Sign Up for ASP Alerts This essay is part of the ongoing American Security Project series, Iraq: Lessons Learned. Read more essays in this series here.
By Lawrence J. Korb
November 7, 2007
One of the lessons of Iraq is that our nation’s All-Volunteer Army (AVA) has suffered significant long-term damage waging a long war it was not designed to fight.
When the Nixon administration ended the draft and switched to the All-Volunteer Force (AVF) in 1973, the service most affected was the Army. For all practical purposes, in the period of conscription that lasted from 1948 to 1973, the Army was the only service that had to rely on the draft to fulfill its manpower needs. (The Marines had to draft small numbers in the waning years of Vietnam and the Navy took in conscripts briefly in the mid 1950s.)
The AVA was to have four components: a comparatively small active force; a strategic reserve consisting of the Army National Guard and Army Reserve which would serve as a bridge to conscription if the nation became involved in a long war; a large pool of draft registrants which could be activated quickly; and private contractors who would take over mundane support functions like food service and routine maintenance.
This structure had two advantages.
First, it held down costs. Even though the size of the active Army was reduced, it still was the largest service and thus had the largest payroll. And with the creation of the AVF, the hidden tax of conscription ended and the cost of each soldier rose substantially. Second, a smaller force made it easier for the Army to recruit sufficient numbers of high quality personnel.
After getting off to a rough start, the AVA became a great success. By the mid 1980s, the active duty Army was comprised of high quality men and women. The Guard and Reserve were better trained and equipped than ever. Private contractors had assumed many of the routine support functions freeing up soldiers for combat missions. And after being discontinued briefly during the mid 1970s, draft registration was reinstituted and accepted by young men as part of becoming an adult.
The AVA performed very well in the Persian Gulf War. Tens of thousands of Guard and Reserve personnel were activated to support the hundreds of thousands of soldiers deployed to the Gulf. Private contractors provided food service and routine maintenance behind the lines and accounted for about 10 percent of those deployed in the Gulf. Since the war lasted only 37 days and the ground war only 100 hours, there was no need to reinstitute the draft and the reserves were demobilized after about six months.
The second Persian Gulf War – the invasion and occupation of Iraq which has now gone on for almost five years – is another story altogether. To maintain its troop levels in Iraq (as well as Afghanistan), the Army has had to violate its social contract with its active and reserve soldiers, use the Guard and Reserve as an operational rather than a strategic reserve, and rely on private contractors to perform military missions.
According to this social contract, active duty soldiers should get two years between one year deployments and reserves should not be activated more than one year out of six. Today, combat brigades are lucky to get one year between deployments of 15 months in Iraq. Many Guard units have been activated several times since 2001. These reserve units are essentially rotating with active units in maintaining force levels in Iraq and Afghanistan. In 2005, 40 percent of the troops in Iraq were from the reserve component. Their number, as a percentage of the force in Iraq, declined and lingered below 25 percent in 2007, but is expected to rise again in 2008.
The results of conducting this long war with an All-Volunteer Army have been devastating for the Army and the country. To meet its needs the active duty Army has had to lower its educational and aptitude standards to unprecedented levels; raised the age for enlistment to 42; shortened enlistments to as little as 15 months; and given bonuses of up to $70,000 for new recruits and up to $150,000 to keep soldiers in. Even with these steps, the Army has had to grant moral waivers (including for felony convictions) to more than 10 percent of its new recruits. West Point graduates are leaving the service in numbers not seen in 30 years, leaving the Army short thousands of Captains.
Private contractors outnumber military personnel in Iraq and have had to take on military missions. When performing these missions, some contract personnel have used force so indiscriminately that they have undermined the counterinsurgency strategy.
All of this could have been avoided if the Bush administration had invoked the third pillar of the AVF; that is, reinstating the draft to relieve the strain on the other three pillars. The question should be asked: If keeping some 200,000 troops in Iraq and Afghanistan for more than four years is not enough to activate the draft, then what is? How much damage to the AVA will our political leaders tolerate before dipping into the pool of draft registrants?
Dr. Lawrence J. Korb is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and a Senior Advisor to the Center for Defense Information. Prior to joining the Center, he was a Senior Fellow and Director of National Security Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. From July 1998 to October 2002, he was Council Vice President, Director of Studies, and holder of the Maurice Greenberg Chair. Prior to joining the Council, Dr. Korb served as Director of the Center for Public Policy Education and Senior Fellow in the Foreign Policy Studies Program at the Brookings Institution, Dean of the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Pittsburgh, and Vice President of Corporate Operations at the Raytheon Company. Dr. Korb served as Assistant Secretary of Defense (Manpower, Reserve Affairs, Installations and Logistics) from 1981 through 1985. In that position, he administered about 70 percent of the Defense budget. For his service in that position, he was awarded the Department of Defense's medal for Distinguished Public Service. Dr. Korb served on active duty for four years as a Naval Flight Officer, and retired from the Naval Reserve with the rank of Captain.
Conscription is not the answer
Dr. Korb’s recent paper on the All Volunteer Army (AVA) properly identifies the challenges facing the AVA but unfortunately fails to identify the causes of those challenges and proposes exactly the wrong solution.
The challenges facing the military arise not from the failure to implement conscription. Rather, the challenges arose because the Bush Administration has never understood the need to match resources and requirements. In addition, the force has been strained because it is suffering from the many well-documented strategic and operational blunders of the DOD leadership. We know that the Pentagon has never understood the necessity of providing sufficient trained manpower to execute a mission. Secretary Rumsfeld’s near-manic obsession with smaller forces nearly led to a 2 division reduction in the size of the Army in QDR 2001. Rumsfeld’s institutional bias against the Army, his bullying of subordinates and the blind ideological belief that Iraq would be a quick and easy war combined to create an atmosphere where proper military planning for a post-invasion phase was not possible.
Before launching the invasion, the Pentagon should have run through the proper post-conflict scenarios and identified the various manpower requirements for each scenario. As has been documented by Tom Ricks and others, artificial force caps were imposed for political and ideological reasons. Had we engaged in the necessary diplomacy and worked with our allies, additional forces may have been available.
As we know, Shinseki was right. We needed larger, properly trained forces on the ground after the invasion. They weren’t there. Added to that shortfall, the disbanding of the Iraqi Army, failures of the CPA and lack of allies other than the British put greater strain on an already undersized US contingent. Proper planning by competent leaders could have alleviated the manpower problems.
As a result, the Army has been stretched thin over the last few years. As Dr. Korb notes, recruiting has been a struggle and the Army has taken in more recruits requiring moral and medical waivers than in previous years.
However, I find it curious that Dr. Korb and others criticize the Army for spending more to recruit. The Army is in a buyer’s market because it is hiring more personnel from a market that is less inclined to buy. As in any business, the marginal cost of recruiting, hiring bonuses and other payments increases substantially as the employer looks to find the last few qualified employees. Traditional market forces demonstrate that in this regard the Army is no different than any other large employer.
The reason the Army is in a market that is less inclined to buy is because the connection between the American people and military service has been nearly severed. The unpopularity of the Iraq War is part of it. However, President Bush grievously erred by not issuing a real call to service after September 11. Telling America to get on with their lives instead of serving contributed to the decline in influencer support for the military. The President compounded his failure by arguing that all Americans sacrifice for the war because they pay taxes. The mindset that equates the “sacrifice” of paying taxes with the sacrifice of deploying to a war zone speaks for itself. As Charlie Moskos has said, the recruiting problem would be solved if Jenna Bush enlisted.
The fact that influencers are less willing to support young people entering military service raises a related question – if the Iraq War ended tomorrow, would influencers be more willing to support service? I suspect that the number of influencers supporting service would not increase dramatically as most influencers themselves are not veterans and are not familiar with military service.
Dr. Korb’s solution is, however, unworkable. Conscription is exactly what the Army does not need. Operating in a technologically-sophisticated military requires greater aptitude and motivation than the mass armies of the past. I have never met a serving Army officer or NCO who wants to lead draftees. Every Soldier currently in the Army wants to serve, for whatever reason. Leading Soldiers who are motivated to serve and want to be in the Army is far more desirable than trying to lead those who do not want to be there. As a serving Army Reserve officer, the last thing I would want is to lead a young man or woman who did not want to be a Soldier.
Second, conscription could never work because it could never be administered fairly. Conscription prior to Vietnam was accepted by society as a whole because military service was a universal rite of passage for young men, regardless of economic or social background. Opposition to conscription inevitably grew when the children of better-off Americans successfully obtained deferments during Vietnam. Even if conscription were implemented with no possibility of deferment (a fanciful idea since medical, education, religious and other deferments would proliferate immediately), it would still be a brutally arbitrary system.
According to the Department of Education, 12,574,000 young men and women graduated from high school last year. The Army’s recruiting mission last year was just over 80,000 recruits. If the Army were to increase its size by 100,000 through conscription, then it would draft just .7% of the total pool of high school graduates under 21 in the first year of conscription. Since the vast majority would breathe a sigh of relief that they were not conscripted and so few would be forced to serve against their will, service would not be seen as a rite of passage or badge of honor. In a system where everybody serves, then conscription might be seen as an obligation of citizenship; in a system where a statistically insignificant number serve involuntarily, conscription would be seen as an unfair burden and not as an obligation.
Unless those conscripted were amply rewarded to compensate for falling behind their cohorts, conscripts may well deeply resent that they were forced to serve while their friends did not, particularly if forced to serve in a war they oppose. One can only imagine the lengths that the parents of Ivy League-bound conscripts would go to ensure an early discharge. I do not believe that the “thanks of a grateful nation” would make up for the sense among conscripts that they took a detour off the fast track that their friends stayed on. Educational benefits, loan repayments and other bonuses paid to conscripts to “even the playing field” could just as easily be made available to those who want to serve. Unless conscription was universal, and it never would be, it could never be fair. Our military needs are not that large, however, to support or justify massive standing armies.
Finally, Dr. Korb’s arguments about the reserve components are important. The reserve components were never intended to be an operational rotation force with the only difference from the active force being the pace of deployment. Employers are less supportive of service in the Guard and Reserve and recent Senate hearings documented the increasing number of reemployment problems experienced by members of the Guard and Reserve.
Given that the Guard performs vital homeland security missions, the best course of action would be to increase the size of the Guard and Reserve to relieve their personnel tempo, allow reservists to regenerate civilian careers, but still ensure sufficient forces are available for any domestic and overseas contingency.
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