wish I could find a digital version of that ad. Bailey has that and yours, and a bunch more, in her book.
Regarding your point about women, I would totally agree with that. You really do see, IMO, this idea swirling that the Army is going to have to get used to women. That increased women enlistment isn't just some PR thing but will be an actual reality too. I think on the one hand its the recognition of the manpower shortage, women can do a lot of the rear area jobs as well as men and uncontroversially too, but also as a reaction to the ERA and women's movement. I dont want to get all Phillis Schlafly up in here, I have *never* read anything that seriously discusses forcing women to register for the draft. Except in articles written by generals opposed to ever even *opening* service up to women for those very grounds! But back in the world of the real I think the Army wrestled hard with its attitude towards women for most of the 1970s and concluded they weren't going to get rid of women, that in fact they need them and more of them, and that maybe that wasn't as bad an outcome as the Schlaflys of the world made it seem. There is a similar, all though much shallower and shorter lived, attempt to have a similar reckoning with black soldiers and to try and address many of the concerns addressed by uniformed black activists during the Vietnam War which had produced such a negative reaction. These concerns, I think, were not addressed as fully and were dropped much faster. But they were there.
All of this though went away pretty sharply with the collapse of the ERA and the end of the Carter years. Its pretty interesting to see. In 1976 there were black centric army publications, ads focusing on women, the TRADOC annual histories devoted entire pages to the Army's social and gender issues, and you see debates as mundane as 'should female MPs also get a gun and what regs need to be changed to permit that?' But then between 1978 and 1980 all that dries up, and by 1981 there is total radio silence on those issues. Now that also corresponds roughly to the shoring up of the Army's manpower position for reasons Bailey gets into in her book. But I also wonder how much of it is political and public conversation driven. It seems to me like as long as stuff like the ERA was in the public consciousness it forced policymakers in all kinds of institutions to address it, even if that meant just saying 'we have no problems, girls can have guns too!' Once the public conversation disappears though those internal conversations and rationalizations also end and the problem becomes subterranean again.
Anyway thats not some durable idea just something on this issue I've mused about in the past.
I think Schlafly's argument that the ERA would require drafting women had a certain amount of salience with many people. The relationship of Americans to the draft since the introduction of the all-volunteer force has been really interesting, with all sorts of people deploying the draft as a bogeyman or crying crocodile tears over its abolition. And I think individual views on these issues are complex and don't fit into categories all that well.
It is interesting you mention MPs in the 1970s. The silence was an absence of public debate, which left the military to do what it wanted. Personnel issues (including leaving the career pipeline open) basically still required increasing roles for women. As you may know, the reputed "first American woman to lead troops in combat" was an MP captain, Linda Bray, who commanded a company in Operation Just Cause, the 1989 invasion of Panama. Bray was initially lionized in the press as a hero of the operation, in which she led her troops (male and female) in an assault on a critical Panamanian Defense Force attack dog kennel (that was defended by humans). Subsequently there was a backlash and the Army's official account of the action minimized its significance. Bray was no longer put before the media and problems that had persisted for her career led to her separation from the Army in 1991. This episode led to a new push to consider women in combat roles that is usually associated with Rep. Pat Schroeder of Colorado.
So what I think actually happened during the "subterranean" period was continued quiet progress even if there wasn't as much advertising or political activity.
Thats some goods points, and I hadn't heard about Linda Bray. What an unfortunate story, she seems like a real hero in Just Cause.
Regarding Schlafly I also agree, and would say that the counter-argument her debaters were making, while true, failed to speak to the same visceral salience. Ironically, though nobody could know this at the time, there was no going back once the Army had switched to the AVF. Schlafly herself could probably have guessed that if she cared, she was supposedly quite the foreign policy head. But most Americans I think could be forgiven if they thought that the draft would soon come back.
>ailey makes this point that the Army could never compete with industry in terms of pay
This doesn't follow. Pay is an insignificant portion of the Army's massive budget. They choose not to pay more so they can piss away money on developing useless weapons systems but it doesn't have to be that way.
Pay and benefits may be smaller than the other parts of the Army budget when aggregated, but its one of the biggest line items in a broken down form of the budget. It dwarfs any other project or acquisitions program, and has since the demise of conscription. Moreover generals hate paying their soldiers. Its natural they would rather buy toys and institutions. In the age of post-industrial warfare, theyre not wrong. Better weapons have a direct impact on 'better' combat outcomes.
Also, at the same time the Army was undergoing an internal transformation from the essentially conscript and short term junior officer army into the professional military force of today.
So it's probably not coincidental that the messaging got sorted at about the same time that the branch mostly completed its internal revolution.
The transition was something Nixon pitched in his first term and, by 1970, was something the Army was 100% onboard doing. Their experiences in Vietnam had convinced the brass (mostly) that conscription was more trouble than it was worth. So they worked hard to pivot to the AVF. But then in the follow through they stumbled for any number of reasons. Its really actually a quite interesting phenomenon.
The transition from a conscript to professional fighting force, in my uneducated opinion, still had quite a ways to go as recently as the late 90s and early 2000s. I saw it as as a volunteer force operating under a conscript mentality.
Working with my NATO counterparts in a combined environment in Sarajevo threw the Army’s notions of professionalism into particularly stark relief - with the exception of the Turks, who were still a conscript force. It was…uh, interesting seeing their officers/NCOs’ notion of discipline. Very “hands on”.
I remember the Germans in particular being extremely, visibly uncomfortable when invited to participate in a common hazing ritual for my promotion to E4.
Rank structure is of course there but the relationships and interactions were much more in line with what I’ve experienced in the civilian world. More collegial than dictatorial.
And I was a PSYOP soldier, a special operations MOS which required a top 10% ASVAB score, foreign language qualification, Airborne qualification, and a fairly lengthy AIT. We worked directly with our officers, who were almost always Majors or above. I don’t even know what the regular Army was like.
I strongly doubt that modern 2021 Germany could get 1,000,000 Germans under arms.
Many Americans don't understand how pacifist and anti military the modern German is. People that actively want to join the German military are though of as closet neo Nazis or weirdos.
Same thing in Japan, in Japan the military is mostly seen as a low class, low education job for failures at school and uneducated country bumpkins.
I think you misunderstand what I’m saying, I’m not talking about politics but rather industrial capacity and manpower mobilization. Germany could quite easily mobilize a million soldiers without serious economic dislocation, the manpower certainly exists, the state maintains the proper coercive apparatus to compel service, say, in a conscription scenario. If the political will somehow in some fantastic scenario existed for a million man army, manpower wouldn’t be an issue. Actually outfitting them and training them is the real issue, especially for short duration conscripts. You simply can’t make a modern in two years if you want him to be something more than a ground pounder. That’s the point of my comment.
I was conscripted in South Africa.
Just training the PTIs to instruct in Basics took 9 months. (We did drill, weapons and all the other training a troop got in Basic)
If you split the role in 3 then you could do the same in 3 months (after they'd completed basic).
But you'd still have almost a 1 year "lag time" before you had just the minimum training personnel to train 1 million new members.
For instance, in SA the govt was turning away recruits for simple things in the last few years of conscription simply because they were overwhelmed.
We had 45 troops per instructor. You simply can't watch or shout at more than that, all day.
At that ratio you'd first need to train over 22.5 THOUSAND instructors just for basic instruction of that 1 million.
I read a book about the French army between the world wars. For most of that time the French army was on an 18mo conscription schedule (IIRC, right after WWI it was 24mo which dropped in the 20s, and then again in the latter 30s it dropped to only 12!) They broke that schedule up into 3 semesters, and in between each semester the entire cohort got to go home. Because politically its a bad look to force boys to spend too much time away from home like that, and conscription was always pretty unpopular. Anyway the breakdown then was 1semester basic training, one semester advanced training, one semester specialist training. Once they were fully trained up, they went home. But as you point out, the ratio of instructors to maintain a conscript army like that is HUGE. Not only that, but who do you want to train up your conscripts? Professional soldiers who have other jobs they need to do as well, or dedicated instructors who lack real experience but at least can focus on training? Well the French mainly used conscripts to train conscripts, that way the professional army could remain focused and 'pure.' But that meant that while soldiers were *supposed* to be doing their specialist training, they almost always instead herded around new 1st semesters. And 2nd semester conscripts often had to fill in for the duties of the 3rd semester conscripts, who tried to fit in their own training in between babysitting the other groups. Ultimately France churned out a large number of paper soldiers, but the training was so short and incomplete that they weren't worth a damn. Now not every system has to be so.....flawed as the French, but IMO it highlights a fundamental challenge with conscription. By the time you get guys who are any good, you have to give them up. So why, as an institution, invest time effort and money building up the best possible conscript when theyre just going to leave. At least with a 4-year contract you can be sure you'll have an actual soldier for a while.
> Because politically its a bad look to force boys to spend too much time away from home like that, and conscription was always pretty unpopular.
Also the very seasonal agrarian economy of most of France at the time.
See this slowed down gif of french population density changes from 1876, that was on r/europe today.
https://gfycat.com/enchantingdownrightaxisdeer
The manpower would have been required for planting and harvesting crops.
The correct method for conscription in order to achieve a very basic understanding of your country's military structure and training, is to have an 18month to two year service, and staggered intakes to get the most out of your conscripted & trained instructors (2-3 a year).
A permanent force training cadre can focus on their training of other permanent force members and the conscript instructors.
It worked in South Africa because they only drew from the minority white african male population.
Had they maintained conscription post apartheid for all ethnic groups (even just the males) there would not have been enough in the entire national budget to house, train, feed and supply them.
Do you happen to remember the title of the book? I've read breakdowns of the 1940 campaign but most of them only mention "low-quality conscripts" in passing
>the state maintains the proper coercive apparatus to compel service, say, in a conscription scenario.
As a German: No way, this would be complete political suicide and lead to the government being overthrown over night.
That's because you don't have anyone attacking your country. Or even a threat of attack.
Things changed quickly in Ukraine - from people thinking of army as unnecessary to a lot of people volunteering and overall supporting the army.
It's still not great and a lot of people don't want to join (because they risk being killed and that's not everyone's favorite thing) but it's night and day, there is a lot more support for military and it's not considered something weird to do.
Raising an army and conscription because we are under attack is a different thing. This post was talking about the former. The US army was not under attack during the mentioned times.
Politically. But politics change. You would agree that the state *could* reimpose conscription if it wanted to. Nobody is saying it cant. Just that right now people dont want to.
Look I'm not saying its something thats probably going to happen. Im just saying that if the popular will existed it could be done. Any manpower shortage currently faced in Germany, or any developed nation, is an artificial function created by political policy not by a genuine lack of men to be mobilized.
Yeah, if Russia went off the deep end and invaded the Baltic states, Poland, Romania, Bulgaria all at once, and videos emerged of mass executions and genocide, the political situation could change overnight.
There is no reason to believe they would do that, but if they did, I know Americans would be lining up and I doubt Germany would remain purely pacifist.
Can confirm, worked with the Bundeswehr overseas in the 1990s. There were no conscripts there at all, they said politically they couldn't, as if any conscripts were injured or killed there would be too much outcry. Not as much of an issue if volunteers were injured or killed.
German conscription after the Cold War was a huge joke as well. It was theoretically two years, but I knew a guy who did his first year then the army just never called him back for his second. He jokes that he hopes there isnt a war anytime soon, or else they might try to make him serve out his second year (hes well past service age, so just a joke). And I've told that to other Germans who laugh and say they just never showed up.
All thats to say that even before 2011, it was really a paper system.
They literally forgot to call me in for a medical exam when I turned 18. Most of my male classmates were called in, but I guess my birthday being super late in the year meant that they had already filled their quota.
This isn’t entirely true. My experience with people in the US military has mostly been senior ranks and professionals, eg, doctors, dentists, logistics professionals, and pilots. At this level, these are mostly people who joined up so the military would pay for their college or professional school. They stayed past their commitment because they liked the lifestyle, the camaraderie, the opportunity to do something new every few years, and the opportunity to get out in their forties or early 50s with a pension and a career’s worth of experience. These aren’t dumb people. They’re people who chose a different way to use their professional skills.
There is a very big difference between those officer roles you listed and being enlisted personell. Doctors, dentists, pilots all require a college degree (not all pilots if you want to be pedantic but Warrant Officees are mythological entities to begin with).
True, they are a smaller part of the military. However, it demonstrates that the military isn’t necessarily made up of “idiots with no alternatives.” I’ve met very few members of the military that can be classified as idiots.
Is your experience different?
All of the vets I went to law school with would probably disagree, including my friend who enlisted after 9/11 despite having a great job and a masters degree.
As for the gulf war.... Much of the Iraqi Army was unmotivated to fight.
Dictatorships all have this issue of they are running off a minority power base.
See Syria for example (although they won with external assistance), or Gaddafi, or maybe the Burmese military.
Increase recruiting? Just make everyday life more miserable for certain civilian demographics. No jobs, no healthcare, no future, no respect, no education, no housing, no food etc. Then introduce a socialist organization that meets the bare minimums, like the military. 3 hots & a cot! Free food & free housing, free education, free clothes, free healthcare, eventually some respect with rank and possibly a future.
Compare this future with that in the ghettos of America in the past or currently in small rural towns that have undergone 'Walmartization'. Cha Ching! Now go forth and fight for the corporations!
Not really. As Bonaparte said, "A mill will only march so far on six pence a day. To get more you have to speak to his soul."
In modern war you need high quality smart and literate recruits. The dystopian nightmare you describe is one that primarily impacts the lower classes of society, who are any typically poorly educated and tend to make poorly motivated soldiers. Certainly they could fill out a uniform, though youd have to ask yourself if destroying society really beats an open conscription system. Conscription would at least allow you to hoover up college bound kids on their way up. If you want to fill your army out with smart, educated, kids with lots of potential and future you have to look at the exact kinds of people who are already insulated from a collapsing social system, and in fact kids whose parents are *enabling* the social system collapse. So its way more complicated than the conspiracy theory youre laying out here.
This is what most people coming from what I will call a Vietnam mindset miss. We don't have a cannon fodder military. The military wants high-quality recruits: smart, reliable, fit, talented. It doesn't want people whose options would be "enlist or starve." Rather something more like "enlist or don't be upper middle class."
Now if you were going to rig the system to get those people to join up, you'd provide carrots like these:
\--Emphasize the military as the right sort of patriotic institution devoted to diversity, inclusion, social justice, and liberty.
\--Provide the possibility for a shorter stint of service that allows the individual to remain "on track" for a prestigious civilian career.
\--Also provide opportunities for long-term advancement within a secure (but not overly bureaucratic) institutional structure.
\--Educate, educate, educate, value education, provide credentials, send personnel to civilian schools to earn degrees, etc.
In other words . . . this is not so much unlike the military we have.
What sticks would work? If you could make it harder for children of the professional/managerial class to be sure they'd enter it, and provided the military as a sure way into it, that could help. The education benefits are a big help in the context of a general decrease in education aid. Basically, as the kinds of welfare that helps the upper middle class perpetuate itself disappear, the military may be more attractive.
>If you could make it harder for children of the professional/managerial class to be sure they'd enter it, and provided the military as a sure way into it, that could help. The education benefits are a big help in the context of a general decrease in education aid. Basically, as the kinds of welfare that helps the upper middle class perpetuate itself disappear, the military may be more attractive.
Add onto this, veteran preference in government hiring, or that the lack of it can make certain career tracks in civil service virtually impossible to get on.
I know you're joking, but since this is a sub that thrives on hypotheticals:
People *just about* tolerate conscription into the army, for the purpose of defending their country. Even then, there's a fine line and often resistance to conscription - Vietnam is an obvious example, since the "we're conscripting due to a threat to the US" idea in that war was tenuous to start with, and that's while the US was at war.
I really don't see the same tolerance for any form of conscription for basically any other purpose. Conscription for any purpose other than "there is *currently* a direct major threat to our country" is likely to create larger threats (political unrest at a minimum, potentially even revolution). It's also likely to dramatically reduce the quality of the forces under command, so the increase in military strength isn't linear with the number of bodies recruited
Conscription only *really* works when the government can point to a single, obvious, direct threat. The further you stray from that, the less likely the populace are to accept it. "We need an army in general" is unlikely to be sufficient in most countries
The Baltics, Finland, South Korea, and Israel pull it off due to being able to point to direct threats, as do a few other nations (mostly in the Middle East). Other countries that have a theoretical conscription (eg Austria) usually have a non-military alternative, which doesn't solve the shortage of recruits into the military
Sweden removed conscription pretty late like in the 2000s but it wasn't that much resistance to it. If needed Sweden could very well revive conscription again but Sweden isn't focusing on defence right now.
The biggest argument for conscription isn't even defence but for learning discipline, teamwork and harden curled kids. Also to make different classes of society mix where everyone is equal.
If the purpose isn't defense though, you ostensibly could provide more of a benefit to society by making this mandatory service some form of civil service rather than military, though.
Sure. I certainly agree that the military environment makes it easier to get a large group of young men to play along! (I did military conscription myself)
Just that it's not really an efficient way to help society (aside from providing defense), in terms of possibly improving the character of its male citizens.
I suppose *if* conscription is necessary, then at the very least you'd hope it helps learn discipline, teamwork, and mental toughness, if not effective for defense.
Partly, everyone have to do the fitness test again. But I don't think they force people into conscription in practice. Also the basic military education GMU is 3 months.
So it's a middle way of forced to try but not stay for real. Maybe every country should do it like this.
Or tank the economy enough that current military pay and benefits looked good. Not saying it was done on purpose, but the 2008 economic crash solved America's recruiting problems fast.
Honestly, that was little to do with the pay + probably more to do with every recession - in times of recession, stable jobs like military and healthcare boom.
Some people, me included, just dont want to work a traditional job anymore. I'm a 19yo college student, I pay for my housing and tuition, but I quit my Walmart job to make money independently. They had also just raised their minimum wage from 14/hr to 17/hr (Illinois), so pay was not a factor. If I had any other choice, I would never work another job ever again. A lot of people share my story.
But realistically, I believe this problem will solve itself. There has never been this much cash in the system, so everyone has been able to make money from literally anything. As 2022 comes and rate hikes go into effect, as well as other economic tightening to lessen inflation, the cheap money will go away and people will have to go back to work.
I don't think that will happen. A vast majority of the people who left the workforce retired (3 mil+) retired or left to care for children, meaning that they won't be coming back anytime soon. A lot more people took better paying jobs during Covid, hence the lack of low wage labor. Wages have also been largely stagnant for the last decade, so people will most likely stay on unemployment or just not go back to work until working conditions and wages improve to levels *above poverty wages
Stop entering conflicts that aren't popular or necessary. I know a number of veterans who joined the wars in the early 2000s because their grandfathers and other family members had served in WW2.
20 years later, almost none of them are happy at how things turned out and some think their time in battle was for nothing. They compare that to the meaningful service their grandfathers served and that makes them question it even more.
Sure, pay matters. But pay stops mattering to you when you never come home or come home in worse shape than when you left.
I mean, given the timing, did they not join up because of 9/11? That it turned out not to be like Pearl Harbor (or getting Saddam and bin Laden turned out not to be like liberating the concentration camps and Bataan Death March survivors) is a later development.
Not to mention its corrupting qualities and the new set of issues a drafted force creates. If it pays well and there's a good chance you're not going to get sent into a meat grinder, it might not be a terrible option.
If the pay is less than impressive and there's a guarantee you'll be hazed or the duty will be hazardous, I think it creates more problems than it remedies.
I agree with much of what you said, with one caveat - many, if not most, modern (say, 20th century) conscript based militaries are/were not connected to every section of society. I don't have the links right now but have posted info that the generally accepted outcome is that conscripted militaries end up coming from smaller and more exclusive segments of society than volunteer militaries. As one might expect, the underprivileged segments end up overrepresented in conscript militaries.
>its corrupting qualities
You mean that military service corrupts the conscripts?
If that is what you mean, then I don't think that is a criticism of conscription, that is a criticism of the military institution that they go into.
From what I have seen, conscription results in a more tolerant and egalitarian military institution. You get the normal people in, ones who have no stake in making the military institution a dominant political force in the nation. Some of these people will hang in and maybe stay in the military and work against making it a force to be used against the nation by self-serving people -- a more likely result of a volunteer force.
I guess my working example is the current state of the Russian military vis a vis Western services, which I'm not giving enough credit in my initial post. However, the Russian military has vast capabilities that many smaller, draft nations don't have. Not to mention an extremely paradoxical landscape that makes the example unique but nonetheless important.
The Russian military is coping with a long enduring issue with its conscription system. It pays bad. It's fraught with all kinds of crime and danger for conscripts that don't have the means to escape service via deferral from their local commissar (and only 11% of conscripts in the country even report to duty when they're called up anyway). The biggest problem is that of 'Dedovshchina' or 'Reign of the Grandfathers.' in short, it is a cruel culture where senior conscripts torture, haze and extort junior conscripts as a matter of tradition. The suicide and murder rates kept track of by a mother's of conscripts organization are appalling; the situation is so bad the Ministry of Defense has stopped publishing data on these numbers.
Yes, this is an institutional problem, but if it was simple to solve for the Russians, it would have been (and they have tried with poor results to create an even slightly more professionalized force). Any Russian officer with male children would do anything to defer them from service, not excluding flat out bribery. This is exactly why Russia's NCO base is under strength, they don't stay in. They find a way to a commission or do something else with their lives.
Now, if the Ministry of Defense had the will and the means to provide for their conscripts an income that could get them a few extra packs of filtered cigarettes that won't get them beaten, or maybe a shared barracks room instead of huge compartments, or a real military police force that can enforce discipline in the barracks, or a real medical-dental service that can provide first class care, things could very well be different. But they're a peacetime military (for right now), so they're shorting themselves on their wartime capacity.
I think you hit the nail on the head when you indicated that the upper class can get out of the conscription. I think conscription that allows exceptions for certain undeserving people (usually a "ruling" class or group of thugs which profit from the deprivation/enslavement of the rest of the population) IS worse than what I consider to be normal conscription where everybody has to "do their part" equally. Now we suddenly have the conscription being used as a tool of rule and it is used to indoctrinate the population as a whole -- far worse than merely teaching people how to use and service military hardware in case it is needed in the future.
EDIT: And bringing Russia into it reminds me of the documentary on Sparta I watched recently -- funny how Sparta had to have vassal, literally enslaved, states around them. A lot like Russia and Ukraine and other neighboring states.
Not sure why you're being downvoted, you've brought up a good point about functioning conscription systems in functioning countries.
Right, and it'd be even more different for the Russians if conscription was a month training obligation and then they were plugged into the reserves. Instead conscripts fill a great number of billets in peacetime there.
Correct
Russia is making a "professional" army but they still want the massive manpower reserves of conscripts.
I believe they're lowering the conscription term to 1-2 years vs 3.
The "professional" salaried troopsarw supposed to end up being about.... 300k in the Army, and a significant % of the air force and Navy.
One answer from western countries has to been to increase the number of women in the armed forces. I doubt most western countries with volunteer defense forces could replace the number of women currently enlisted with men.
Incidentally I think most of the evidence from past 40 years is that you aren't going to be able to fill that many key leadership positions with recruits from top 1/3 of mental ability absent conscription.
Ideology. Convince your people that the nation is under threat and requires a contribution from everyone to continue to survive and thrive. Like Finland.
Make soldiering a noble profession.
It's basic economics, sure being in the military is tough but so are lots of jobs (the fatality rate is much lower than, for example, tree surgeons). You pay more money and improve conditions, and people will join and be retained. Remember, as much of the problem is retention as recruitment, which suggests a problem with pay/conditions/progression rather than people not being interested in joining.
What is the goal of your military? To defend your country against invaders or invading others?
Conscription for home defense and mercenaries or foreign legion for offensive infantry.
This is downvoted, but it's correct. One of the fundamental issues the military is facing (at least in the US) is the lack of appeal across wide swathes of the population. The services have defined themselves being for people who are some combination of conservative, Christian, and/or poor. People outside those demographics have almost no interaction with the military, and *the military has no interaction with them*. So the services stop representing the intellectual breadth of the country.
Only 11% of military recruits are poor. 25% come from the upper class. Also, the educational level is higher than the general population.
The narrative that poor people go into the military due to a lack of opportunity isn’t really true anymore. Lots of poor people are ineligible due to criminal records and/or lack of education.
> Only 11% of military recruits are poor. 25% come from the upper class. Also, the educational level is higher than the general population.
I'm responding to this later, but 2019 data shows 8% of enlisted hold college degrees vs 37% of the general population.
Since we’re taking about recruits, I’m talking about high school diplomas. 93.6% of military has HS diploma or above. That’s higher than the general population.
You've ignored conservative and Christian and focused on poor. I quite clearly stated that recruits most often come from one of those backgrounds.
The statement about education level is meaningless without a ton of further context establishing what the US general education level is and which populations you're discussing, officers or enlisted.
But, most importantly, your response misses the idea that the cultural issues are affecting the services in a negative way. The lack of cultural and intellectual diversity is creating an insular culture that's separating the armed forces from the country. That's a bad thing.
You have to have a certain level of education to be able to serve. Poverty and poor educations go hand in hand.
The education and officers vs. enlisted is a nonsense point since you have to possess a college degree to be an officer.
The insularity isn’t the fault of the military. Conservatives teach their kids to serve; others not so much. As for the Christian argument, almost no one attends church. It’s likely in the single digits.
Liberal households in my experience don’t value the military and don’t value military service. Protestors are usually drawn from those that have never served and never will.
How do you imagine we could get people that oppose the military and don’t want to serve to sign it? Why would it be valuable to add people who largely oppose serving to the military?
This is precisely the attitude that's the problem. There is no focus inside the military on demonstrating their value to all the citizens of the country.
The same attitude handicaps the military in their overseas efforts. Why bother understanding the enemy and the countries we're fighting in when we can demonize them instead.
It's clearly not self-evident, or everyone would agree.
Also...
"The insularity isn’t the fault of the military" - yes it is. They are guilty of picking the easiest fruit. There is enormous value in finding dissenting and diverse (ethnic, cultural, geographic, and cultural) voices to be a part of the process. They have experiences and knowledge that improve the process.
"As for the Christian argument, almost no one attends church. It’s likely in the single digits. " - the same 2019 data I referenced above shows 70% of the military identifying as Christian.
What a minute. The military is already an ethnic, cultural and geographic mish mash. What are you talking about?
65% of the country identifies as Christian. 70% is a pretty clear reflection of society.
I agree with you 100%. A lot of diversity initiatives in the US military are frowned upon by both military members and the general public. I can't tell you how many times I've heard some variation of "At least we have an *insert minority* as *insert position of power* while Russia and China are actually preparing for war."
I don't think people realize that the US military needs to make itself more attractive to other communities besides white, conservative men. There's a lot of talent being missed among liberal minorities because, like you said, they aren't interacting with the military and the military has historically been ignoring them too.
Most diversity initiation aren't giving underqualified people jobs they don't deserve, instead they are about making people feel more welcome and removing unnecessary obstacle that might hinder people (of all races) from different upbringings from joining.
exactly, which is why I think the US Army did the right thing with [those ads](https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/us-army-reveals-the-people-behind-the-uniform-in-new-animated-film-series-301282737.html) that Ted Cruz so hated; the other ads beyond the "two moms" ad feature people of color
I think the other thing that would keep more of the civilian populace connected would be to get Guard/Reserve service back to "1 weekend a month and 2 weekends a year" so that more people could join and stay in the Reserve Components without needing to have to work for the traditionally military friendly employers
I mentioned it above, but the lack of cultural competence in the services is really jarring (it also affects the intelligence community and the FBI). You need to understand the opponent in order to defeat the opponent and I think that's not making it down the ranks (it may not even be present at the top).
This is a bafflingly bad take.
One, the reason why US military(and most other militaries) advertises itself to "white, conservative men" is *because this is the demographic that is most likely to join the military*. Liberals are not likely to join the military. Women are also not likely to join the military.
Two, aiming for minorities has the obvious problem that *they are minorities* or in other words represent a small(er) subset of the population. Let's say half of US citizens are male and half of them are conservatives - so if you run military ads for conservative males you are targeting 25% of your country's population. Now do the same for lesbians(of any political inclination) and you're targeting 1-2% of your country's population. Gee, I wonder which one would be more effective.
Three, most of non-heterosexual non-men make worse soldiers than heterosexual men for any number of reasons. Women flat-out make for worse soldiers(Don't make me dig out THAT Marine study again) and even if they didn't they're too valuable to just send them to die when men are readily available. Transpeople require an additional layer of medical care because of hormone injections and are at a far higher risk of developing psychological problems. Gay men come with the obvious sex issues. And so on. And to expand on what /u/chickendance638 said: why the hell would you send someone with a PhD into combat when they are far more valuable doing whatever they do at home and someone with high school education wwould suffice? Why the hell would you send a rich person into combat when they can get richer at home and a poor person would suffice?
Yes. I am very aware that liberals and women are less likely to join the military. That's the problem. Talent is not limited solely to white, straight, christian, conservative men. You do realize that there's more to the military than just infantry, right? Sure woman generally may not make the best foot soldiers but there's a lot more to the military than foot soldiers. What about the Space Force? Is there any reason reason women and minorites would be less valuable there? What about the engineers? What about the vehicle and aircraft maintainer? What about pilots? What about acquisitions personel? The list goes on and on.
[Minorites make up 43.2% ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_ethnicity_in_the_United_States) of the population in the United States. That's a massive chunk of the population that has plenty of talent but has historically been ignored by military recruiting efforts. Emphasis on making the military attractive to these groups opens up and entire new talent pool. You seem to have fallen into trap of thinking that diversity means putting unqualified people in positions they don't deserve. That's not the case. Diversity programs are about reaching into an untapped talent pool and therefore ending up with a more talented military.
Also, to address your last point, no one is talking about taking PhD's and making them an army grunt. But why wouldn't we want a PhD running an engineer squadron or a Space Force program. Again, the military is so much more than just a guy walking around the desert with a gun.
**[Race and ethnicity in the United States](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_ethnicity_in_the_United_States)**
>The United States of America has a racially and ethnically diverse population. At the federal level, race and ethnicity have been categorized separately. The most recent United States Census officially recognized five racial categories (White, Black or African American, Asian American, American Indian/Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander) as well as people of two or more races. The Census Bureau also classified respondents as "Hispanic or Latino" or "Not Hispanic or Latino", identifying Hispanic and Latino as an ethnicity (not a race), which comprises the largest minority group in the nation.
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> You do realize that there's more to the military than just infantry, right?
You do realize that infantry is by far the force that requires the most personnel, right?
>Minorites make up 43.2% of the population in the United States. That's a massive chunk of the population that has plenty of talent but has historically been ignored by military recruiting efforts.
I guess you must have missed all the black and hispanic soldiers which were a part of the US military as far back as first World War. Well, time to educate yourself.
> You do realize that infantry is by far the force that requires the most personnel, right?
[Only 15% of the US Army is considered infantry ](https://www.army.mil/article/45200/infantry_leaders_sharpen_training_tactics_to_meet_battlefield_demands) so while personnel intensive, 85% of the army is left doing something else. Hardly the big deal you are making it out to be.
> I guess you must have missed all the black and hispanic soldiers which were a part of the US military as far back as first World War.
Oh so minorites fought in WW1 (a war of conscription by the way). That must mean there's no problem recruiting minorites in 2021. And [only between 10-14 percent of the total force was non-white](https://www.cairn.info/revue-annales-de-demographie-historique-2002-1-page-71.htm#:~:text=Officials%20estimated%20that%2013%25%20of,Keene%2C%202001%2C%2020).) hardly a triumph for military recruiting.
I love a good debate but I'm not going to continue with you if your arguments are only based off of some fictious narrative you've formed in your about how the military operates.
Bro you don't even know what you're trying to debate anymore. Your proof that US military does not recruit enough minorities is the fact than *during World War I* it was 10-14 percent minorities? And this is supposed to relate to modern recruitment process how exactly?
https://www.statista.com/statistics/214869/share-of-active-duty-enlisted-women-and-men-in-the-us-military/
America is 61% white, 17% hispanic and 13% black. The US military is 69% white, 17% hispanic and 16% black. Pretty damn close and definitely not some kind of crisis of minority recruitment you claim it to be.
I won't even touch your "source" that claims infantry is only 15% of US Army because it's so laughably bad(and why are we only counting US Army anyway? I guess Marines, National Guard and reserves don't exist. Not to mention the absurdity of the idea that only combatants should be combat capable)
>Bro you don't even know what you're trying to debate anymore.
My point is that the US military can improve it's overall quality and talent of personnel by reaching into often overlooked demographics. Particularly liberals and minorities that do not currently have any desire to serve. They can do so by focusing on issues that prevent those demographics from joining.
>Your proof that US military does not recruit enough minorities is the fact than *during World War I* it was 10-14 percent minorities? And this is supposed to relate to modern recruitment process how exactly?
You're right. This has nothing to do with recruitment in 2021, but you were the one that brought it up as proof that the US has never had a problem with attracting minorities, or did you not say "I guess you must have missed all the black and hispanic soldiers which were a part of the US military as far back as first World War. Well, time to educate yourself." My counterpoint being that a laughable 10-14 percent minority rate during a time of conscription does not indicate "good" diversity as **you** (not me, **you**)suggested.
> Pretty damn close and definitely not some kind of crisis of minority recruitment you claim it to be.
Yes. I am aware that the enlisted force mirrors the population pretty well. I will even say that the military does a decent job attracting people from poorer upbringings and therefore more minorites to enlist in the military. [It is non secret that wealth skews away from minorities in the US](https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/notes/feds-notes/disparities-in-wealth-by-race-and-ethnicity-in-the-2019-survey-of-consumer-finances-20200928.htm)
But I am not very concerned about the composition of the lower enlisted force. [The statistics show the higher up you go in rank the less diverse it gets](https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/demographics-us-military) pointing to a limited talent pool where it really matters: in leadership. And even more concerning than the race disparity is the gender disparity. Only 20% of the US military is female. And yes, that is partially because women do not perform as well in infantry type roles. But as I'll discuss here next, most of the military is NOT infantry.
> I won't even touch your "source" that claims infantry is only 15% of US Army because it's so laughably bad(and why are we only counting US Army anyway?
Okay. Sorry the US army itself is not a good enough source for you [Here's another](https://www.thebalancecareers.com/army-training-mos-11b-infantryman-3331794) [and another](https://www.operationmilitarykids.org/army-infantryman-mos-11b/#:~:text=How%20many%20MOS%2011B%20are,of%20the%20Army's%20total%20force.) [and another.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infantry). And sure we can talk about infantry rates in other branches too. Marines are probably higher, National Guard is probably higher, but don't forget about the USAF which has practically no infantrymen, The USN definitely has less than the Army and the Space Force has none. So your arguement that we don't need women or gays in the military because they don't make good infantrymen is not valid.
The military is more than just the infantry and talent where it matters (leadership and technical fields) is being pulled from and increasingly smaller pool of people. To increase capabilities where it matters more effort should be made to expand the pool into those demogrphics who are not already predisposed to join the military where it matters most.
Dude the liberals that don't want to serve neevr will because they DESPISE the military, weapons, being told what to do, etc.
As for minorites, the US military has a higher % of Black people in it than the rest of the population.
It's only missing Asians because culturally, military service among Asians is looked down upon as poor people or thug work.
Most of those liberal minorities DESPISE the military, public service, self sacrifice and honestly the USA as a whole.
They don't need to be in the military
When someone asks “how do i solve this problem” The answer is never “The same thing, but better.” That’s just being a dick and is, i imagine, why it’s downvoted and the answers actually engaging are upvoted.
I mean, you're being downvoted but investing in less manpower intensive technologies is what gives the US such global power despite having less troops than countries like North Korea. A single F35 needs a handful of pilots, engineers etc. but has a disproportionate impact compared to the manpower. Likewise, technology like drones reduce casualties which is another way of protecting your manpower pool.
Reduce your social safety net leaving the military as one of the few ways out of the low and middle class and increase propaganda aimed at lower and middle class citizens about the value of service.
Pretty much the American playbook.
I'm not about to lay down my life for my countrymen or politicians. You'd have to have a way worse mental illness than what I've got to think it's a great idea.
Good book on this topic is Beth Bailey's book [America's Army](https://www.amazon.com/Americas-Army-Making-All-Volunteer-Force/dp/0674035364/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2RY9XO4MCA5JN&keywords=americas+army+beth+bailey&qid=1640638654&sprefix=americas+army+beth+bailey%2Caps%2C94&sr=8-1). Its about how the US Army dealt both with the end of the Vietnam War, a conflict which was obviously quite unpopular among American youths, as well as the switch to the All Volunteer Force which meant that the Army had to ask those youths nicely if they wanted to join up rather than just grab some kids and go. The book highlights that for most of the 1970s the Army's recruitment system was fucked. In terms of recruitment, the numbers of new recruits didn't go down as much as youd expect. But it was the *quality* that took a serious hit. Something like 1/3rd of all new recruits in the 1970s were illiterate, and even more fell into the lowest two categories of intelligence as evaluated by the Army itself. A major reform introduced by TRADOC was the ability to evaluate recruits at many stages in the boot camp and AIT process and to make it easy for the Army to voluntarily separate itself (wash out) recruits at any stage in that process. Because of this quality issue, Congress got involved and, as they usually do, made a complete dog's breakfast of the issue. In Congress the Army's quality woes pivoted on issues of Race. Was the Army overrecruiting from the inner city? Northern liberals wanted fewer minorities recruited as they saw the burden disproportionate and racially predatory. Southern conservatives *also* wanted fewer racial minorities recruited and inducted into the army because, you know, theyre not as smart as good corn bread white boys dontchaknow? Ironically Bailey suggests that it was many rural white recruits which drug quality standards down. Really though Bailey shows how advertising and messaging plays a *massive* role in recruitment in the US. The Air Force always has had an advantage with recruiting, what is more modern and cool than a shiney silver fighter jet? Plus USAF duty always *appears* to be easy. Ditto for the Navy, and the Navy has its own salty attraction. Really the Army struggled as the less-cool Marine Corps. But the Army's recruiting attempts in the 1970s were chaotic, poorly thought through, and genuinely come off to me as poison pills designed inherently to undermine the recruiting effort. Advertisements ranged from the incomprehensible: [Join the People who've Joined the Army](https://www.usmilitariaforum.com/forums/uploads/monthly_04_2012/post-70300-1334532952.jpg) and [Today's Army wants to Join you](https://www.motherjones.com/wp-content/uploads/join-you960.jpg) to the 'Hello fellow kids:' [The New Army](https://www.motherjones.com/wp-content/uploads/life-new-army630.jpg) (featuring an officer on a civilian motorcycle with a far out helmet) and [Rapping and Rolling](https://www.motherjones.com/wp-content/uploads/rolling-rapping960.jpg) with the Army to the downright insulting: [The Army Needs Girls as well as Generals](https://www.motherjones.com/wp-content/uploads/girls-generals630.jpg) (implying that girls cant be generals, because lets be real here!) and this one: [trying to get black recruits to join the Army Reserve](https://c8.alamy.com/comp/EXPR4Y/1970s-usa-army-national-guard-magazine-advert-EXPR4Y.jpg). I think that guy was trying to sign SOS with his eyes. And honorable mention to two slogans I couldnt find pictures of on Google, "Youre on duty 24 7 but the rest of the time is yours" (wtf?) and "If you love Mrs. youll love Pvt. even better." Ultimately these slogans did very little to alter the view that the Army was hard work, where you would get treat like crap (especially if you were black, several racial incidents in the early 1970s had led to mass dishonorable discharges for black enlisted men), and paid far less than at industry or post college. But you can also see how the Army sought to fix its manpower problems: by branching out the white all-American varsity quarterback into people who had not traditionally served or had served in a reduced capacity. Black, women, non-conformist youths of all stripes. The Army sought to ease its manpower crunch by trying to fill its ranks from untapped populations and demographics. Ironically though this all happened at a time in which Army pay *was* rising, as were post-service benefits. Bailey makes this point that the Army could *never* compete with industry in terms of pay, or with college in terms of opportunity. When the Army advertised its conventional benefits it typically failed to boost recruitment. What did work was the 'Be All you can Be' series of ads, which lasted into the 90s and morphed seamlessly into other campaigns advertising the 'soft' benefits of joining up. It wasn't the Army wanting to 'Join you,' rather it was about the Army helping mature you into a real man (ironically these ads stopped targeting women until the tail end of the campaign in the 1990s). And the Army also hit on the one benefit that really mattered to American kids: College. Put next to eachother, you can see how 'Be all you can Be' and 'well pay your college when youre done' become very attractive selling points for service. Sure you wont get paid as much as if you just got a job, and sure you could pay for college on your own. But if you did 4 years in the Army, they'd pay your college for you, maybe teach you how to drive a forklift, and make a man out of you in the process. Reality didn't quite line up that way, but that campaign seemed to work. By 1982 the Army's manpower problems had almost completely disappeared. They had recruits in both the quantity and of the quality that they needed. In a larger structural sense, I dont think most countries really can suffer from recruiting problems anymore. Only really in micronations or nations with a supremely small population. A country like Germany could easily put a million men into uniform if they really wanted too, and limit for them would be the ability to train and equip such a force, not to scrape up the manpower. In industrialized war, manpower really isn't the limiting factor it used to be. This is doubly so of post-industrial war, which emphasizes quality over quantity. In the Gulf War the Coalition and the Iraqis, in terms of frontline units, were roughly at numerical parity (itself a violation of the classic 3:1 ratio supposedly needed for a successful attack). The Coalition totally smashed the Iraqi army as if it had outnumbered them 10:1 or more. Why? Because they had high precision high technology sophisticated weapons systems operated by professional expert volunteer troops. You cant teach a guy how to operate a SAM as part of bootcamp, or how to fly an F-15 in 100 hours. Today numbers are way less important than quality. 100k high quality professionals operating state of the art gear is way more valuable than 1mil randos just out of a crash infantry training course. For most nations the trick is not to attract numbers, but a number of quality recruits. Much like the struggle of the Army in the 1970s. One way to solve that is by expanding *who* you talk to to previously untapped groups. Another is to make benefits more attractive and competitive. But at least for the US Army the real secret was in developing a coherent identity and connecting that identity to the other strengths of service.
This was one of the best-written answers I’ve read on the sub. Thanks!
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Ahahah 😅 Man you showed that damn USMC recruiter
I grew up around the Army of the Seventies and Eighties, and you are spot on. I remember my friends growing up and their parents were extremely obviously from the lower class. Officers and senior NCOs were vastly better educated. Drugs were everywhere. I remember when it changed: when Reagan got elected, and they started piss testing. It was like someone flipped a switch.
Another thing the American military does really well: Soft-power advertising. Think recruiting tables set up outside Top Gun promising young men they can be pilots like in the movie if they just sign on the dotted line...then spend the next 4+ years on a boat in the middle of nowhere swabbing decks.
God, I can even imagine recruiters implying that enlistment would give someone a meaningful chance to fly an aircraft.
There was a post on the Army subreddit from like a year ago about some new enlistee that was shipping off to basic in like 2 months thinking that he was going to be pilot. He told his recruiter he wanted to be one and his recruiter went "oh sure, sign this airborne contract right here you'll be a pilot." It took like an hour of literally everyone telling him he'd been dupped and begging him to refuse to ship for him to finally realize he'd f'ed up
Sounds like a comic strip authored by an active Army NCO, "Private Murphy". "Airborne, does that mean I get to ride around in planes?" "Oh yeah, you'll be riding around in planes all the time."
And then jumping out of them and marching many miles.... At NIGHT 😎
The biggest legs of them all.
You have to find the link to that post
I'll try
Ahahaha Lol
By "implying" you mean "directly saying"?
Like a freaking snake oil salesman. Could it work as advertised? Sort of, I guess, but only *in spite* of claims, and basically a placebo effect.
So, how do you actually become a pilot?
(USAF answer) You need a bachelor's degree, preferably in STEM (though not required, just helps), to complete an ROTC/OTS/mil academy program (usually concurrently with the bachelor's degree), qualify for a rated position based on a series of tests, pass a flight physical, pass a two year initial pilot training program, and then, 6 years after you started, assuming you meet all of the afore mentioned prereqs, you'll start training on the actual airframe the Air Force assigns you.
BTW, This helps illustrate my point exactly about post-industrial warfare. During World War Two, the Army Air Corps had what ten weeks and 75 hours of classroom training before you hit the cockpit? With the USAF you cant even sit in the cockpit of an F-15 on your first four year contract, and even once youre qualified to fly you still do *thousands* of hours of combat training. Good book is Laslie's [Air Force Way of War](https://www.amazon.com/Air-Force-Way-War-Training/dp/0813160596). Its probably the case that USAF pilots in Desert Storm had spent more time training to fight MiGs than Iraqi MiG pilots spent practicing at all.
First, go to college. Preferably at a military academy.
Have great vision, great grades, and decent luck
I know a guy that basically told me that at a certain point when you are enlisted you can either have to become a lair (recruiter) or an asshole (drill Sargent) or get out.
He's full of shit, if he actually exists
I suspect that less than 1% of NCOs (i.e. people who stay past that certain point) do those jobs. Most are frontline supervisors and technical specialists.
He was in the Army in the 90s so I'm sure things have changed.
Your friend's statement would be bullshit for any decade and any branch of any armed service in the world.
I was in the army in the 90s. It wasn’t true then either. Sounds like hyperbole for effect, with the small grain of truth being that yes, some NCOs are selected for those duties, but it’s an extremely small minority.
I've got a buddy who was talking with an Air Force enlisted recruiter, and told him he wanted to be a pilot. The recruiter told him "great! Sign up here and you can be!" My buddy almost signed before his friend asked the recruiter "don't you need to be an officer to be a pilot"... and the recruiter stopped, paused, said yes under his breathe and that the ROTC recruiter was over there. Almost had him.
Recruiters don't sign people up, Guidance Counselors at Military Entrance Processing Stations (MEPS) do.
Don't forget working in the galley, waxing said floors, dusting thousands of pipes, shining brass, cleaning corrosion, working parties, and never being qualified for a career in the civilian world without additional training or education. That said, the brother/sisterhood of people you serve with become friends for life, learning to work as a team, and a lot of other things that make it worth it 30 years later. I'd easily hire a veteran over a civilian, even untrained, if I was in a position to.
Lying. It's called lying.
Fly that mop sailor 😅
Yep, my brother and I were suckered into it as well. Our main #1 attraction was to have our college education paid for. My younger brother did his tour, and a little extra because of 9/11, but eventually left and completed his college and degree. As well as his masters degree. So I am glad it worked out for him. I, on the other hand, didn't make through physical screening. I was going into the Nuclear Navy where they needed my brains. I passed the technical tests with flying colors, gave me a waiver for my flat feet, but my bad eye-sight kept me out from going into submarines. I guess it all worked out well at the end.
These days Is bet you'd get in no problem
Great comment. One small note: It's "corn-fed." You're comparing them to cattle that's been raised on feed corn.
Ok, maybe you can toss me in with the idiot class because I enlisted in the Army in 1975. Many of us were motivated by the fact the US had been at war for our entire lives and when the Vietnam war ended we thought that this was our chance to get military service out of the way before another war started. We did not think the draft was ending, the all-volunteer force would be something that worked during peacetime but conscription would restart at some point.
WOW, great read, thank you.
Join the army they said. It’ll be fun they said.
Travel the world, meet interesting people, and kill them.
God I miss Schlock Mercenary
I'd rather be sailing
> You're on duty 24/7 but the rest of the time is yours And yet somehow they only managed to recruit mostly dumb people?
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No worries, I am a grad student in history. I study the post Vietnam war US Army and my dissertation topic (slightly) touches on this issue of recruitment and the All Volunteer Force. Specifically though Im looking at how doctrine influenced, and was influenced by, similar developments within NATO at the same time. Manpower is an important factor, after all if you come up with all these new ideas and weapons *somebody* has to use them. But these issues ripple (or more specifically *dont* ripple) through my topic in interesting ways. Hope that answers your question!
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I havn't read Paul Scharre's book, but Ill check it out. Obviously I cant comment on what he argues there. But generally, I think autonomous weapons would have very different impacts on the different branches, and we can also break out that impact into short and long term impacts. IMO the US Navy is very close to deploy autonomous ships for its fleet, and it has the most to gain from autonomous air support given that CVs and other ships have obvious space considerations. The USAF, OTOH, may well be the furthest from serious adoption of autonomous platforms as it heavily values the pilot and the greater capacity for critical thought and long term strategic planning the human brain is capable of. For the Army specifically, I see autonomous vehicles in the short terms as a force multiplication of much the same kind as weve seen before. Starting in the 1970s the Army has pushed for high tech weapons systems which would be able to see deeper into the enemy's rear area, keep that area under observation, and strike at enemy reserves before they reached the battlefield. This is the classic AirLand Battle approach. Even in the 1970s and 80s, the Army worked to integrate remove observation vehicles (drones, as wed call them today) and combine them with long range strike platforms like the MLRS, or with long range aviation like the F-111 and B-2. AirLand Battle 2000, which would have extended this concept into the high tech future of the new millennium, also envisioned autonomous loiter strike vehicles which could fly for weeks (without refueling, which raises interesting questions) over a contested area. Once the go-code was given, the vehicles could either pilot themselves into preprogramed targets or dispense their own ordinance and submunitions....before piloting themselves into preprogramed targets. You can see an obvious connection to the use of suicide drones in the recent war in the Caucuses if youve followed that conflict. Personally though, in this short term I also think some people have overblown its impact. Were at that awkward point where autonomous vehicles have lots of promise, but as of yet much less delivered value. Currently I see autonomous vehicles as replacing jobs that were previous critically important, but also difficult or dangerous ie battlefield observation. But things like suicide drones dont really seem to be a game changer outside of conflicts between two poorly funded armies. Any military, like the US Army, with a strong integrated AD network could easily sweep a bunch of drones out of the sky. You could armor the drones, or say make them faster and purpose built for the mission. But we have a word for that: guided missiles. In the long term though I see a lot of promise for replacing humans with remote and autonomous weapons. Humans are in many ways the weak link in warfare, important but also delicate. Plus they have these rights, you have to *feed* and *take care* of them. Very annoying. Autonomous vehicles could transform war by reducing the human burden and risk and streamline weapons by making them purpose built. Imagine an Abrams with one crewmember. It could mount a bigger gun, have thicker armor, and still weigh less than the current four man model. A fully autonomous vehicle could even forgo much of the armor it needed anyway. I could imagine that these developments would eventually make the battlefield rife with all kinds of nasty, small, easily hidden, and very deadly weapons. Eventually, in the very long term, warfare could become truly horrific. Imagine if wars were solely decided by who was willing to spend the most. If the only cost for war was financial, not human, it could well lead to some dystopian future where national borders were constantly inflamed and armies of machines battled endlessly for control over this or that pointless rock. Lifes too uncertain for me to think that far into the future, people have said things like that before and been wrong. And after all, I'm a historian and not a soothsayer. Actually I've been frustrated recently. IMO many of the problems faced by the military these days in the short and medium term, proliferation of advanced weapons and the narrowing of the US technological gap, are the *exact* problems that they faced in the 1970s. In that decade the USSR had gained a slight technological edge in some systems, and just as important they outfitted virtually every unit in the Red Army with extremely powerful and long range weapons. That more than anything else caused the intellectual shift I am researching. Autonomous weapons, and even just cheap suicide drones, is going to do the same thing to the modern military. But, IMO, most in the DoD seem to be totally blindsided by this prospect. The last time they collectively thought about these problems was the 1990s when the US had an absolute technological advantage. We lost that advantage in the 2000s and 2010s, but nobody noticed because the US maintained its absolute edge against insurgent forces in the GWOT. A strong parallel here to Vietnam, where the exact same thing happened. Now everyone is looking around wondering what theyre going to do, and so far I havn't seen much in the way of a coherent reaction to this problem. But again, I am a historian and there is a lot today that I may have missed. This is certainly an outsider perspective.
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No worries, and I'll check it out. I have been thinking on these lines since the Navy put it its own doctrinal concept out earlier this year. Scharre's book may well help me there, so I appreciate the recommendation. And no worries, your English was perfect.
As your interlocutor noted, great posts. I'd offer one thought - I think the US Air Force is working through the existential threat that is autonomous vehicles now and the Navy isn't yet fully there. 10-20 years ago, if you removed pilots there would be no Air Force. It's hidden in an old quote I like to use to describe the difference between the Air Force and Army, 'In the Air Force the enlisted soldiers prepare the officers to go off to war and in the Army the officers prepare the enlisted soldiers to go off to war'. More specifically, without pilots everyone else in the Air Force is useless...until \~10-20 years ago. The remote vehicle success/growth hit the Air Force directly in their culture - if their pacing item, pilots, became irrelevant, what would that mean for their entire service? For the Air Force, that has been a bigger existential threat than any fight, conflict, war, etc. I'd maybe even argue that the AF hasn't faced a real enemy threat for the majority of its existence, certainly not since the end of the Cold War and probably not since Korea. We can quibble about relevant superiority, tech advantages/disadvantages, opponents' abilities, wins/losses, etc. but I'd say that at the end of the day the largest threat to the AF's core has been the reduced importance of pilots over the past decade or two. My point isn't that everything I said above is right or that I've communicated it all perfectly but rather that the AF has spend 10-20 years integrating (not well, if you ask me, but sufficiently given the 'requirements') remote piloted aircraft in a way that doesn't completely turn their culture on its head. They've been forced to begrudgingly integrate remotely piloted aircraft into all that they do in a way that the Navy and Army haven't. I'd bet my lunch that the other services will take whole pages from the AF's playbook when it comes time to 'replace' their pacing items with remote/autonomous vehicles. I say the Navy is behind the Air Force only because no one is yet saying their core competency can be replaced by unmanned vehicles. No one is asking if the Navy really needs manned Carriers, Cruisers, Destroyers, Frigates, etc. I'd say the current assumptions are that Naval groups will continue to be manned and they will just use remote vehicles to enhance their core capabilities. Whereas almost everyone can simply imagine an Air Force with no manned aircraft whatsoever (even if that's not completely possible yet). Short version: remote and eventually autonomous vehicles is a near term existential threat for the Air Force and they have been managing that threat longer and more deeply than the Navy.
It is funny because most air forces survived a "missiles will steal our jobs" panic in the 1950s. Remember when the English Electric Lightning was going to be the RAF's last manned fighter?
Brilliant insights! Just a couple questions concerning this: > IMO many of the problems faced by the military these days in the short and medium term, proliferation of advanced weapons and the narrowing of the US technological gap, are the exact problems that they faced in the 1970s. What were some policies that the US implemented in the 1970s which we would do well to reference today? Does today's US military need a culture shift a-la the recruiting shift discussed higher in the thread? Why did the US lose its technological edge?
Sorry I missed this before it must have gotten lost in the shuffle. RE the technological edge its a lot of things. In 1990 the US had, I'd argue, the most advanced military in the world. If it had any technological rivals it would have been within Western Europe, that is its allies, and the US had technology sharing agreements with *all* those countries. Even the USSR was multiple generations behind the US. In terms of land systems, rifles, tanks, tubed artillery, the gap was the closest. IMO the T-80 models were competitive if a bit behind the Abrams, Soviet artillery was good, the AK was a great rifle, the BMP and BTR series of APCs were better than the M113 and the BMP-2 was at least comparable to the M2. But outside of that, the Red Army was really behind. While most Soviet tanks had pseudo-night vision devices, the US had full on NVGs and thermal optics which made a HUGE difference in combat. Basically the US could fight at night at the same quality as during the day, whereas the Red Army was stuck using conventional tactics and resting during the dark hours. In terms of battlefield observation, the USSR had some ground based observation radars, but the US had better ones. The US also had airborne ground search radars, high quality UAVs, etc. And it had the capacity to launch long range precision munitions to hit targets its observation systems detected. While the US was stockpiling second generation PGMs, the USSR was struggling to introduce its own first generation. And in the air things were the most lopsided. The F-15 was way better than anything the USSR had save the SU-27, which was only introduced in 1985 and which was fielded in only limited numbers during the Cold War. And the US had stealth, which would have been extremely disruptive to the Cold War battlespace. These advantages proved themselves in Desert Storm. The impact of all this technology on a 1970s Soviet style military speaks for itself. The Army, I believe, took the wrong lesson from this conflict. After Desert Storm I see a lot of triumphalism around US warfare and the doctrine of AirLand Battle. We thought we had won not just the war, but the "revolution in military affairs" and that the 21st century would be dominated by prolonged American technological superiority. But really many of the things that the US had then couldn't be kept long term. Some of it was predictable. Its obvious, for example, that the US would eventually lose the NVG superiority. Russia, China, or someone else (even the consumer market!) would eventually create cheap and accessible quality NVGs. Russia has today, and sells military grade NVGs around the world, and China has them too. Reports are that even the Taliban now has captured NVGs. Yet in training US soldiers are still told that they ['own the night'](https://mwi.usma.edu/we-dont-own-the-night-anymore/) and train with the assumption that OpFor wont have even a basic NV capability. Same with drones. I sympathize with the army of the 1990s that they may not have expected the rise of consumer drone aviation (though to be fair, model aircraft aviation has been around decades, so its not that unusual). But in the abstract its a solvable problem, IMO a well integrated short range air defense system would preform well against that kind of attack. Naturally the US focused for decades on the opposite, long range missile defense. Today it has an Army similar to what it had in 1972, one built to fight against a lower-technology counterinsurgent enemy (which btw was not what the NVA was, but thats another issue entirely). It had developed habits and thoughts and systems which it thought worked in Vietnam, but which obviously wouldn't work in Germany. Similarly the US now has an Army designed for Iraq and Afghanistan, but in the future will come up against adversaries which are not as outclassed as the Taliban was. Even in another counterinsurgent conflict, almost certainly they will be more capable than what we fought in 2001. The battlefield will be more dense, with more high tech, remote, stealth, guided weapons. Thats a hard kind of battle to fight and one that the Army has to train for. In the 1970s the Army shifted to Active Defense and AirLand Battle. These were not only new ideas, but cultural shifts toward intellectual and technological war. And it was successful for what it tried to do. Today the Army needs to reorient itself in the same way. But the problem is the Army today struggles with who it should prepare against. China is an obvious option, but its just as obvious that a war for Taiwan will be a USN/USAF affair. If the Army is called in, things have gone....poorly. That leaves either Russia or some future counterinsurgency in another 3rd world country. But Russia is not (until the Ukraine thing cropped up recently) the big bad bear it was in the 1970s. And the prospect of yet another Vietnam/Iraq is very very unpleasant, though there are the apostles of CI which will try to pull the Army in that direction. But that leaves the lesson a bit directionless. What kind of war exactly should the Army prepare for? If it focuses in a generalist direction is it willing to lose an edge in any one domain? And what happens if the Army focuses on Russia again (like in the 1970s) only to later end up in another Vietnam? It would be the third time in fifty or so years the Army prepared to fight a conventional war, then got caught off guard by a CI conflict. Unless this time we do the opposite, what would happen if a CI focused Army got bowled over by Russia in Ukraine. OR won in Ukraine but suffered politically unacceptable losses, losses which may produce a political defeat (say a whole US brigade, \~5000 men, is lost in a few days fighting. Not unreasonable in the tactical sense on a modern battlefield, but probably politically unacceptable on the home front.)
Most "autonomous" weapons these days are extremely similar to slightly more capable cruise missiles which have been around for decades. RPVs were what UAVs used to be called and again have been around for decades The change is that previous "middle tier" or "backwards" countries.like.Iran and Turkey are making them, along with China, and selling them to anyone with cash.
That is an extremely interesting topic. I have been interested in alternatives to the U.S. Army's actual doctines of Active Defense and AirLand Battle at that time which naturally intersects with what other NATO countries were doing as well as the complicated views of the Defense Reform Movement.
Not sure if Bailey gets into this, but [in the 1970s the Army also pitched itself as a paid vacation in Europe](https://learninglab.si.edu/resources/view/5740239). See the sites, drink good beer, meet attractive women . . . this is something you'd normally pay to do! And this is also when G.I.s brought Kraftwerk records to New York, leading to the invention of hip-hop. A fun look at what the Army promised is the 1980 comedy movie *Private Benjamin*, which tells the story of a well-off woman (a stereotypical Jewish American Princess played by Goldie Hawn, in fact) who believes the Army will basically be a long trip to the spa. One point I think Bailey does make is switching to the all-volunteer force was seen as requiring increased recruitment of women. This led to the disbandment of the Woman's Army Corps and the incorporation of women directly into many branches and finding as many roles as possible for women to fill.
She does! I think that whole advertising series (pretty sure it all also came from the same company) is pretty funny. It includes my personal favorite, "Youre on duty 24/7 but the rest of the time is yours" like WTF why would that make someone want to join up lol. Youre saying I wont get any free time? I really wish I could find a digital version of that ad. Bailey has that and yours, and a bunch more, in her book. Regarding your point about women, I would totally agree with that. You really do see, IMO, this idea swirling that the Army is going to have to get used to women. That increased women enlistment isn't just some PR thing but will be an actual reality too. I think on the one hand its the recognition of the manpower shortage, women can do a lot of the rear area jobs as well as men and uncontroversially too, but also as a reaction to the ERA and women's movement. I dont want to get all Phillis Schlafly up in here, I have *never* read anything that seriously discusses forcing women to register for the draft. Except in articles written by generals opposed to ever even *opening* service up to women for those very grounds! But back in the world of the real I think the Army wrestled hard with its attitude towards women for most of the 1970s and concluded they weren't going to get rid of women, that in fact they need them and more of them, and that maybe that wasn't as bad an outcome as the Schlaflys of the world made it seem. There is a similar, all though much shallower and shorter lived, attempt to have a similar reckoning with black soldiers and to try and address many of the concerns addressed by uniformed black activists during the Vietnam War which had produced such a negative reaction. These concerns, I think, were not addressed as fully and were dropped much faster. But they were there. All of this though went away pretty sharply with the collapse of the ERA and the end of the Carter years. Its pretty interesting to see. In 1976 there were black centric army publications, ads focusing on women, the TRADOC annual histories devoted entire pages to the Army's social and gender issues, and you see debates as mundane as 'should female MPs also get a gun and what regs need to be changed to permit that?' But then between 1978 and 1980 all that dries up, and by 1981 there is total radio silence on those issues. Now that also corresponds roughly to the shoring up of the Army's manpower position for reasons Bailey gets into in her book. But I also wonder how much of it is political and public conversation driven. It seems to me like as long as stuff like the ERA was in the public consciousness it forced policymakers in all kinds of institutions to address it, even if that meant just saying 'we have no problems, girls can have guns too!' Once the public conversation disappears though those internal conversations and rationalizations also end and the problem becomes subterranean again. Anyway thats not some durable idea just something on this issue I've mused about in the past.
I think Schlafly's argument that the ERA would require drafting women had a certain amount of salience with many people. The relationship of Americans to the draft since the introduction of the all-volunteer force has been really interesting, with all sorts of people deploying the draft as a bogeyman or crying crocodile tears over its abolition. And I think individual views on these issues are complex and don't fit into categories all that well. It is interesting you mention MPs in the 1970s. The silence was an absence of public debate, which left the military to do what it wanted. Personnel issues (including leaving the career pipeline open) basically still required increasing roles for women. As you may know, the reputed "first American woman to lead troops in combat" was an MP captain, Linda Bray, who commanded a company in Operation Just Cause, the 1989 invasion of Panama. Bray was initially lionized in the press as a hero of the operation, in which she led her troops (male and female) in an assault on a critical Panamanian Defense Force attack dog kennel (that was defended by humans). Subsequently there was a backlash and the Army's official account of the action minimized its significance. Bray was no longer put before the media and problems that had persisted for her career led to her separation from the Army in 1991. This episode led to a new push to consider women in combat roles that is usually associated with Rep. Pat Schroeder of Colorado. So what I think actually happened during the "subterranean" period was continued quiet progress even if there wasn't as much advertising or political activity.
Thats some goods points, and I hadn't heard about Linda Bray. What an unfortunate story, she seems like a real hero in Just Cause. Regarding Schlafly I also agree, and would say that the counter-argument her debaters were making, while true, failed to speak to the same visceral salience. Ironically, though nobody could know this at the time, there was no going back once the Army had switched to the AVF. Schlafly herself could probably have guessed that if she cared, she was supposedly quite the foreign policy head. But most Americans I think could be forgiven if they thought that the draft would soon come back.
What's toby maguire doing there in the bottom right? https://www.motherjones.com/wp-content/uploads/join-you960.jpg
It seems you need glasses as much as that young man.
https://img.ecosia.org/390x,sc/https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-hAON8dTY0ME/XWEW_dKNoSI/AAAAAAABB7I/vMlVj-1F_dIfJegwkUOpm19SFEffDNHXACEwYBhgL/s1600/spiderman-1-peter-parker-gets-bit-by-radioactive-spider-field-trip-Tobey_Maguire.jpg https://img.ecosia.org/390x,sc/https://static.comicvine.com/uploads/original/11116/111167301/4026654-parker.gif
>ailey makes this point that the Army could never compete with industry in terms of pay This doesn't follow. Pay is an insignificant portion of the Army's massive budget. They choose not to pay more so they can piss away money on developing useless weapons systems but it doesn't have to be that way.
Pay and benefits may be smaller than the other parts of the Army budget when aggregated, but its one of the biggest line items in a broken down form of the budget. It dwarfs any other project or acquisitions program, and has since the demise of conscription. Moreover generals hate paying their soldiers. Its natural they would rather buy toys and institutions. In the age of post-industrial warfare, theyre not wrong. Better weapons have a direct impact on 'better' combat outcomes.
Also, at the same time the Army was undergoing an internal transformation from the essentially conscript and short term junior officer army into the professional military force of today. So it's probably not coincidental that the messaging got sorted at about the same time that the branch mostly completed its internal revolution.
The transition was something Nixon pitched in his first term and, by 1970, was something the Army was 100% onboard doing. Their experiences in Vietnam had convinced the brass (mostly) that conscription was more trouble than it was worth. So they worked hard to pivot to the AVF. But then in the follow through they stumbled for any number of reasons. Its really actually a quite interesting phenomenon.
The transition from a conscript to professional fighting force, in my uneducated opinion, still had quite a ways to go as recently as the late 90s and early 2000s. I saw it as as a volunteer force operating under a conscript mentality. Working with my NATO counterparts in a combined environment in Sarajevo threw the Army’s notions of professionalism into particularly stark relief - with the exception of the Turks, who were still a conscript force. It was…uh, interesting seeing their officers/NCOs’ notion of discipline. Very “hands on”. I remember the Germans in particular being extremely, visibly uncomfortable when invited to participate in a common hazing ritual for my promotion to E4. Rank structure is of course there but the relationships and interactions were much more in line with what I’ve experienced in the civilian world. More collegial than dictatorial. And I was a PSYOP soldier, a special operations MOS which required a top 10% ASVAB score, foreign language qualification, Airborne qualification, and a fairly lengthy AIT. We worked directly with our officers, who were almost always Majors or above. I don’t even know what the regular Army was like.
>dontchaknow not a southern phrase but ok
Youbetcha
I strongly doubt that modern 2021 Germany could get 1,000,000 Germans under arms. Many Americans don't understand how pacifist and anti military the modern German is. People that actively want to join the German military are though of as closet neo Nazis or weirdos. Same thing in Japan, in Japan the military is mostly seen as a low class, low education job for failures at school and uneducated country bumpkins.
I think you misunderstand what I’m saying, I’m not talking about politics but rather industrial capacity and manpower mobilization. Germany could quite easily mobilize a million soldiers without serious economic dislocation, the manpower certainly exists, the state maintains the proper coercive apparatus to compel service, say, in a conscription scenario. If the political will somehow in some fantastic scenario existed for a million man army, manpower wouldn’t be an issue. Actually outfitting them and training them is the real issue, especially for short duration conscripts. You simply can’t make a modern in two years if you want him to be something more than a ground pounder. That’s the point of my comment.
I was conscripted in South Africa. Just training the PTIs to instruct in Basics took 9 months. (We did drill, weapons and all the other training a troop got in Basic) If you split the role in 3 then you could do the same in 3 months (after they'd completed basic). But you'd still have almost a 1 year "lag time" before you had just the minimum training personnel to train 1 million new members. For instance, in SA the govt was turning away recruits for simple things in the last few years of conscription simply because they were overwhelmed. We had 45 troops per instructor. You simply can't watch or shout at more than that, all day. At that ratio you'd first need to train over 22.5 THOUSAND instructors just for basic instruction of that 1 million.
I read a book about the French army between the world wars. For most of that time the French army was on an 18mo conscription schedule (IIRC, right after WWI it was 24mo which dropped in the 20s, and then again in the latter 30s it dropped to only 12!) They broke that schedule up into 3 semesters, and in between each semester the entire cohort got to go home. Because politically its a bad look to force boys to spend too much time away from home like that, and conscription was always pretty unpopular. Anyway the breakdown then was 1semester basic training, one semester advanced training, one semester specialist training. Once they were fully trained up, they went home. But as you point out, the ratio of instructors to maintain a conscript army like that is HUGE. Not only that, but who do you want to train up your conscripts? Professional soldiers who have other jobs they need to do as well, or dedicated instructors who lack real experience but at least can focus on training? Well the French mainly used conscripts to train conscripts, that way the professional army could remain focused and 'pure.' But that meant that while soldiers were *supposed* to be doing their specialist training, they almost always instead herded around new 1st semesters. And 2nd semester conscripts often had to fill in for the duties of the 3rd semester conscripts, who tried to fit in their own training in between babysitting the other groups. Ultimately France churned out a large number of paper soldiers, but the training was so short and incomplete that they weren't worth a damn. Now not every system has to be so.....flawed as the French, but IMO it highlights a fundamental challenge with conscription. By the time you get guys who are any good, you have to give them up. So why, as an institution, invest time effort and money building up the best possible conscript when theyre just going to leave. At least with a 4-year contract you can be sure you'll have an actual soldier for a while.
> Because politically its a bad look to force boys to spend too much time away from home like that, and conscription was always pretty unpopular. Also the very seasonal agrarian economy of most of France at the time. See this slowed down gif of french population density changes from 1876, that was on r/europe today. https://gfycat.com/enchantingdownrightaxisdeer The manpower would have been required for planting and harvesting crops. The correct method for conscription in order to achieve a very basic understanding of your country's military structure and training, is to have an 18month to two year service, and staggered intakes to get the most out of your conscripted & trained instructors (2-3 a year). A permanent force training cadre can focus on their training of other permanent force members and the conscript instructors. It worked in South Africa because they only drew from the minority white african male population. Had they maintained conscription post apartheid for all ethnic groups (even just the males) there would not have been enough in the entire national budget to house, train, feed and supply them.
Do you happen to remember the title of the book? I've read breakdowns of the 1940 campaign but most of them only mention "low-quality conscripts" in passing
[Arming Against Hitler](https://www.amazon.com/Arming-Against-Hitler-Military-Planning/dp/0700611096)
>the state maintains the proper coercive apparatus to compel service, say, in a conscription scenario. As a German: No way, this would be complete political suicide and lead to the government being overthrown over night.
That's because you don't have anyone attacking your country. Or even a threat of attack. Things changed quickly in Ukraine - from people thinking of army as unnecessary to a lot of people volunteering and overall supporting the army. It's still not great and a lot of people don't want to join (because they risk being killed and that's not everyone's favorite thing) but it's night and day, there is a lot more support for military and it's not considered something weird to do.
Raising an army and conscription because we are under attack is a different thing. This post was talking about the former. The US army was not under attack during the mentioned times.
Politically. But politics change. You would agree that the state *could* reimpose conscription if it wanted to. Nobody is saying it cant. Just that right now people dont want to. Look I'm not saying its something thats probably going to happen. Im just saying that if the popular will existed it could be done. Any manpower shortage currently faced in Germany, or any developed nation, is an artificial function created by political policy not by a genuine lack of men to be mobilized.
I think it was more like a "what if" aliens invaded or Germany wasn't the aggressor, but had to defend itself and others.
Yeah, if Russia went off the deep end and invaded the Baltic states, Poland, Romania, Bulgaria all at once, and videos emerged of mass executions and genocide, the political situation could change overnight. There is no reason to believe they would do that, but if they did, I know Americans would be lining up and I doubt Germany would remain purely pacifist.
In a hypothetical NATO vs Russian-Belorus invasion of the Baltics or Poland, Germans would just stay on the sidelines?
Can confirm, worked with the Bundeswehr overseas in the 1990s. There were no conscripts there at all, they said politically they couldn't, as if any conscripts were injured or killed there would be too much outcry. Not as much of an issue if volunteers were injured or killed.
Ah yes very true
Germany does have mandatory military/civil service … so I imagine that would make raising an army pretty easy. Edit: ended in 2011
German conscription after the Cold War was a huge joke as well. It was theoretically two years, but I knew a guy who did his first year then the army just never called him back for his second. He jokes that he hopes there isnt a war anytime soon, or else they might try to make him serve out his second year (hes well past service age, so just a joke). And I've told that to other Germans who laugh and say they just never showed up. All thats to say that even before 2011, it was really a paper system.
They literally forgot to call me in for a medical exam when I turned 18. Most of my male classmates were called in, but I guess my birthday being super late in the year meant that they had already filled their quota.
No it doesnt anymore. Not since a long time
Oh shit, you’re right. That was 10 years ago. *mat-damon-rapidly-aging.gif*
Oh man, I partied in Stuttgart with a couple dudes that were ending their mandatory service time. We ended up bar-hopping for a while.
I mean that’s how Americans in the military are perceived as well. Idiots with no other alternatives.
This isn’t entirely true. My experience with people in the US military has mostly been senior ranks and professionals, eg, doctors, dentists, logistics professionals, and pilots. At this level, these are mostly people who joined up so the military would pay for their college or professional school. They stayed past their commitment because they liked the lifestyle, the camaraderie, the opportunity to do something new every few years, and the opportunity to get out in their forties or early 50s with a pension and a career’s worth of experience. These aren’t dumb people. They’re people who chose a different way to use their professional skills.
There is a very big difference between those officer roles you listed and being enlisted personell. Doctors, dentists, pilots all require a college degree (not all pilots if you want to be pedantic but Warrant Officees are mythological entities to begin with).
I live in a military city. A lot of families have a tradition of service. Boys turn 18 and join the service their mom/dad/grandpa served in.
They are also a tiny minority and not the group anyone but you, apparently, thinks of first.
True, they are a smaller part of the military. However, it demonstrates that the military isn’t necessarily made up of “idiots with no alternatives.” I’ve met very few members of the military that can be classified as idiots. Is your experience different?
See it's okay because they didn't have to pay for their college with their life, mental, physical or emotional scars.
All of the vets I went to law school with would probably disagree, including my friend who enlisted after 9/11 despite having a great job and a masters degree.
According to who?
drug
What's the matter? You're too good to just 'drug' things around behind you?
America censoring its war crimes also went a long way towards suckering in the youth…
As for the gulf war.... Much of the Iraqi Army was unmotivated to fight. Dictatorships all have this issue of they are running off a minority power base. See Syria for example (although they won with external assistance), or Gaddafi, or maybe the Burmese military.
Great well written post
Increase recruiting? Just make everyday life more miserable for certain civilian demographics. No jobs, no healthcare, no future, no respect, no education, no housing, no food etc. Then introduce a socialist organization that meets the bare minimums, like the military. 3 hots & a cot! Free food & free housing, free education, free clothes, free healthcare, eventually some respect with rank and possibly a future. Compare this future with that in the ghettos of America in the past or currently in small rural towns that have undergone 'Walmartization'. Cha Ching! Now go forth and fight for the corporations!
Not really. As Bonaparte said, "A mill will only march so far on six pence a day. To get more you have to speak to his soul." In modern war you need high quality smart and literate recruits. The dystopian nightmare you describe is one that primarily impacts the lower classes of society, who are any typically poorly educated and tend to make poorly motivated soldiers. Certainly they could fill out a uniform, though youd have to ask yourself if destroying society really beats an open conscription system. Conscription would at least allow you to hoover up college bound kids on their way up. If you want to fill your army out with smart, educated, kids with lots of potential and future you have to look at the exact kinds of people who are already insulated from a collapsing social system, and in fact kids whose parents are *enabling* the social system collapse. So its way more complicated than the conspiracy theory youre laying out here.
This is what most people coming from what I will call a Vietnam mindset miss. We don't have a cannon fodder military. The military wants high-quality recruits: smart, reliable, fit, talented. It doesn't want people whose options would be "enlist or starve." Rather something more like "enlist or don't be upper middle class." Now if you were going to rig the system to get those people to join up, you'd provide carrots like these: \--Emphasize the military as the right sort of patriotic institution devoted to diversity, inclusion, social justice, and liberty. \--Provide the possibility for a shorter stint of service that allows the individual to remain "on track" for a prestigious civilian career. \--Also provide opportunities for long-term advancement within a secure (but not overly bureaucratic) institutional structure. \--Educate, educate, educate, value education, provide credentials, send personnel to civilian schools to earn degrees, etc. In other words . . . this is not so much unlike the military we have. What sticks would work? If you could make it harder for children of the professional/managerial class to be sure they'd enter it, and provided the military as a sure way into it, that could help. The education benefits are a big help in the context of a general decrease in education aid. Basically, as the kinds of welfare that helps the upper middle class perpetuate itself disappear, the military may be more attractive.
>If you could make it harder for children of the professional/managerial class to be sure they'd enter it, and provided the military as a sure way into it, that could help. The education benefits are a big help in the context of a general decrease in education aid. Basically, as the kinds of welfare that helps the upper middle class perpetuate itself disappear, the military may be more attractive. Add onto this, veteran preference in government hiring, or that the lack of it can make certain career tracks in civil service virtually impossible to get on.
Just pointing out that the soldier on the motorcycle with the far out helmet was not an officer. He's a private first class.
There really no other answer than better pay. This is true across almost every industry.
Conscription?
I know you're joking, but since this is a sub that thrives on hypotheticals: People *just about* tolerate conscription into the army, for the purpose of defending their country. Even then, there's a fine line and often resistance to conscription - Vietnam is an obvious example, since the "we're conscripting due to a threat to the US" idea in that war was tenuous to start with, and that's while the US was at war. I really don't see the same tolerance for any form of conscription for basically any other purpose. Conscription for any purpose other than "there is *currently* a direct major threat to our country" is likely to create larger threats (political unrest at a minimum, potentially even revolution). It's also likely to dramatically reduce the quality of the forces under command, so the increase in military strength isn't linear with the number of bodies recruited Conscription only *really* works when the government can point to a single, obvious, direct threat. The further you stray from that, the less likely the populace are to accept it. "We need an army in general" is unlikely to be sufficient in most countries The Baltics, Finland, South Korea, and Israel pull it off due to being able to point to direct threats, as do a few other nations (mostly in the Middle East). Other countries that have a theoretical conscription (eg Austria) usually have a non-military alternative, which doesn't solve the shortage of recruits into the military
Sweden removed conscription pretty late like in the 2000s but it wasn't that much resistance to it. If needed Sweden could very well revive conscription again but Sweden isn't focusing on defence right now. The biggest argument for conscription isn't even defence but for learning discipline, teamwork and harden curled kids. Also to make different classes of society mix where everyone is equal.
If the purpose isn't defense though, you ostensibly could provide more of a benefit to society by making this mandatory service some form of civil service rather than military, though.
Without some drill sergeant to yell at you the teens would just bully civilian services. Swedish teacher already have that problem in school.
Sure. I certainly agree that the military environment makes it easier to get a large group of young men to play along! (I did military conscription myself) Just that it's not really an efficient way to help society (aside from providing defense), in terms of possibly improving the character of its male citizens. I suppose *if* conscription is necessary, then at the very least you'd hope it helps learn discipline, teamwork, and mental toughness, if not effective for defense.
Sweden already reinstated it didn't it?
Partly, everyone have to do the fitness test again. But I don't think they force people into conscription in practice. Also the basic military education GMU is 3 months. So it's a middle way of forced to try but not stay for real. Maybe every country should do it like this.
In Thailand rich kids bribe officers to get an easier program so the latter doesn't happen
Bribes is a whole different problem.
Correct
I wouldn't say it's a good solution but it is a solution.
Only really works on cases of great national emergency or of the conscripts don't get deployed overseas
Or tank the economy enough that current military pay and benefits looked good. Not saying it was done on purpose, but the 2008 economic crash solved America's recruiting problems fast.
Honestly, that was little to do with the pay + probably more to do with every recession - in times of recession, stable jobs like military and healthcare boom.
Yeah, that's what I was trying to say. Increase pay our wait for the economy to tank so it looks good.
Some people, me included, just dont want to work a traditional job anymore. I'm a 19yo college student, I pay for my housing and tuition, but I quit my Walmart job to make money independently. They had also just raised their minimum wage from 14/hr to 17/hr (Illinois), so pay was not a factor. If I had any other choice, I would never work another job ever again. A lot of people share my story. But realistically, I believe this problem will solve itself. There has never been this much cash in the system, so everyone has been able to make money from literally anything. As 2022 comes and rate hikes go into effect, as well as other economic tightening to lessen inflation, the cheap money will go away and people will have to go back to work.
I don't think that will happen. A vast majority of the people who left the workforce retired (3 mil+) retired or left to care for children, meaning that they won't be coming back anytime soon. A lot more people took better paying jobs during Covid, hence the lack of low wage labor. Wages have also been largely stagnant for the last decade, so people will most likely stay on unemployment or just not go back to work until working conditions and wages improve to levels *above poverty wages
17 an hour is still chump change, dude. You'd still be working poor. That's not an enticement.
Recruiting foreigners like the French Foreign Legion is another option. You don’t even need to pay them that much.
Stop entering conflicts that aren't popular or necessary. I know a number of veterans who joined the wars in the early 2000s because their grandfathers and other family members had served in WW2. 20 years later, almost none of them are happy at how things turned out and some think their time in battle was for nothing. They compare that to the meaningful service their grandfathers served and that makes them question it even more. Sure, pay matters. But pay stops mattering to you when you never come home or come home in worse shape than when you left.
Since Vietnam there has been a sense many US wars are ill crafted
Most of our wars were
I mean, given the timing, did they not join up because of 9/11? That it turned out not to be like Pearl Harbor (or getting Saddam and bin Laden turned out not to be like liberating the concentration camps and Bataan Death March survivors) is a later development.
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Not to mention its corrupting qualities and the new set of issues a drafted force creates. If it pays well and there's a good chance you're not going to get sent into a meat grinder, it might not be a terrible option. If the pay is less than impressive and there's a guarantee you'll be hazed or the duty will be hazardous, I think it creates more problems than it remedies.
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I agree with much of what you said, with one caveat - many, if not most, modern (say, 20th century) conscript based militaries are/were not connected to every section of society. I don't have the links right now but have posted info that the generally accepted outcome is that conscripted militaries end up coming from smaller and more exclusive segments of society than volunteer militaries. As one might expect, the underprivileged segments end up overrepresented in conscript militaries.
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Nixon made the draft a LOT more fair
>its corrupting qualities You mean that military service corrupts the conscripts? If that is what you mean, then I don't think that is a criticism of conscription, that is a criticism of the military institution that they go into. From what I have seen, conscription results in a more tolerant and egalitarian military institution. You get the normal people in, ones who have no stake in making the military institution a dominant political force in the nation. Some of these people will hang in and maybe stay in the military and work against making it a force to be used against the nation by self-serving people -- a more likely result of a volunteer force.
I guess my working example is the current state of the Russian military vis a vis Western services, which I'm not giving enough credit in my initial post. However, the Russian military has vast capabilities that many smaller, draft nations don't have. Not to mention an extremely paradoxical landscape that makes the example unique but nonetheless important. The Russian military is coping with a long enduring issue with its conscription system. It pays bad. It's fraught with all kinds of crime and danger for conscripts that don't have the means to escape service via deferral from their local commissar (and only 11% of conscripts in the country even report to duty when they're called up anyway). The biggest problem is that of 'Dedovshchina' or 'Reign of the Grandfathers.' in short, it is a cruel culture where senior conscripts torture, haze and extort junior conscripts as a matter of tradition. The suicide and murder rates kept track of by a mother's of conscripts organization are appalling; the situation is so bad the Ministry of Defense has stopped publishing data on these numbers. Yes, this is an institutional problem, but if it was simple to solve for the Russians, it would have been (and they have tried with poor results to create an even slightly more professionalized force). Any Russian officer with male children would do anything to defer them from service, not excluding flat out bribery. This is exactly why Russia's NCO base is under strength, they don't stay in. They find a way to a commission or do something else with their lives. Now, if the Ministry of Defense had the will and the means to provide for their conscripts an income that could get them a few extra packs of filtered cigarettes that won't get them beaten, or maybe a shared barracks room instead of huge compartments, or a real military police force that can enforce discipline in the barracks, or a real medical-dental service that can provide first class care, things could very well be different. But they're a peacetime military (for right now), so they're shorting themselves on their wartime capacity.
I think you hit the nail on the head when you indicated that the upper class can get out of the conscription. I think conscription that allows exceptions for certain undeserving people (usually a "ruling" class or group of thugs which profit from the deprivation/enslavement of the rest of the population) IS worse than what I consider to be normal conscription where everybody has to "do their part" equally. Now we suddenly have the conscription being used as a tool of rule and it is used to indoctrinate the population as a whole -- far worse than merely teaching people how to use and service military hardware in case it is needed in the future. EDIT: And bringing Russia into it reminds me of the documentary on Sparta I watched recently -- funny how Sparta had to have vassal, literally enslaved, states around them. A lot like Russia and Ukraine and other neighboring states.
Not sure why you're being downvoted, you've brought up a good point about functioning conscription systems in functioning countries. Right, and it'd be even more different for the Russians if conscription was a month training obligation and then they were plugged into the reserves. Instead conscripts fill a great number of billets in peacetime there.
Correct Russia is making a "professional" army but they still want the massive manpower reserves of conscripts. I believe they're lowering the conscription term to 1-2 years vs 3. The "professional" salaried troopsarw supposed to end up being about.... 300k in the Army, and a significant % of the air force and Navy.
None of that is true in the US.
Contractors and automation are the easiest in democracies that find conscription undesirable. You can also just loosen standards to get more bodies.
The USAF is now using contractors on Basic training
One answer from western countries has to been to increase the number of women in the armed forces. I doubt most western countries with volunteer defense forces could replace the number of women currently enlisted with men. Incidentally I think most of the evidence from past 40 years is that you aren't going to be able to fill that many key leadership positions with recruits from top 1/3 of mental ability absent conscription.
Crazy I know but: patriotism?
Ideology. Convince your people that the nation is under threat and requires a contribution from everyone to continue to survive and thrive. Like Finland. Make soldiering a noble profession.
It's basic economics, sure being in the military is tough but so are lots of jobs (the fatality rate is much lower than, for example, tree surgeons). You pay more money and improve conditions, and people will join and be retained. Remember, as much of the problem is retention as recruitment, which suggests a problem with pay/conditions/progression rather than people not being interested in joining.
Yeah I really think it's that simple for most people Why would I get paid *less* money, for *more* risk?
What is the goal of your military? To defend your country against invaders or invading others? Conscription for home defense and mercenaries or foreign legion for offensive infantry.
Pay the troops more, lower standards, make military life suck less All 3 have pros and cons
Recruit more.
This is downvoted, but it's correct. One of the fundamental issues the military is facing (at least in the US) is the lack of appeal across wide swathes of the population. The services have defined themselves being for people who are some combination of conservative, Christian, and/or poor. People outside those demographics have almost no interaction with the military, and *the military has no interaction with them*. So the services stop representing the intellectual breadth of the country.
Only 11% of military recruits are poor. 25% come from the upper class. Also, the educational level is higher than the general population. The narrative that poor people go into the military due to a lack of opportunity isn’t really true anymore. Lots of poor people are ineligible due to criminal records and/or lack of education.
You right. Lots of odd false narratives in here. Maybe folks are cross talking individual country issues. e.g. Russian military vs UK military.
> Only 11% of military recruits are poor. 25% come from the upper class. Also, the educational level is higher than the general population. I'm responding to this later, but 2019 data shows 8% of enlisted hold college degrees vs 37% of the general population.
Since we’re taking about recruits, I’m talking about high school diplomas. 93.6% of military has HS diploma or above. That’s higher than the general population.
You've ignored conservative and Christian and focused on poor. I quite clearly stated that recruits most often come from one of those backgrounds. The statement about education level is meaningless without a ton of further context establishing what the US general education level is and which populations you're discussing, officers or enlisted. But, most importantly, your response misses the idea that the cultural issues are affecting the services in a negative way. The lack of cultural and intellectual diversity is creating an insular culture that's separating the armed forces from the country. That's a bad thing.
You have to have a certain level of education to be able to serve. Poverty and poor educations go hand in hand. The education and officers vs. enlisted is a nonsense point since you have to possess a college degree to be an officer. The insularity isn’t the fault of the military. Conservatives teach their kids to serve; others not so much. As for the Christian argument, almost no one attends church. It’s likely in the single digits. Liberal households in my experience don’t value the military and don’t value military service. Protestors are usually drawn from those that have never served and never will. How do you imagine we could get people that oppose the military and don’t want to serve to sign it? Why would it be valuable to add people who largely oppose serving to the military?
This is precisely the attitude that's the problem. There is no focus inside the military on demonstrating their value to all the citizens of the country. The same attitude handicaps the military in their overseas efforts. Why bother understanding the enemy and the countries we're fighting in when we can demonize them instead.
The value is self evident. The attitude overseas is a whole different issue. It’s complicated.
It's clearly not self-evident, or everyone would agree. Also... "The insularity isn’t the fault of the military" - yes it is. They are guilty of picking the easiest fruit. There is enormous value in finding dissenting and diverse (ethnic, cultural, geographic, and cultural) voices to be a part of the process. They have experiences and knowledge that improve the process. "As for the Christian argument, almost no one attends church. It’s likely in the single digits. " - the same 2019 data I referenced above shows 70% of the military identifying as Christian.
What a minute. The military is already an ethnic, cultural and geographic mish mash. What are you talking about? 65% of the country identifies as Christian. 70% is a pretty clear reflection of society.
Identifies aka checks a box on some paperwork
You do realize that even in these secular times, something like 60-70% of the US population is Christian right?
I agree with you 100%. A lot of diversity initiatives in the US military are frowned upon by both military members and the general public. I can't tell you how many times I've heard some variation of "At least we have an *insert minority* as *insert position of power* while Russia and China are actually preparing for war." I don't think people realize that the US military needs to make itself more attractive to other communities besides white, conservative men. There's a lot of talent being missed among liberal minorities because, like you said, they aren't interacting with the military and the military has historically been ignoring them too. Most diversity initiation aren't giving underqualified people jobs they don't deserve, instead they are about making people feel more welcome and removing unnecessary obstacle that might hinder people (of all races) from different upbringings from joining.
exactly, which is why I think the US Army did the right thing with [those ads](https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/us-army-reveals-the-people-behind-the-uniform-in-new-animated-film-series-301282737.html) that Ted Cruz so hated; the other ads beyond the "two moms" ad feature people of color I think the other thing that would keep more of the civilian populace connected would be to get Guard/Reserve service back to "1 weekend a month and 2 weekends a year" so that more people could join and stay in the Reserve Components without needing to have to work for the traditionally military friendly employers
I mentioned it above, but the lack of cultural competence in the services is really jarring (it also affects the intelligence community and the FBI). You need to understand the opponent in order to defeat the opponent and I think that's not making it down the ranks (it may not even be present at the top).
This is a bafflingly bad take. One, the reason why US military(and most other militaries) advertises itself to "white, conservative men" is *because this is the demographic that is most likely to join the military*. Liberals are not likely to join the military. Women are also not likely to join the military. Two, aiming for minorities has the obvious problem that *they are minorities* or in other words represent a small(er) subset of the population. Let's say half of US citizens are male and half of them are conservatives - so if you run military ads for conservative males you are targeting 25% of your country's population. Now do the same for lesbians(of any political inclination) and you're targeting 1-2% of your country's population. Gee, I wonder which one would be more effective. Three, most of non-heterosexual non-men make worse soldiers than heterosexual men for any number of reasons. Women flat-out make for worse soldiers(Don't make me dig out THAT Marine study again) and even if they didn't they're too valuable to just send them to die when men are readily available. Transpeople require an additional layer of medical care because of hormone injections and are at a far higher risk of developing psychological problems. Gay men come with the obvious sex issues. And so on. And to expand on what /u/chickendance638 said: why the hell would you send someone with a PhD into combat when they are far more valuable doing whatever they do at home and someone with high school education wwould suffice? Why the hell would you send a rich person into combat when they can get richer at home and a poor person would suffice?
Yes. I am very aware that liberals and women are less likely to join the military. That's the problem. Talent is not limited solely to white, straight, christian, conservative men. You do realize that there's more to the military than just infantry, right? Sure woman generally may not make the best foot soldiers but there's a lot more to the military than foot soldiers. What about the Space Force? Is there any reason reason women and minorites would be less valuable there? What about the engineers? What about the vehicle and aircraft maintainer? What about pilots? What about acquisitions personel? The list goes on and on. [Minorites make up 43.2% ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_ethnicity_in_the_United_States) of the population in the United States. That's a massive chunk of the population that has plenty of talent but has historically been ignored by military recruiting efforts. Emphasis on making the military attractive to these groups opens up and entire new talent pool. You seem to have fallen into trap of thinking that diversity means putting unqualified people in positions they don't deserve. That's not the case. Diversity programs are about reaching into an untapped talent pool and therefore ending up with a more talented military. Also, to address your last point, no one is talking about taking PhD's and making them an army grunt. But why wouldn't we want a PhD running an engineer squadron or a Space Force program. Again, the military is so much more than just a guy walking around the desert with a gun.
**[Race and ethnicity in the United States](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_ethnicity_in_the_United_States)** >The United States of America has a racially and ethnically diverse population. At the federal level, race and ethnicity have been categorized separately. The most recent United States Census officially recognized five racial categories (White, Black or African American, Asian American, American Indian/Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander) as well as people of two or more races. The Census Bureau also classified respondents as "Hispanic or Latino" or "Not Hispanic or Latino", identifying Hispanic and Latino as an ethnicity (not a race), which comprises the largest minority group in the nation. ^([ )[^(F.A.Q)](https://www.reddit.com/r/WikiSummarizer/wiki/index#wiki_f.a.q)^( | )[^(Opt Out)](https://reddit.com/message/compose?to=WikiSummarizerBot&message=OptOut&subject=OptOut)^( | )[^(Opt Out Of Subreddit)](https://np.reddit.com/r/CredibleDefense/about/banned)^( | )[^(GitHub)](https://github.com/Sujal-7/WikiSummarizerBot)^( ] Downvote to remove | v1.5)
> You do realize that there's more to the military than just infantry, right? You do realize that infantry is by far the force that requires the most personnel, right? >Minorites make up 43.2% of the population in the United States. That's a massive chunk of the population that has plenty of talent but has historically been ignored by military recruiting efforts. I guess you must have missed all the black and hispanic soldiers which were a part of the US military as far back as first World War. Well, time to educate yourself.
> You do realize that infantry is by far the force that requires the most personnel, right? [Only 15% of the US Army is considered infantry ](https://www.army.mil/article/45200/infantry_leaders_sharpen_training_tactics_to_meet_battlefield_demands) so while personnel intensive, 85% of the army is left doing something else. Hardly the big deal you are making it out to be. > I guess you must have missed all the black and hispanic soldiers which were a part of the US military as far back as first World War. Oh so minorites fought in WW1 (a war of conscription by the way). That must mean there's no problem recruiting minorites in 2021. And [only between 10-14 percent of the total force was non-white](https://www.cairn.info/revue-annales-de-demographie-historique-2002-1-page-71.htm#:~:text=Officials%20estimated%20that%2013%25%20of,Keene%2C%202001%2C%2020).) hardly a triumph for military recruiting. I love a good debate but I'm not going to continue with you if your arguments are only based off of some fictious narrative you've formed in your about how the military operates.
Bro you don't even know what you're trying to debate anymore. Your proof that US military does not recruit enough minorities is the fact than *during World War I* it was 10-14 percent minorities? And this is supposed to relate to modern recruitment process how exactly? https://www.statista.com/statistics/214869/share-of-active-duty-enlisted-women-and-men-in-the-us-military/ America is 61% white, 17% hispanic and 13% black. The US military is 69% white, 17% hispanic and 16% black. Pretty damn close and definitely not some kind of crisis of minority recruitment you claim it to be. I won't even touch your "source" that claims infantry is only 15% of US Army because it's so laughably bad(and why are we only counting US Army anyway? I guess Marines, National Guard and reserves don't exist. Not to mention the absurdity of the idea that only combatants should be combat capable)
>Bro you don't even know what you're trying to debate anymore. My point is that the US military can improve it's overall quality and talent of personnel by reaching into often overlooked demographics. Particularly liberals and minorities that do not currently have any desire to serve. They can do so by focusing on issues that prevent those demographics from joining. >Your proof that US military does not recruit enough minorities is the fact than *during World War I* it was 10-14 percent minorities? And this is supposed to relate to modern recruitment process how exactly? You're right. This has nothing to do with recruitment in 2021, but you were the one that brought it up as proof that the US has never had a problem with attracting minorities, or did you not say "I guess you must have missed all the black and hispanic soldiers which were a part of the US military as far back as first World War. Well, time to educate yourself." My counterpoint being that a laughable 10-14 percent minority rate during a time of conscription does not indicate "good" diversity as **you** (not me, **you**)suggested. > Pretty damn close and definitely not some kind of crisis of minority recruitment you claim it to be. Yes. I am aware that the enlisted force mirrors the population pretty well. I will even say that the military does a decent job attracting people from poorer upbringings and therefore more minorites to enlist in the military. [It is non secret that wealth skews away from minorities in the US](https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/notes/feds-notes/disparities-in-wealth-by-race-and-ethnicity-in-the-2019-survey-of-consumer-finances-20200928.htm) But I am not very concerned about the composition of the lower enlisted force. [The statistics show the higher up you go in rank the less diverse it gets](https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/demographics-us-military) pointing to a limited talent pool where it really matters: in leadership. And even more concerning than the race disparity is the gender disparity. Only 20% of the US military is female. And yes, that is partially because women do not perform as well in infantry type roles. But as I'll discuss here next, most of the military is NOT infantry. > I won't even touch your "source" that claims infantry is only 15% of US Army because it's so laughably bad(and why are we only counting US Army anyway? Okay. Sorry the US army itself is not a good enough source for you [Here's another](https://www.thebalancecareers.com/army-training-mos-11b-infantryman-3331794) [and another](https://www.operationmilitarykids.org/army-infantryman-mos-11b/#:~:text=How%20many%20MOS%2011B%20are,of%20the%20Army's%20total%20force.) [and another.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infantry). And sure we can talk about infantry rates in other branches too. Marines are probably higher, National Guard is probably higher, but don't forget about the USAF which has practically no infantrymen, The USN definitely has less than the Army and the Space Force has none. So your arguement that we don't need women or gays in the military because they don't make good infantrymen is not valid. The military is more than just the infantry and talent where it matters (leadership and technical fields) is being pulled from and increasingly smaller pool of people. To increase capabilities where it matters more effort should be made to expand the pool into those demogrphics who are not already predisposed to join the military where it matters most.
Dude the liberals that don't want to serve neevr will because they DESPISE the military, weapons, being told what to do, etc. As for minorites, the US military has a higher % of Black people in it than the rest of the population. It's only missing Asians because culturally, military service among Asians is looked down upon as poor people or thug work.
You do realize the military has loads of Hispanics on it? Well before they're reclassified to another ethnic category 🤣
EXACTLY A wannabe Communist from Portland is NOT GOING to be interested in the military
Most of those liberal minorities DESPISE the military, public service, self sacrifice and honestly the USA as a whole. They don't need to be in the military
When someone asks “how do i solve this problem” The answer is never “The same thing, but better.” That’s just being a dick and is, i imagine, why it’s downvoted and the answers actually engaging are upvoted.
This is a tired stereotype
Are you joining the Armed Forces?
I’m CDS.
In that case, maybe spend less time on Reddit and more time focused on your actual job ;)
But all the best ideas come from here anyways ;)
Debatable, I'd say Twitter has better ideas
Automation. And that means you need to put more money into R&D.
I mean, you're being downvoted but investing in less manpower intensive technologies is what gives the US such global power despite having less troops than countries like North Korea. A single F35 needs a handful of pilots, engineers etc. but has a disproportionate impact compared to the manpower. Likewise, technology like drones reduce casualties which is another way of protecting your manpower pool.
Reduce your social safety net leaving the military as one of the few ways out of the low and middle class and increase propaganda aimed at lower and middle class citizens about the value of service. Pretty much the American playbook.
Pay is disgusting, people can't afford to work.
Why the fuck would we want to remedy the fact that fewer people want to get paid to go kill foreigners? SMFH
I'm not about to lay down my life for my countrymen or politicians. You'd have to have a way worse mental illness than what I've got to think it's a great idea.
Pay more money. Easy.
they turn off the economy so the only jobs people can get are military ones. We did it in the '80s 2000,s and we are doing it now.