The All-Volunteer Force Is in Crisis

Fifty years ago, one American faced Independence Day having just lost much of his personal freedom. Dwight Elliot Stone, the U.S. military’s last draftee, was inducted into the United States Army on June 30, 1973. Private Stone served not in Vietnam but in the safer yet equally humid swamps of Fort Polk, Louisiana. His 17 months in uniform brought down the curtain on the draft. Stone was the last of more than 17 million men conscripted into the U.S. military.

Those who joined the American military in July of 1973, and in the five decades since, have been part of what is known as America’s “all-volunteer force,” or AVF. For most Americans, the AVF is something to be celebrated, but foreign to their daily lives. The AVF gave most Americans the freedom to be indifferent to their military, shifting the burden of service to a smaller, self-selected cohort of citizens.

The AVF receives endless accolades; American politicians often refer to it as “the finest fighting force the world has ever known.” But despite 20 years of war and military interventions with mixed results, the all-volunteer force has been subject to little debate about whether it’s still the right force for America.

When these discussions do occur, most focus on democratic accountability. As President George W. Bush quipped about the Iraq War to a group of Oval Office visitors in 2006: “If I had to do this with a draft army, I would have been impeached by now.” The idea that misguided wars might be prevented by a more engaged population has its appeal, but the AVF also faces more practical challenges.

As it turns 50 this week, the all-volunteer force appears unsustainable. It is threatened on three fronts: cost, capacity, and continued ability to find enough Americans willing and able to serve.

A military that has to compete with the civilian job market for workers is extremely expensive. Military pay and benefits make up the single largest category in the Defense Department budget. These costs have skyrocketed since 9/11, rising by more than 50 percent in real terms. In 2012, the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a defense think tank, projected that if personnel costs continue to grow at that rate and the overall defense budget remains flat, military personnel costs will consume the entire defense budget by 2039. A worsening recruiting environment has led to enlistment bonuses of up to $50,000, and retention bonuses as much as 10 times that amount for pilots and other crucial personnel. And this is all without mentioning the Department of Veterans Affairs, whose budget is approaching half the size of the Defense Department’s.

Because of its cost, the AVF is too small to handle a major war or emergency. When faced with two medium-size campaigns, in Iraq and Afghanistan, the AVF was seriously challenged to provide sufficient troops, despite constant mobilization of reservists, the enlistment of local allies, and the deployment of copious contractors. A major conflict would break the AVF—an open secret in defense circles, but something that few in Washington want to discuss. Over the past year of fighting, Russia and Ukraine have both taken casualties equal to at least half the active-duty U.S. Army. (U.S. military doctrine says that a force is destroyed after sustaining 30 percent casualties). Selective Service, subject to even less scrutiny than the AVF, remains on the books because if we ever enter into another major conflict, we will need a draft again.

The current recruiting crisis has become the most pressing short- and long-term challenge for the AVF. All-volunteer force is a misnomer: The U.S. military should be described as an all-recruited force. Each young American who ships off to boot camp is the result of intense effort by an enormous recruiting and marketing apparatus. The Army alone has assigned more than 10,000 soldiers, equivalent to about three brigades, to recruiting duty. In the Marine Corps, the joke is that Marine Corps Recruiting Command eats first: The Corps’ recruiting and marketing budget is sacrosanct. Ballpark bomber flyovers and “Be All You Can Be” don’t come cheap.

The stark fact is that most young Americans can’t currently serve and even fewer want to. Since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, just 23 percent of Americans ages 17–24 are eligible to enlist without a waiver. Obesity, medical and mental-health issues, or a history of substance abuse prevent most of their peers from being able to serve. The switch to a new military health-records system, MHS Genesis, is also making recruiting tougher by revealing the actual mental and physical health of recruits, after decades of half-truths and fudged standards. The overall propensity to serve is even worse than the eligibility. Most of those who are eligible to enlist are currently enrolled in college. Just 9 percent of young Americans would seriously consider military service, near the all-time low since the AVF began. COVID restrictions made it tougher for military recruiters to find and meet this extremely small tranche of young Americans; online efforts have been a poor substitute for in-person recruiting.

These trends have been exacerbated by historically low unemployment rates. Any perceived negative of military service is amplified when there are more opportunities to stay home and live comfortably. The result is that 2023 is likely to be the worst year for military recruiting since the AVF began. Most of the services have already said that they will fail to hit their recruiting targets. The Army, short 15,000 recruits last year and facing the same shortfall this year, is shrinking. The Army’s top enlisted leader, Sergeant Major of the Army Michael Grinston, recently warned that trying to do more with less is putting “an enormous strain” on soldiers and their families.

The response to these challenges takes the usual American form: throwing more money at the problem. But higher pay and more bonuses have their limits. Total compensation for military service is already in the 90th percentile for equivalent civilian work for enlisted personnel in their first decade of service. Pay is now secondary to lifestyle concerns for many service members debating another enlistment.  

There are also long-term structural challenges that counter the appeal of increased compensation. Foremost among these is that the profession of arms has become a family trade. A declining societal ethos of service, coupled to the tendency of mission-focused military recruiters to “fish where the fish are” by focusing on high-yield geographic areas, has made multigenerational military families the norm. In 2019, nearly 80 percent of Army recruits reported having a family member who had served. For almost 30 percent, that person was a parent. Since the end of the draft, the American republic has quietly, steadily acquired a military caste. Any significant decline in this caste’s willingness to continue serving—a foreseeable event in the aftermath of two failed wars and the increasing influence of partisan politics on the military—will pose an existential threat to the AVF. There are signs that this has already begun to happen. A 2021 survey by the Military Family Advisory Network found that just 62.9 percent of military and veteran families would recommend military life, down from 74.5 percent two years before.

The other structural challenge facing the AVF is that it is still based on the career and family norms of the 1950s. In an era of increased career mobility and dual-income households, the military is still designed for a world of single-income families with the civilian spouse playing the role of supportive camp follower. President Joe Biden’s recent moves to support the careers of military spouses will help, but can have only a marginal effect. Military spouses will still be subject to an itinerant lifestyle that regularly moves them to predominantly rural areas where professional opportunities are in short supply. With more women than men completing college and pursuing professional careers, the pool of families willing to take on the burden of military service under this model is steadily dwindling.

The military career model also assumes that senior leaders will be with the same organization for 30 years or more, making the institution an extreme outlier among large employers. This limits the talent pool to those who find such a commitment palatable. In a world where drones and artificial intelligence will likely dominate future conflicts, the isolated and heavily bureaucratic professional-development models of the military will struggle to keep up with the pace of innovation. Congress has authorized lateral entry measures—enlisting those with needed skills at far higher initial rank and pay—to break open this closed labor market, but cultural resistance from the services has prevented these policies from making much impact.

The AVF’s problems should give pause to any politicians or policy makers who are somehow still sanguine about America’s ability to win wars. In any major conflict, the military will have to dramatically expand and adapt in ways the AVF cannot manage. America has not even begun to have a conversation about what comes next.

For 50 years, most Americans have had the luxury of ignoring their military, even as they paid its large and growing bills. Through Cold War peace and post-9/11 wars, the all-volunteer force has consisted only of those who chose to join it. But the deepening recruiting crisis and the structural threats to the sustainability of the AVF make the future of our all-recruited military a crucial national-security issue. Private Stone is unlikely to be America’s last draftee.