This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.
In some ways, it's still hard to take in. In 2001, in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, President George W. Bush and crew invaded Afghanistan, the very country in which the Soviet Union's military had failed so catastrophically in the previous century. Since then, in one fashion or another, our country has been at war -- openly in Afghanistan and Iraq, far less so across other parts of the Greater Middle East as well as Africa. And that global war, which used to be known here as "the war on terror," has simply never ended. Of course, there could be worse to come, given the way the two great military powers on the planet, the U.S. and Russia, are facing off in Ukraine right now, while the Biden administration and the U.S. military ratchet up the pressure for a future conflict with China in the Indo-Pacific region.
And mind you, unlike in so many of America's past wars, all of this has been done without a draft (which was ended in the wake of the disastrous conflict in Vietnam) by what's known as the all-volunteer military. The question TomDispatch regular Nan Levinson, author of War Is Not a Game: The New Antiwar Soldiers and the Movement They Built, explores today is: How can a military that hasn't actually managed to win a war of consequence since 1945 and can't seem to stop fighting them continue to restock its ranks?
My hint to the Chinese (if they are indeed the rising power on planet Earth), given the Soviet experience, the present Russian one in Ukraine, and the American one in this century: figure out how to do it without going to war. In our world, it should be obvious by now that war is poison for the planet's great powers. As Levinson suggests today, at some level those the U.S. military is so eager to incorporate into its ranks increasingly seem to sense this. Tom
Is the Army All That You Can Be?
Losing Wars and Losing Recruits
By Nan Levinson
After more than 20 years of losing wars, recruiting for the U.S. Army is now officially a mess. Last year, that service fell short of its goal by 15,000 recruits, or a quarter of its target. Despite reports of better numbers in the first months of this year, Army officials doubt they will achieve their objective this time around either. The commanding general at Fort Jackson, the South Carolina facility that provides basic training to 50% of all new members of the Army, called the recruiting command's task the hardest since the all-volunteer military was launched in 1973. The Army's leaders were alarmed enough to make available up to $1.2 billion for recruitment incentives and related initiatives.
Those incentives include enlistment bonuses of up to $50,000 and promotions for young enlistees who successfully bring in new candidates. Women recruits can now wear their hair in ponytails, and regulations have been updated to permit small, inconspicuous tattoos in places like the back of your ear.
The other branches of the military aren't exactly doing well either. The Marines, for example, met their numbers largely through retention, not recruitment, and the Navy was forced to accept recruits who scored in the lowest-qualifying range on an entrance exam.
The tempo of recruitment has always swung back and forth, depending in part on whether the economy is bad or booming. Today, that economy may be a mess, but hiring is still remarkably robust, leaving high school graduates with more choices than just the Army or stocking shelves at Walmart (which, by the way, also offers college tuition assistance).
The labor market isn't the only obstacle to filling the ranks. Covid not only kept recruiters largely out of schools -- a traditional hunting ground -- for a couple of years, but they also lowered the scores on military entrance exams. The Army has seen a 9% decrease in scores (already low when this round of measurement began) on the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB), the all-important test that determines which branches of the military and which jobs you qualify for. An oft-cited statistic -- and it's alarming, no matter how you feel about the military -- is that only about 23% of the Americans the Army aims to recruit qualify as physically, educationally, and mentally fit to enlist.
Then there's what could be called the patriotic duty gap. The U.S. is no longer officially fighting any wars (though the global war on terror, even if no longer known by that name, never really ends). The lack of a rally-round-the-flag event like 9/11, along with the calamitous military withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021 and 20th-anniversary reexaminations of the disastrous invasion of Iraq, have left Washington wary of starting a new conflict. Sure, tens of billions of dollars of weaponry are going to Ukraine and there are more than 900 U.S. troops still in fighting mode in Syria, where a drone strike recently killed an American contractor and injured U.S. troops, but we seldom hear much about such deployments, or similar ones in Iraq, Niger, Somalia, and other countries across much of Africa, until something goes wrong, so they're hardly top-notch recruitment material.
Summing up the mood of the military's present target generation, Major General Alex Fink, chief of Army enterprise marketing, observed, "They see us as revered, but not relevant in their lives."
What's a Recruiter To Do?
A year ago, an Army Career Center (aka a recruiting station) opened in my fairly affluent neighborhood. This was curious. After all, it's an area surrounded by elite universities and not the most welcoming high schools when it comes to the military. I had walked by the station often, noting the posters in its windows advertising career training and the benefits of the Army Reserve. There was even one in Tagalog about an expedited path to U.S. citizenship. (And mind you, there isn't a large Filipino population in this neighborhood either.)
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