Comparing the US armed forces personnel to the war fighting Janissaries of the Ottoman Empire, Lehnert argues that, while the military is better trained than ever, it is also less representative and must make efforts to expand recruitment and work on retention.
Janissaries: An elite corps of war captives and Christian youths in the service of the Ottoman Empire. Converted to Islam and trained under the strictest discipline, their military prowess made it possible for the Ottoman rulers to expand their power significantly. However, "by the middle of the sixteenth century discipline among the janissaries had declined, but the real fault lay with the sultan and his ministers. The levy system of recruitment faltered and the corps had become a refuge for society's misfits."
The United States is the most powerful nation in the world, in large part because of a system of government that fosters economic expansion backed by a military created to protect and enforce national interests. We achieved world-power status by developing a military capability compatible with our national objectives and cultural framework.
Today, our ability to implement our foreign policy and ensure regional stability is at risk because our military is becoming isolated from the rest of society's policy and opinion makers. Fractures—manifested in our recruiting, readiness, and retention problems—are beginning to form in the old civil-military relationship. It is time to regroup.
Historically, the United States has been ambivalent about its military. Spawned by our experiences under British rule, we developed an early distrust of large standing armies and instead relied on militias made up of local volunteers. It was not until World War I that the U.S. military began to mold itself into a force that could compete with the other world powers.
During World War II we developed a force-projection capability and a logistical and war production infrastructure, and we employed a professional military to train a mobilized citizenry. Americans answered the call to arms and met the challenge of halting the Axis forces. At the end of the war, the United States had achieved Great Power status.
A few years later, in Korea, the United States engaged in a war that failed to weld our nation together in a common goal. In it, we saw the first fractures in the civil-military covenant that had served us for nearly 50 years.
The military that fought in Vietnam was created in part by our social elites—through their lack of a personal stake in the war and their disdain for those who did the fighting. Almost completely absent from the force were members of the upper class; the names of only 12 Ivy League graduates appear on the Vietnam War Memorial. Instead, programs such as Robert McNamara's "Project 100,000" sent youth from the lowest mental categories to the Army and the Marine Corps. The not-so-subtle message was that it takes no brains to fight. Veterans returned to a citizenry that mocked them and held them in contempt. It is an oversimplification to blame the loss of the Vietnam War on the nation's lack of support for the American fighting man; however, it is fair to say that when military efficiency is sacrificed for social experimentation, and when policymakers have no personal stake in the war, the outcome is predictably bad.
The military leaders who created the all-volunteer force were formed during those dark days, and in each of them burned a commitment not to repeat the mistakes of Vietnam. The all-volunteer force focused on raising the mental, physical, and moral standards of the fighting force, and has had the unintended consequence of drawing its recruits from a more narrow range of U.S. citizenry. The poorest economic classes no longer could qualify for enlistment because of poor test scores or criminal records. The upper classes saw no advantage to serving and no social imperative for service.
The force that fought in Panama and Kuwait was arguably the best trained, equipped, and educated our nation has ever produced. It also was one of the least representative. Largely middle class and generally conservative in philosophy, its values clearly were not those of either the social elites who would not serve or the disadvantaged who could not serve. It was an extraordinarily proficient and competent warfighting machine. It had become the U.S. version of the early Janissaries.
The Rift Widens
In the decade since Desert Storm, the U.S. military has undergone significant changes. The breakup of the Soviet Union brought the downsizing of the military, though it ushered in a less predictable world order. As nations jockey for power, the U.S. military has been called on more frequently to perform peacekeeping and peace-enforcement missions instead of its traditional warfighting role. While budgets declined and deployments increased, cracks in the civil-military covenant widened.
The scandal of Tailhook was used by antimilitary elements as shorthand for everything wrong with the military—whose mate members "just didn't get it." Close on the heels of this event came the military's resistance to the 1990 effort to legitimize gays in the military. Never did an issue more clearly demonstrate the rift between the two groups. To the intellectual elite, the military's reaction was plain homophobia. To the majority of the military, it was a stand against the legitimization of immoral behavior.
Ole Holsti, a professor at Duke University, has been polling military officers on their political views for more than 20 years. In 1976, he found that one-third identified themselves as Republican. Today, two-thirds say they are Republican. Leaving out party labels, the numbers are even more startling. In 1976, the conservative to liberal ratio was 4-to-1. Today it is 23-to-1, even with the injection of females and minorities, who tend to be more liberal. Among junior officers, this politicization is becoming even more intense.
Adding to the problem, few who form public policy and influence public opinion (politicians, media, educators, and industrialists) have ever worn a uniform. The percentage of veterans in the House has dropped from more than 75 in 1971 to about 25 in 1999. Senate numbers are similar. Nor do their sons and daughters serve. In 1999, for example, of 74,851 students enrolled in Ivy League colleges—arguably the source of many of our future policymakers—only 31 were contracted for a commissioning program in the U.S. Marine Corps.
Military service does not guarantee empathy for the military, but it does provide a degree of legitimacy. Those who govern are the ones who make the decision to send our forces into harm's way. For those who have fought in service to their country, this commitment is never made idly. For those who have never served nor seen their children serve, war can become an intellectual abstraction, an exercise of power undertaken to achieve political aims.
Representation for its own sake is not the issue. A 1999 study conducted by the Triangle Institute for Security Studies reviewed all military actions abroad since 1816 and found a distinct correlation between the number of veterans in the national political elite and the frequency with which the United States resorted to force. The report concluded that when the number of veterans involved in policymaking decisions declines, the United States is more likely to use force to solve its problems.
Recruiting, Retention, and Readiness
Despite increased deployments, aging equipment, and rising retention problems, senior military leadership long argued that the U.S. military could fight and win two nearly simultaneous major regional conflicts. It was former Commandant of the Marine Corps General Charles Krulak who first publicly informed the Senate Armed Service Committee of his readiness concerns in September 1998. No service chief said his service is incapable of winning two major regional conflicts, but they began providing empirical data acknowledging all was not well.
- Recruiting. The U.S. military needs to recruit nearly 200,000 service members every year to maintain its congressionally mandated end strength of 1.37 million. Last year, every service but the Marine Corps either missed its recruiting objectives or lowered quality to achieve end strength.
The Air Force ended the 1999 fiscal year nearly 1,700 recruits short of its goal of 33,800—the first shortfall since 1979. Despite expanding eligibility for enlistment bonuses, the Air Force is 10,000 below end strength and projects its pilot shortage will grow to more than 2,000 by 2003.
Despite a $6,000 recruitment bonus, $12,000 in bonuses, and up to $50,000 in scholarships, the Army missed its recruiting quota again. It made up the deficit by reenlisting more soldiers, though often in the wrong specialties. It also dropped its long-standing requirement for 90% high school graduates.
The Navy met its fiscal year 1999 objectives only by lowering recruiting standards and accepting more non-high school graduates.
The Marine Corps has met its recruiting objectives for more than four years, but at a terrible cost. Each year, the cream of its noncommissioned officers are taken from the operating forces to convince young men and women to become Marines. To make recruiting goals, the average Marine recruiter works 80 hours a week.
Recently, calls to revive the draft have become more frequent. Despite our socially reengineered brave new world, however, it is doubtful that the American people will allow their daughters to be drafted along with their sons. It also is doubtful that a draft would spread the sacrifice equally throughout society. The military requires only a fraction of the 21 million men and women who make up the 18-22-year-old recruit population, and as we saw during Vietnam, it is the poorer and less educated who wind up serving.
Another response to the growing problem is to lower recruiting standards. Recently, the Secretary of the Army decided to accept more applicants with graduate equivalency degrees. The Army maintains these recruits are just as intelligent as those with high school diplomas, but this misses a key point. There is a direct correlation between the likelihood of a recruit finishing his first enlistment and whether he finished high school. And as the services lower their standards, they reinforce the elite's view of military service as a refuge for the unfit.
- Retention. Retention is expressed in two areas: non-end-of-active-service attrition and the decision to leave at the end of obligated service.
Desertion is on the rise in both the Army and the Navy. The Army had 2,438 deserters in 1998 and the Navy had 2,086—about double that of five years ago.
One out of every three recruits does not finish his first term of enlistment.
The Navy reenlistment objective is 38% of its first-term sailors. Despite generous bonuses, only 29% have reenlisted. In a recent GAO survey, 75% of the sailors interviewed said they intend to leave the military. The Navy has decided to reverse these trends by keeping sailors they previously would have discharged for misconduct. Meanwhile, Navy boot camp attrition rates have risen sharply. The 12-month average as of June 1999 was 23.3% for women and 16.7% for men.
The Air Force predicts that it will be short 1,679 pilots by 2002. Despite annual bonuses of $12,000-$22,000, fewer than one-third of the pilots accepted this offer. "Of the 1,047 pilots in the Air Force class of 1979, only 381 stayed the minimum 20 years required for retirement pay." Even the Coast Guard is projecting its first pilot shortage in a decade.
The Army and Marine Corps, though they have met their reenlistment objectives, are experiencing shortfalls in critical military occupational specialties.
- Readiness. Readiness is more than just, for example, how many airplanes in a squadron are fully mission capable on a given day. It includes the age and condition of the equipment, the availability of repair parts, and the level of training of operators and mechanics. Readiness reflects whether a unit has been allowed to focus on its warfighting mission or has been distracted by other tasks.
The average age of fighters and ground-attack aircraft is exceeding 20 years. Those in the Guard and Reserve are older. The CH-46 helicopters are more than 30 years old. The B-52 bomber will be 75 years old when it is finally retired. Mission-capable rates for all types of Air Force aircraft have been on a decade-long decline.
The Navy has 317 ships, down from a Cold War high of nearly 600. The net impact is to increase the length of deployments and wear and tear on remaining vessels. All of the Navy's original five LHA-1 big-deck amphibious ships reach block obsolescence around 2006. Current ship building rates are not adequate to retain even a 300-ship fleet.
Operational tempo is increasing the rate at which ground equipment deteriorates. Much of the equipment in service already has exceeded its service life. In a vicious cycle, money spent maintaining aging equipment defers new equipment acquisition. The Marine Corps is "plowing scarce resources—Marines, money and material—into old equipment and weapon systems to keep them operational." The average assault amphibious vehicle is 27 years old. The average five-ton truck is 18 years old. Cost to repair this aging equipment has increased 104% from fiscal year 95 to fiscal year 98.
The Air Force requires a C-5 Galaxy fleet with a minimum 75% mission-capable rate to meet global airlift demands in a two major regional conflict scenario. It has 61%. It needs 120 C-17 Globemasters; it has 52. The Navy requires 19 large, medium-speed roll-on/roll-off ships. It has 10.
We are moving back to the hollow force of the late 1970s. Failure to invest in infrastructure is translating into decreased readiness. Not surprisingly, decreased readiness is one of the factors mentioned as a reason for leaving the military.
The Way Ahead
If we intend to retain the capability to achieve political objectives through military means, our nation needs to resolve its ambivalent attitude toward its military and repair the civil-military relationship.
- Change Recruiting Strategies. Thus far, only the Marine Corps has capitalized on its proud history and unique traditions. Each service needs to sharpen its image and special institutional identity. Pride in the organization should be the primary message, not an afterthought.
- Maintain Quality. Lowering standards only confirms our national elites' belief that the military is an excellent place to warehouse the intellectually noncompetitive and the criminally aggressive. Don't do it.
- Invest in the Future. Short-term focus on near-term readiness delays new equipment procurement. Intelligent and prudent investments in new equipment are overdue.
- Confirm Our Commitment to Those Who Serve. The perceived erosion of benefits has had a definite effect on recruiting and retention. The same standard of health care from active duty through retirement must be affirmed. The recent decision to overturn the unpopular Redux program was a positive first step in restoring retirement benefits. Adequate pay is an issue, but national confirmation that service members' sacrifices are recognized and appreciated is equally important compensation. That message has been lost.
- Implement National Service. After graduation from or dropping out of high school, every man and woman would be asked to devote a year to national service, but not necessarily military service. Relief from service would be limited to physical or mental disqualification or documented and unusual family circumstances. One state—Maryland—already makes community service a requirement for high school graduation. Army Secretary Louis Caldera, Senator Strom Thurmond (R-SC), former Senator Gary Hart, former Representative Pete McCloskey, former Senator Sam Nunn, and military sociologist Charles Moskos all have endorsed or recommended national service. In addition to restoring the concept of service, it could draw a more representative cross section of society into the military, thus restoring the civil-military relationship. Ultimately, the best solution for filling the ranks in our military force might be some combination of national service and a volunteer force.
Civilian control of the military is too embedded in our culture for America's Janissaries ever to become a danger to the nation they have sworn to serve, but a military force increasingly separated from the rest of society in provenance and attitudes will continue to experience difficulties in attracting qualified recruits. Readiness will suffer and retention will decline. Those who remain on active duty will surrender warfighting capability to ill-defined peacekeeping missions that end without resolution. Loss of combat effectiveness will be hastened by programs designed to make our military more attractive to society at large, but ineffective as a combat force. Dissatisfaction stemming from lengthy deployments, understaffed units, and aging equipment will continue to affect retention. Even those who choose to serve today will not encourage their children to do so. Like MacArthur's old soldier, America's Janissaries will simply fade away.
Colonel Lehnert, a joint specialty officer, is assigned to II Marine Expeditionary Force, Camp Lejeune, North Carolina. He recently deployed to Panama as Chief of Staff, Joint Task Force Panama, to provide force protection during the last days of the transfer of the Panama Canal and the military bases. He has commanded Marines from platoon to regimental level.