The U.S. Military Recruiting Crisis, With Nora Bensahel

LINDSAY:
Welcome to the President's Inbox, a CFR podcast about the foreign policy challenges facing the United States. I'm Jim Lindsay, director of Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. This week's topic is the U.S. military recruiting crisis.

 

With me to discuss the challenges that the U.S. armed services are having in attracting new recruits, and what can be done about it is Nora Bensahel. Nora is a visiting professor of strategic studies and senior fellow of the Merrill Center at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. She's also a contributing editor and columnist for War on the Rocks. She has co-written the book Adaptation Under Fire: How Militaries Change in Wartime. Earlier this year, she co-wrote an article in War on the Rocks titled, "Addressing the U.S. Military Recruiting Crisis." Nora, thanks for joining me.

 

BENSAHEL:
Thanks very much for the invitation to be here.

 

LINDSAY:
So Nora, 2023 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the all-volunteer force. But over the last several months I've seen a number of articles talking about the recruiting crisis that the U.S. military and the U.S. Army in particular are facing. Can you give me a sense of the extent in nature of the recruiting crisis?

 

BENSAHEL:
Yeah, it's pretty extensive, and it is now spreading beyond the Army to affect most of the other services as well. During government fiscal year 2022, which ran from October 1st of 2021, all the way through September 30, 2022, the numbers of people who were joining the military fell to some of their lowest numbers in recent memory. The Army itself fell short about 10,000 soldiers that it needed to make up its ranks. The other services were able to make their numbers, but just barely.

 

This current fiscal year, which will end on September 30th of this year, the Army is on track to lose up to 20,000 additional people, to shrink by that much. And the other services, all except the Marines, are projecting that they will come in under their military recruitment targets. So this is a very significant challenge for the military. It seems to be shrinking for reasons that are not strategic. They're not the result of a debate about whether we should have a smaller military or a bigger military. It's shrinking because there simply aren't enough people who are both qualified and interested to join the military. And that has defense observers really extremely concerned about what the future of the force is going to look like.

 

LINDSAY:
So Nora, help me understand that. When we talk about the inability to recruit or failing to meet recruitment goals, are we talking about recruitment of enlisted people? Are we talking about the recruitment of officers? Are we talking about both?

 

BENSAHEL:
It's the enlisted force primarily. The numbers are there on the officer side.

 

LINDSAY:
So we're talking privates who eventually-

 

BENSAHEL:
Exactly.

 

LINDSAY:
... some corporals, sergeants, et cetera.

 

BENSAHEL:
Exactly. And when we say recruiting, we're of course talking about the most junior people, getting them in the door to serve their first term. One of the interesting things about this is that retention, keeping people in the military once they've signed up, has actually gone up. So the people who are serving in the military are choosing to stay at it at higher rates than the past few years. But the getting people in the door for their initial service enlistment is where the military has been having tremendous challenges.

 

LINDSAY:
So Nora, is that retention rate equivalent across the services, or do some services do a much better job of retaining their enlisted personnel?

 

BENSAHEL:
The numbers that I've seen suggest that it is widespread, but we won't really know the numbers till the fiscal year ends. But the early indications are that retention will be fine across the services, even while recruitment, bringing in people initially, is not.

 

LINDSAY:
Okay. So it seems to be that the problem right now is more about getting people in the door than keeping people in the room once they're there.

 

BENSAHEL:
Yep. Exactly right.

 

LINDSAY:
Now there seems to be a bit of irony here, Nora, because I can recall back after the beginning of the Afghanistan war, and certainly after the beginning of the Iraq war, there were concerns raised that the U.S. military would not be able to maintain an all-volunteer force because people who signed up knew they ran a very high risk of actually seeing combat. But that didn't happen, correct?

 

BENSAHEL:
You're right. It didn't happen. And many people, including myself, expected that it would. I think that the patriotism that 9/11 evoked kept many people joining the military for many years. And as well, perhaps somewhat counterintuitively, people who sign up to join the military tend to want to fight. And so even though the risks were high, of course, recruitment ended up not being a problem for most of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

 

LINDSAY:
So I have to ask you the so what question. If the United States Army or the United States Navy or the Air Force are unable to meet their recruiting targets, what's the consequence?

 

BENSAHEL:
Well, the consequence is the military might not be as ready as it would otherwise be to fight in wars of the future if they come. Fighting in a future war is what the business of the Department of Defense is. It's what the military trains for every single day. And the risk is if the U.S. military is too small to conduct the kinds of missions that it needs to conduct in the future wars, that that will go badly for the United States.

 

And particularly in the current era of great power competition. Russia is at war in Ukraine. There are concerns that could spill beyond Ukraine's borders potentially. And of course, the increasing tension between the United States and China that could spill over into conflict at some point. And if the U.S. military is not big enough, it's not trained well enough, it doesn't have enough people to meet those missions, it not only means that we'll be losing more lives in the course of those conflicts, but ultimately the United States might not win those wars. And again, that's something that concerns the Department of Defense greatly.

 

LINDSAY:
So Nora, why are we experiencing a recruitment crisis at this point?

 

BENSAHEL:
It's a great question, and it is so hard to answer because there are many, many different trends that are all happening at the same time. You can't actually figure out the primary cause or the two biggest causes because there's just so much that's going on at once. The easiest ones to understand are legacies of the pandemic. Standardized test scores are down, not just in the United States, but across the world. The military has its own standardized tests that you take called the ASVAB that determines your aptitude to serve in the military. And those scores have fallen just as many other types of standardized test scores have fallen. So fewer people are making the entry requirements on that standardized test.

 

Similarly, there are a lot more people who aren't making the fitness requirements, who are overweight, which the military has certain guidelines about body fat and weight that need to be met in order to come in. Those ones are considered temporary. They may be happening for a while because many years of school kids were affected by the pandemic. And there are some things that the services are already doing to try to help recruits who are otherwise eligible make those things up. The Army started, and the other services are following, something called the Future Soldier Preparatory Course, which is essentially coming together and getting test assistance and physical fitness assistance so that otherwise eligible recruits can meet those standards. So those are the most obvious ones that come out recently.

 

LINDSAY:
Okay. So one problem obviously, if I understand you correctly, is the percentage of people in the target age range who are eligible to enlist. And I've seen numbers suggesting that it was previously around 29 percent of the target age range, which I assume is somewhere between eighteen and twenty-four, twenty-five. And that number is now down to just 23 percent.

 

BENSAHEL:
That's right. And that was a precipitous drop in one year between 2021 and 2022. That's a huge amount to go down in just one year. And that's why I said, of course, everyone in the military, everyone who thinks about the defense of this country, is concerned about that because for that to happen in one year is a tremendous, tremendous drop.

 

LINDSAY:
Okay. And I imagine a second potential problem is what do the numbers show you about the percentage of people who are actually interested in signing up with the military?

 

BENSAHEL:
Right. In an all-volunteer force, it's not just who's eligible, right? The eligibility is the baseline, right? That's the pool you can draw from. But again, we haven't required people to serve in the military since 1973 when the draft was abolished. And so everybody who comes into the military has to want to serve.

 

And there I think we are seeing the effects of the one Achilles heel of the all-volunteer force. The all-volunteer force has been tremendous in almost every way. It has created a U.S. military that is professional, that is among the most capable in the world, that has people who want to be there and who are committed to their service. The one downside of the all-volunteer force is that it has separated military service from the ordinary citizenry. Not something that was ever intended by getting rid of the draft, but as that has evolved over fifty years, what we've seen is a huge and ever widening gap between the military and the society that it serves.

 

So right now, for example, a third of the people who choose to serve in the military have a parent who served in the military. Up to 80 percent of people coming in have a family member broader than just a parent who serves in the military. So even though about 1 percent of the population serves in the U.S. military, it's the same 1 percent generation on generation. It is not evenly distributed around the country. And what that means is that there's a whole wide population of young people out there who will never meet a veteran, who will never know anybody who serves in the military, and are likely to never consider military service as one of their options just because they're never exposed to people in the military. And so we're seeing the consequences of that coming home to roost, if you will, on the eligibility part.

 

LINDSAY:
So what I hear you saying, Nora, is that when you look at the all-volunteer force, in many ways a professional military, it is to some extent become a family business attracting most of its recruits from people who are already involved in the operation.

 

BENSAHEL:
That's right. And many people have called it exactly that. There are some really deep philosophical problems with that such as, you what does it mean if you're a citizen of the United States to assume that someone else is going to serve in times of crisis, right? That's a pretty deep obligation of citizenship, to serve your country.

 

But even more than those bigger philosophical questions, it's become problematic because the military has relied so heavily on essentially one type of person to come in, people who have a family member in. And I think one of the reason that you're seeing a crisis now in military recruiting is the more you rely on any single segment of the U.S. population, the more vulnerable it is if that segment for whatever reason becomes unable or unwilling to serve in the military. And I think that that is what we're seeing today.

 

Too many Americans just have no idea about the military and would never even consider service in the military. So when you have these broader trends that are affecting eligibility and that are even affecting people who do have that family connection, their willingness to serve in the military, that's how you get a crisis. And it becomes very difficult to dig your way out of that because you have to overcome fifty years of that separation between average Americans and the military.

 

LINDSAY:
Nora, I want to come back to the big philosophical question maybe at the end of our conversation. But for right now, I want to drill down on this question of interest in what are the factors that might be sort of tilting people away from thinking about the military as a life choice? I take it one factor is tight labor markets.

 

BENSAHEL:
That is always the case, but it is particularly strange with the current economy that we're in because we have tight labor markets, but we also have relatively high unemployment given those tight labor markets. In the past, military recruiters have known what to do when the economy is strong, when people have more good civilian job options, the way that they've been able to compensate with that is by raising enlistment bonuses and other very targeted financial means that will help them compete in a competitive job market. But the old tricks of how you manage recruitment in a strong economy aren't working because this is not the same type of strong economy that we had before. Even though the labor market is tight, getting people into the right types of jobs and the jobs that they're qualified for is a problem in the civilian economy right now. And so it is also a problem in the military recruitment area.

 

LINDSAY:
What I've also heard, Nora, is that many people who are in the military are no longer encouraging other people to follow their footsteps because of their own dissatisfaction with military life, the demands it makes. To what extent is that a real or significant issue?

 

BENSAHEL:
Again, it's very hard to know the precise causes of what's affecting people's decision to join, but I do think that there is some evidence that that is what's happening. Part of that is tied to the fact that Americans overall are less confident in U.S. institutions than they used to be. And the U.S. military has particularly suffered in that. Americans don't have a lot of faith in any public institution, frankly. And the military still is one of the two highest ones that Americans say that they have confidence in, that they believe in. But the numbers, if you go back and look at the survey data across time, what was a very favorable rating is still favorable, but dropped twenty percentage points in the past two years.

 

LINDSAY:
The trend has not been the military's friend.

 

BENSAHEL:
Yeah. On how the American public views the military, and whether they think that the military is a good institution in the United States.

 

LINDSAY:
Why do you think that is?

 

BENSAHEL:
Well, I think there are a number of things going on. And again, we can only guess because figuring out the precise reasons is impossible because so many things are happening at the same time. My own view looking at this is that part of this among the American people more broadly, not just those in uniform, the American people are very ignorant about the military. And when they looked at the way that the U.S. withdrew from Afghanistan, not the decision whether or not to withdraw, but when they looked on TV and saw those heart wrenching pictures of Afghans trying to flee the country, the U.S. military looked incompetent to a lot of Americans. Now, that's not actually a fair characterization. There were very good military reasons why that was an incredibly complicated military operation. But again, most Americans don't know that, and I think that shook a lot of faith in the military.

 

I also think in the aftermath of the Black Lives Matter's protests in the summer of 2020 when there were lots of people in a lot of cities, there were protests and there were mobilizations of people in uniforms with riot gear with very heavy weaponry on the streets. It was almost never the U.S. military. The National Guard was called out in two of those protests, which is a very small number of the places where this happened. But people don't know a lot about the military. The federal law enforcement agents, which is what they primarily were, and local police were not wearing identifying markers. And so I think a lot of Americans assumed that the military was out on the streets when in fact they were not. But I think that affects the confidence of a lot of Americans.

 

The issue that you raise though about the views among people in the military is obviously a critical one. Because it is the children and family members of people who serve who are most likely to want to serve. That I think was affected by the withdrawal from Afghanistan. I think that many, particularly veterans of the Afghan war, felt that the Biden administration's decision betrayed the U.S. promise to never leave people behind. There were many, many Afghans who helped and supported the U.S. effort who were not able to get out. And I know that was very traumatic. That's not too strong a word for many of the veterans who served there. And I think you may be seeing that coloring their willingness to advise their kids or other family members to join.

 

LINDSAY:
Nora, what do you think about arguments that the willingness of some people, particularly people from conservative families, to volunteer for the military has gone down either because they're opposed to being vaccinated if they go into the military, and also because it has been argued that the military is more focused on being woke than being warriors? How do you react to that?

 

BENSAHEL:
Well, that's a narrative that the Republicans, particularly in Congress, are pushing very hard. In fact, Marco Rubio last year, and I forget who his co-author was from the House, published a report that was called explicitly "Woke Warriors," which says that the military is focusing too much on social issues and diversity and not war fighting. There is no objective evidence for that. And in fact, the fact that retention is higher than it's ever been actually suggests that that is exactly the opposite of what's happening. More people are satisfied with the military and want to stay in than ever before, which is not what you'd expect if those arguments about wokeness were really undermining military effectiveness.

 

That said, the narrative plays very strongly in conservative Republican circles. And because, at least in the past, that there has been evidence that many people in the U.S. military tend to be on the right of the American political spectrum, and that there has been a lot of support for now former President Trump in the military, I do think that narrative is having an effect, even though I think it is objectively false. People believe it and therefore it has consequences. And I do think that is something that is challenging the desires of people who might otherwise be willing to serve if they buy into that narrative.

 

LINDSAY:
Nora, what about arguments I hear from the opposite end of the political spectrum, that people don't want to sign up for the U.S. military because the U.S. military has a problem with right-wing extremism?

 

BENSAHEL:
So there's very little evidence that that is true. I want to be clear. There are some extremists in the U.S. military, but the military as a whole is doing a tremendous number of things to try to ensure that there is no extremist behavior that goes on in the military. They are very on top of that, and leadership is prioritizing that as an issue. But I do think that there is a perception of that, again, more on the left side of the political spectrum, the perception is that it's much bigger than it actually is. It is actually a relatively minor problem in the military, certainly compared to what it seems in broader civilian society.

 

What you also hear from people on the left though is that they don't want to join the military because they're afraid they're going to get hurt. And in particular, women say that they're afraid of being sexually assaulted or otherwise harmed. And there, unfortunately, there is some truth behind those views. There are statistics that show that military sexual assault continues to be a problem, especially in the aftermath of the Vanessa Guillén case, the soldier who was murdered in Texas, and where the Army chain of command there did not cover itself in glory in how it handled that on the base. I think that has had an effect as well.

 

Although I think in relative terms, the effect is minor because people on the left have generally been less likely to want to join the military. So I do think it's affecting their views, but they were among the people who are what the military calls less propensed, less likely to want to join. So the impact of that may actually be less than the impact of these views on the right, because those were the people who were considered more likely to join the military, if that makes sense.

 

LINDSAY:
It does. But Nora, why do you think it is that the military has had such trouble getting on top of the problem of sexual harassment and assault?

 

BENSAHEL:
I think there are a number of reasons why. I think the biggest one is that the U.S. military resisted, in my opinion, for far too long taking the authority to prosecute those terrible incidents away from the commanders, and kept it in the military chain of command for too long. I think early on when it became obvious that this was a growing problem, it was understandable. Commanders have responsibility for their troops and there's a reason why they have the ability to punish them and keep many things within the chain of command for punishment at their discretion.

 

But after years and years when the problem was clearly not getting better, I think they missed an opportunity to do that. And in fact, they only did it in the past year because Congress finally forced them to do that. Legislation finally passed that took the authority to investigate and prosecute, I should say, the most serious allegations of sexual harassment and sexual assault away from commanders. So that is getting better, but that will take some time to play out. And unfortunately, it is not going as quickly as many people would like or that it should be going.

 

LINDSAY:
So Nora, we've talked about the nature of the problem. We've talked about the consequences of the problem. We've talked about the reasons for the problem. That is the crisis in military recruitment. Now I'd like to talk a little bit about what could be done to address it. Now, obviously, the problem could take care of itself if you had a growing population of people in the target age range, because even if your percentages were falling but the pool was growing, you could still end up on the right side of the equation.

 

However, that's not the case for the United States. That age group, fifteen to twenty-four, is actually declining. I don't think it's scheduled to reverse any time soon. So that means that you've got to find some way to increase both the body of people who are eligible, as well as the interest in the military. You've mentioned one military program designed to do that so far, and that's the Army's Future Soldier Preparatory Course. But what is it that U.S. military can do to increase the percentage of people who can meet its own standards?

 

BENSAHEL:
Yeah, it's a great question, and that's what the service leaders are focusing on in the shortest term. Because the way that you can bring more people in quickly is to have them meet those standards. Frankly, I think that part of what they need to do is to look at all of those standards and determine which ones are vitally essential and which ones are not. Nobody is in favor of having people who are unqualified coming into the military, but there are some eligibility restrictions that, in my view, make very, very little sense.

 

LINDSAY:
Walk me through those.

 

BENSAHEL:
So for example, if you have a mental health condition that is relatively minor like anxiety or depression, and you are on medication for that, you are not allowed to join the military, period. You can ask for a waiver that would allow you to serve. But waivers can take months and months and months, and recruits have to find something else to do in the meantime. And they usually find other jobs and don't come back to the military.

 

We also know that those types of mental health problems exploded, well, really among all Americans, but particularly among that target audience of young people during the pandemic. So fewer and fewer people are meeting the standards of not having any mental health issues, even though they have what medically would be considered relatively minor and treatable issues such as depression and anxiety. So one of the things that I've argued that the military should do is, instead of having that be automatic exclusion... Oh, and I should add, if you develop those conditions while you're in the military, you can absolutely stay.

 

LINDSAY:
So you don't get booted out of the military if you develop anxiety.

 

BENSAHEL:
Right. Exactly. And it can be treated by a doctor. The same standard should apply to people entering the military. If it is something that a doctor certifies is not a problem that affects someone's likelihood of military service, my view is they should be allowed to serve. Obviously, there are going to be people with more serious mental health conditions. We're not talking about those types of people. But the most common ones that people are allowed to stay in the military with should be the eligibility requirements as well.

 

LINDSAY:
So what other eligibility requirements do you see, Nora, that in your view should be modified?

 

BENSAHEL:
So this one is quite controversial, but I think given where the nation is on this issue, a minor past incidences of marijuana use may need to no longer exclude people from serving in the military. I want to emphasize I said minor, meaning one or two usages rather than someone who is addicted or anything like that. The fact is that we have a patchwork of laws in this country where smoking marijuana is legal in many states.

 

LINDSAY:
Twenty-one.

 

BENSAHEL:
It's not federally legal, but most teenagers aren't thinking about that. If the state says they can do it, that's what they're going to be thinking about. The U.S. military absolutely needs to remain drug free, but it doesn't need to remain drug free from people in high school, right? If they've had one or two usages in the past, that should not disqualify them from service as long as they continue with, frankly, what the troops that are in the military get, which is random drug testing to ensure that they are drug free. But right now, if you have examples of marijuana use in your past, you are automatically stricken from being able to serve. And people age twelve, thirteen, fourteen make bad decisions. We know this. If it's not a pattern of usage, my personal view is we should be allowing those people to serve as long, as with other folks, we ensure that they remain drug free once they join the military.

 

LINDSAY:
I should note that in the twenty-one states that have legalized marijuana and also the District of Columbia, they're home to roughly half of the people between the ages of fifteen and twenty-four. So that's a very sizeable portion of your pool of applicants.

 

BENSAHEL:
Exactly. And who frankly are not going to care about the nuances between federal law and state law.

 

LINDSAY:
Now, what about things like rules on tattoos?

 

BENSAHEL:
The military has liberalized a lot of those things in recent years, both as a retention tool as well as recruitment. Tattoos became very popular among young folks in the past two decades. For a long time, any tattoo was considered disqualifying. You were not allowed to serve in the military if you had any. All of the services have changed that. So as long as they're not visible in a way that interferes with their service. In other words, if it's not like gang tattoos or something along those lines, then people are allowed to serve.

 

They've also changed some restrictions on hairstyles that may not sound like a big deal, but particularly for Black women, some of those restrictions were a really big deal. And so they've loosened those in ways that should enable more Black women to be able to serve. And those are just a couple of examples of a lot of the liberalizing things that services have done in order to really rethink which of the entry standards really are no kidding standards that must be enforced, and which ones are simply traditions that are no longer relevant today. Nobody wants people to serve who can't do the work, who can't be reliable and trustworthy. But these standards tend to accrete over time without anybody going back and saying, hey, is that actually helping us achieve that objective or not?

 

And frankly, one of the other things that's contributing to people being ineligible, this one is very counterintuitive, but the military at the beginning of the fiscal year instituted a new electronic health records system called MHS GENESIS. And what they're finding is that more people who are recruits, as they submit electronic health records, more people are being flagged for disqualifications because their comprehensive medical history is available. What this seems to suggest is that perhaps recruiters were encouraging applicants not to put down their full medical histories on paper in the past. So although we can say that we're having more people coming in who are not meeting those requirements, some of them we may not have known it, but people have been hiding certain minor medical conditions for a long time that are just now becoming visible with the electronic health records. Which is why I think it's, again, the services need to scrub every single requirement to make sure that it is still valid and necessary for twenty-first century combat.

 

LINDSAY:
What about efforts, Nora, to make service in the military more appealing? Whether by changing how military life plays out, or by changing people's perceptions of the military through things like advertisement and movies?

 

BENSAHEL:
So all of the military services have also tried to address quality of life standards, not just because of the recruitment and retention issues, but also because it's the right thing to do. And so most of the services are now offering programs where, in exchange for longer enlistment contracts, they could be guaranteed to stay on the same base, that they won't have to move every two or three years. Spousal employment is a big issue. It's very hard to have a career as a military spouse when you're changing your bases all of the time. So that's one thing that they've done, as just one example. There are a ton of things that they're trying to do on that quality of life issue.

 

But the hardest one is the one that you mentioned at the end, which is how do you get more propensity among the American people? How do you get more people interested in serving in the military? And again, that's an incredibly tough question because we got to the place where we are today after fifty years of the all-volunteer force and the separation of the civilian society with the military. None of the ways in which the services are trying to tackle that are going to pay off in the short term. None of them are going to solve the recruiting crisis for next year. But still, they're aware that they have to do many more things to try to get more people interested in the military. They're doing new types of advertising and trying to target young folks. In particular, the Army brought back this year its advertising campaign called Be All You Can Be.

 

LINDSAY:
Still one of the best.

 

BENSAHEL:
Exactly. People who are your age and my age will remember this from being kids and seeing the ads. The ads themselves are updated, but the tagline is back as a way to try to motivate folks. So there are efforts like that. But also efforts to ensure that populations around the country, particularly in urban areas and along the coasts, the places where the propensity to serve, the likelihood of serving is lowest, to get people to know the U.S. military.

 

The Army is doing programs, for example, in fifteen cities around the country where recruiters are being connected with operational units so that when they have an event or they can have an open house, they can bring actual soldiers and equipment to a place so that Americans who might not otherwise have any exposure to the military can talk to people in the military, can see the equipment, can develop some form of connection and get a sense of what it is the U.S. military does. Again, that's not going to help in the short term. Those types of efforts are absolutely necessary, but they're going to take a while to bear fruit.

 

So the services are trying their best to balance the short term dealing with the eligibility crisis, which is the way to get people in the fastest, is to have more people meet the criteria, while they're also trying for the longer term to increase American awareness of the military to make military service an option that seems valuable to more Americans.

 

LINDSAY:
Nora, I want to come back to the philosophical question about the desirability of having an all-volunteer force. As you've noted, one of the consequences of the all-volunteer force is that much of the burden of U.S. military service has fallen on a small percentage of the population. And increasingly over time, those people who have served are really separated from those who didn't.

 

BENSAHEL:
That's right.

 

LINDSAY:
And I'll just say as I look out at people who have jumped into the presidential race here in the United States, I don't see contenders who themselves have had military service. So as successful as the all-volunteer force has been, is it something that we should continue to stick by?

 

BENSAHEL:
Well, look, I think the practical reality is that's what we're going to be doing for the foreseeable future, unless there's some existential shock to the nation like 9/11 was. I write and teach with my colleague, a retired army three star named Dave Barno.

 

LINDSAY:
Great guy.

 

BENSAHEL:
He likes to joke that there are only three groups in Washington that oppose a draft. They're the Democrats, Republicans, and independents.

 

LINDSAY:
Fair point.

 

BENSAHEL:
Nobody wants to go back to a draft. And so I don't think we will be going back to a draft again unless some 9/11 or other massive event happens where the political dynamics could change overnight as a result. So I don't think that's likely to happen. But what it means when most Americans don't think they're going to serve in the military, or that there's no scenario under which they could be called to serve in the military, it's a problem for the military in a number of ways. It's not good, if you go back to basic principles of government, for the military to see itself as something separate from the population that it serves.

 

And there's evidence that there is some amount of that going on with people who deployed six, seven, eight times to these wars feeling like they're better Americans than those who didn't volunteer. That's not true, by the way. They should be absolutely commended for their service and praised for it, but it doesn't make them inherently superior to the rest of American society.

 

But frankly, the much bigger danger than that is on the civilian side, and how it shapes how Americans think about war. And what that does, to be brutally honest, it makes it too easy for Americans to decide the nation needs to go to war. There was a survey that was done in December of 2015, which was one month after the attacks on the Paris nightclubs. That was really the first international attack. The group that claimed responsibility for it was ISIS. It was their first big international attack. And so when that was very much in the headlines, and everybody would've been aware of that having just happened, they did a survey of young people and they asked, "Do you think that the United States should go to war against the Islamic State?" And about 60 percent of the young Americans who responded said yes. They then asked the same group of young people, "If the president went on television and announced that there was going to be this war against ISIS, but that they needed more people to fight it, would you volunteer?" And 62 percent said no, they wouldn't. That is profoundly unhealthy when the risks and burdens of military service are not evenly distributed throughout the population.

 

For all of the horrible ways in which the Vietnam draft was enacted, it did in a sense work in the way that it's supposed to, although over too long a period of time, in that eventually the unpopularity of the war among the American public and the fact that they were engaged in that because their sons and daughters were being drafted, that gave them a huge stake in the conflict. And ultimately, it was the lack of U.S. public support that led to the end of the war. Even if it was imperfect and too many people died along the way, that mechanism no longer exists.

 

There were no protests at all when the U.S. went to war in Iraq, which was a much more controversial war, which a lot of people didn't think was justified. But they didn't take to the streets in protest. They might have changed how they voted, but they didn't take to the streets to force a change because it wasn't going to affect them. It wasn't going to affect their families. And again, that is not healthy. It makes the American citizenry too likely to decide to go to war when it's somebody else's kids, not your kids that are going to bear that burden of military service and the risks inherent in that.

 

And so philosophically, having separated the expectation of military service from citizenship for all practical purposes, I find very disturbing both philosophically to what it means to be a citizen, but also practically in that it can have these terrible consequences of having the country go to war more often without sharing the sacrifices of that war more broadly.

 

LINDSAY:
On that sobering note, I'll close up The President's Inbox for this week. My guest has been Nora Bensahel, a visiting professor of strategic studies and senior fellow of the Merrill Center at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. Nora, thank you for joining me.

 

BENSAHEL:
Thank you very much for having me. I enjoyed this very much.

 

LINDSAY:
Please subscribe to The President's Inbox on Apple Podcast, Google Podcast, Spotify, or wherever you listen. And leave us a review. We love the feedback. The publications mentioned in this episode and a transcript of our conversation are available on the podcast page for The President's Inbox on cfr.org. As always, opinions expressed on The President's Inbox is solely those of the host or our guests, not of CFR, which takes no institutional positions on matters of policy. 

 

Today's episode was produced by Ester Fang, with Director of Podcasting Gabrielle Sierra. Special thanks go out to Michelle Kurilla for research assistance. This is Jim Lindsay. Thanks for listening.