Bend but Do Not Break: Shaping the Future of the All-Volunteer Force

Hello, my name is Elliot Cohen. I'm the Arley Burke chair in strategy here at CSIS and we're here to discuss a new book, Bend, but do not break, shaping the future of the all volunteer force. And with me to discuss it are three of our editors or three of the editors of the uh of this book. Uh to my right, to my left rather, uh Dr. Jason Dempsey, who's with the Center for Veteran Transition and Integration at Columbia University, a former US Army Infantry Officer, uh Kate Kusminsky, uh who is the director of studies at the Center for New American Security, and Dr. Jiren Warden, who is a visiting fellow at CSIS and a career infantry officer who recently commanded a brigade in the US Army's 82nd Airborne Division. I should point out that uh these are all the the opinions that'll be expressed today are all private opinions. They don't represent the organizations uh that uh these folks belong to or certainly the United States government. Okay, with that out of the way, let me open it up. Uh I'm gonna just begin with the most obvious question. Why bend but do not break and feel free to to jump in. This is a conversation among friends. >> Well, I appreciate first off thanks for hosting us. This book was also it actually began here at CSIS years ago. So, we're deeply grateful for the opportunity to discuss it. So, Ben, but do not break. We started this book uh it was really the 50th anniversary of the movement away from conscription the transition volunteer force and the the genesis of the title was we have a resilient organization that's held up to at least in recent history 20 years of conflict 20 plus years of conflict and it was resilient and it was pushed perhaps arguably to its limits but it didn't break it was remarkably resilient but we started this project for a couple different reasons one there was a clear literary gap, right? When you talk about the all volunteer force, at least the health of the all volunteer force, it is often times the conversations are incomplete. You know, they can be siloed in academic disciplines. Uh you can have a whole trunch of literature for example on decisions used military force that I looked at or civil relations for example and that extends to to veterans policy. But there really wasn't a holistic treatment of all these issues in a one-stop shop. And because it was the 50th anniversary, it's kind of a natural inflection point. And in the book, you'll see juxtaposed pictures, for example, that bookend the AVF quite nicely of helicopters evacuating both out of Saigon and C Kabell, respectively. And so when we started this project, we were in the in the wake of the Afghan withdrawal. We're also in what many have described as an existential recruiting crisis. So our thought was, look, this isn't just about the all volunteer force. It's broader. 1973 was a critical year for the military and the broader US government because it was also the 25th anniversary of desegregation. It was the birth of the war powers uh the war powers act. It was the transition to the military or the specifically the army's total force policy and the birth of the now defunct trade do and uh training the army's training and doctrine command and US forces command. So our belief was that there was an interactive effect that required further interrogation. >> Great. So um by the way I should point out to uh all those of you who are watching this or listening to us if you go either if you're watching this on the CSIS website or on YouTube uh there's a link there and if you want to send in a question to the three editors here I can pick them up on my iPad and I'll feed them into the discussion later on. Uh I I am going to open that by saying uh I'm probably the only one here who remembers what it was like to look at the draft. Uh I I turned 18 I think in 1974 and you were still had to register for the draft although there were zero draft calls. My draft number as I recall was eight which made it a pretty short thing. I ended up joining the army in a different way later on. But um one thing I do vividly remember in part because of also my own academic work, my own dissertation which was about conscription when a lot of people were very skeptical that the an all volunteer force could work. I mean there was a very very lively debate about it. People debated the economic uh viability of it. They debated the issues of justice. um they debated issues of does the will it separate the military from society. So maybe we could go around and I'll start with you Jason. If there's one big issue that you would like people to think about in connection with the all volunteer force what what would it be for me it's you know part of the motivation for engaging with this book that goes to this big question. It's kind of a I'm going to give you a meta answer which is I want people to think with a little bit more nuance about the all volunteer force. I think we've just had 20 plus years of conflict where there's been a lot of angst about well gee this is supposed to be the greatest force on earth but yet we're losing. Um and people feel a distance and a lack of understanding. And in that gap of distance and a lack of understanding uh a lot of stereotypes and false dichotoies have been put in place. For instance, when people think about soldiers, sailors, and marines, they often think, well, he's either a hero, a superstar like I see in a movie, or it's a victim, somebody broken with PTSD. And there's rarely any in between nuance understanding. And neither of those dichotoies are helpful for understanding the current force. And to your point about, you know, the larger question of conscription versus not, I think a lot of Americans as they look at the current system and think, hey, uh, we're not doing that great or I I feel some guilt about what's going on with our foreign policy, with the way we fight. And they automatically say, well, we should just have a draft and therefore everybody would have skin in the game and the politicians wouldn't do anything foolish. and and it's it's it's an overly simplistic conversation because people are thinking back uh they're skipping 50 80 years of history really and they're going back to this kind of heographic view of World War II and saying well if only we instituted the draft like we had in World War II >> all of our foreign policy problems would be solved. >> Um you know never mind the fact that hey we had a draft and still had a pretty catastrophic war in Vietnam. And so with with us, it's like how do you get help people cross that gap of distance and understand that none of these stereotypes or dichotoies are helpful. We're not going to go back to the World War II model. Uh but we should look at ways to improve this model and there are a whole host of ways of doing that without yearning for some weird time machine that's going to take us back to a place that didn't exist. Kate. >> Yeah. And you're right to say that it was debated before we decided yes uh it made sense for the United States to transition from this mixed force of conscripts and professionals to an all volunteer force. It has enabled us to develop a truly professionalized force. It's a professionalized force that's a lot smaller than what we saw during the draft era. And the implications of that is that it can detach the military from society or society's understanding of the military. And some of the uh there were 13 big questions that the gates commission which was what President Nixon set up to examine this question and he brought in you know theologians and he brought in economists Milton Freriedman was famously on the board to think about what's the economic cost to the United States. After debating all of that, the unanimous decision was uh the first part that we are all familiar with, which is the unanimous recommendation to shift to an allv volunteer force, which would enable a more professional force. But there is a caveat, a second half of that sentence, which is supported by a standby draft. So the draft is actually still on the books. It would require Congress and the president to um pull that trigger. should we need it. Um, and there's a lot of uh evidence that should we actually get to a point where it was that existential, the machinery would kind of fall apart before we were able to draw on a large force. I think too we we pride ourselves in moving away from conscription or compulsory service in the United States, but I think during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, we had compulsory service. It just looked a little different. So, the army shifted from 12 month deployments to 15 month deployments while people were downrange. Um the um the uh recall of the um the retired reserve uh was was implemented. Um we had folks who were stop-loss so they thought they were you know completing their contract and turns out that they weren't. And so those were other lovers of compulsory service that made us think, you know, back to the question of why bend do not break. We've had to bend the rules sometimes or bend this construction of a truly all volunteer force um to have elements of compulsory service that is separate from how the broader society is thinking about deployment. >> Those are great points and I would just complement those. You know, to Kate's point on the draft is still on the books, I would add the all volunteer forces success or continued success is not a foregone conclusion. It requires a lot of maintenance and sustainment. And because it's been so long since we've enacted that draft, it's not in people's instit. It may be in your memory, but it's not in a lot of other people's. >> No, that's for sure. And so that almost makes it a relic. And that's a muscle that we can't allow to atrophy, especially in the worst contingency, if if you might believe, for example, that we're on the verge at some time in our in our future of a large-scale combat operation, that would dwarf the absorptive capacity of the all volunteer force. Um, and Jason said it so aptly, I'll quote the great philosopher of our time, Ted Lasso, by saying, "We need to be curious." And so when we pulled together this book, it's a very diverse array of experts and we don't all agree, which coincidentally is very very healthy. You won't find a p value, a confidence interval, and I'm not saying there's not a place for that, but we want people to engage with their military. Like it's often said that there's a gap between the military and the society with with whom they serve. And that's true. It's obvious, but it's often manifested in like a ubiquitous thanks or a, you know, just you take for instance a sporting event. We may stand in blind deference to an institution. When you do that, if you do that, you're ceasing to ask really hard questions. So, we interrogate everything from people and force design uh to there's a brilliant chapter on on arguably an antiquated familial model to the implications for democratic health. And then the third rail which is what should we offer veterans because this experiment it has succeeded but it's not hasn't been without cost. And so we encourage the general public to be curious about the AVF the positive and the negative externalities. And if I can interject just real quick, I think one of the things that the book gets at and that Jiren brought out but is most problematic with the public's understanding is the very term all volunteer force because this is not a gang of volunteers. Everybody is paid. And so it's interesting that you know when we started out there were economic concerns about you know and they were they were largely couched around indiv individual freedom when the commission set out you know people should not be forced to do something they don't want to do. uh and I think what they missed in a little bit in terms of how it played out over the years and also what the public misses now is this is a costly enterprise uh and nobody is serving for free. Nobody is a true volunteer and so if we actually start peeling back and interrogating those costs I think we come to a better understanding on the strength resilience or fragility of the system. >> So that way leads to the next question that I want to ask. Um, you know, again, I'm I'm drawing on some of the things that I I remember studying when I was working on my dissertation on conscription more broadly, not just in the United States. that the decision for the AVF obviously Vietnam and dissatisfaction with Vietnam plays a role but so does you know sheer demographics that people saw you're getting this huge bulge of uh then men of military age but of course now uh military much more open to women serving and so that made it seem pretty promising. Um obviously our demographics have changed. What what other things would you say just real quickly maybe I can just go around in reverse order this time just ask just just one at a time what are the things that the architects of the all volunteer force either didn't anticipate or could not have anticipated when it was created. >> Yeah. Well two jump out but I'll I'll name one because I know someone else will jump in with the impact on the reserve component which is prominent. I think the the largest one is the family dynamic which really wasn't on the table at the time over uh over the 50 over 50 years 50 plus years. Now the force is married that that wasn't the 1970s labor economy didn't have as many prospects for upward mobility. You already described the baby boom generation. It really wasn't on the table the the extent to which the family dynamic would would fundamentally change the game. So could you just very quickly you were a brigade commander. >> I was. >> Um came off that fairly recently. How does having a largely married enlisted force change how the military functions? >> Well, I think you just have to be aware of it. I'm not sure it would necessarily change it, but from a demographic standpoint, it certainly seen and it also does make I mean there's a lot of benefit to that, right? And you know, for instance, I'll give you one example. Women in the military were once capped at 2%. [clears throat] It wasn't that long ago that if you had a married service member uh that if if the sp if if if the if you had a female service member that was married to a civilian male, that female service member wouldn't get like a full housing allowance with dependence. That's actually not that long ago, if you can believe that. And over time that 2% cap has grown to we're about 17% in the aggregate. Kate, please correct me if I'm wrong. And there's much room to grow. And so what wasn't anticipated is not just the family dynamic, but the role, the prominence of women. So let me be clear, women have saved quantitatively and qualitatively the all volunteer force. This experiment would not be sustainable without them in our ranks. >> Interesting. Okay. And yeah, to to Jiren's earlier point too, they I don't think that in 1973 they were thinking about the impact of the size of the reserve component um and the competition for talent among the active duty and the reserve. The reserve component was orders of magnitude larger with more relevant uh recent military experience back at the at the transition to the all volunteer force. So we had a more sustainable kind of backbench of folks that we could tap into should we need to. We certainly saw a heavy deployment and a use of the operational reserve in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan both for the reserve component and for the national guard. Um but when we look at our recently retired or inactive uh reserve um it's much smaller than what we had in the past. And that is kind of the first line of defense should we have a truly existential crisis. >> That was calling back people who may not be in organized reserve units. That's right. >> Or National Guard units but recently served. The British actually just began running an exercise where they began talking about recalling people who have just left the force. Of course they have a tiny uh a tiny volunteer force. >> Yeah. I think for us the the one of the surprises in addition to uh women saving the all volunteer force uh the black population saved the all volunteer force when you know it turned out that hey we were relying on young white males to fill the conscription army. And then once that went away, the folks who looked at the opportunities and the economic incentives present in the military uh and the ones that started flocking to it were young women, young blacks, and a lot of black women. You know, it's ironic that a lot of uh much of our enlisted ranks for over 20 years were dominated by senior black women in leadership positions uh because it was all part of that cohort from late 70s, early 80s who saw a once in a-lifetime opportunity for economic mobility. >> What What about immigrants? I'll tell you one of the things I remember during um the Iraq war. >> Yeah. >> I was over there uh on a fairly regular basis >> going to a naturalization ceremony in one of Saddam Hussein's >> godi palaces. >> But it was an amazing and deeply moving site >> just how many men and women in uniform who had not been citizens were becoming citizens in the middle of a >> of a combat tour. Is was the role of immigrants uh a large one? hugely important and we saw we've seen massive growth of the Hispanic population over the last 15 years in the military. >> Uh and that was a tremendous part of this growth and where I think to your original question of what did we not expect? Uh it really heightened these questions of is service in the all volunteer force is it a privilege or a burden? Uh and we you know we saw the burden dynamic in Vietnam when people said well you're just sending people to be cannon fodder. We saw it a little bit in Iraq when a lot of our casualty rates seem to be skewing one direction or another. Uh but over time people saw it as hey this is how I assert my citizenship. This is how I become part of the American experiment. And I don't think we were really ready for that. You know this idea that people would be competing amongst each other to to join and serve. >> Yeah. you know it uh of course it's interesting there there are always historical echoes if you look at the army in particular in the 19th century a lot of immigrants um >> we have actually I want to uh tap one of the questions again I want to remind our those who are watching this you can email in a question through the link on the website or on YouTube one question that you just were asked was do you see women having to sign up for the draft is that something that's likely to be in our future So that is a question that no one wants to tackle. No president, no Congress, and not even the Supreme Court >> in this day and age. >> In this day and age. So, um, we a couple years ago at CNAS, we ran a study looking at if the United States had to, uh, uh, instantiate a draft tomorrow because circumstances demanded it, what would be some of the things that would, uh, slow it down or or get caught in the system? And I wanted to stay away from the question of women in the draft because it's been politicized on both sides of of the aisle. Um, and the more I dug into it, the more I realized we can't ignore that because the second that a draft is put into effect, there will be lawsuits across the country. So, the current law is based on 1980s Supreme Court precedent when women couldn't serve in combat MOS's. And so the Supreme Court found that while um you know while this this question existed because it was Congress's article one responsibility to make sure that they could protect the nation in a crisis and because women couldn't serve in combat arms then it was okay for the time being and left the question kind of open. once we have shifted to uh lifting the combat exclusion in 2015 for um ground forces for women. Um that question has been raised a couple of times and it's interesting that the groups that will bring a lawsuit. So men's rights groups will bring a lawsuit saying it's unfair to men. Uh feminist groups will argue that actually you're not viewing women as full American citizens if they're not signed up for the draft. And um what the courts have found thus far is that well no one actually has standing to take this to the Supreme Court because we can't say it's an undue burden for you to go to a website and enter five pieces of information. Four of which the United States government already has on you. Your social security number, your name, your date of birth. Um they they want your address and the new thing they've added is your email address. But the second that the law is enacted that a draft is actually active then half the population does have standing or the whole population depending on who's going to raise that and that'll be at the worst possible moment to actually address this issue but politically it's not a football that anybody wants to touch. >> Interesting. You know even in countries uh which have had conscription of women for quite some time these issues continue to bubble up. I mean the Israelis who've been conscripting women really since the beginning uh for almost 80 years now I mean they there are continually issues about men who don't want to serve with women who don't want to serve with men. It's a somewhat less legalistic society but there there is that we talked a little bit about the reserves and one of the questions uh that's come in is what are your concerns about the health of our reserve component within the all volunteer force? Do we have a strategic reserve or an operational reserve within our total force? I want to unpack that unpack that a little bit because when when we think of a reserve uh first um a lot of what we are really thinking about is the National Guard which is the lineal descendant of the state militias which actually were lineal descendants of the colonial militias uh and have all kinds of peculiar things about them which other countries don't have. I mean this is it's one of the things that makes the American system unique. We have as uh as you mentioned you know people who are recently left military service but can be called back. In other words, they're not training but they're part of a pool. Uh and then there's a there's a very small army reserve or relatively small army reserve uh naval reserve. Um and I think the air force has a separate reserve but I'm not sure. So that that's I think an important question. Um there's an associated question uh which is first do we do we have enough um but there's a there's another question you know the original idea in many ways of the national guard is that okay these are the real citizen soldiers. These are the ones who are tied to their communities. These are the you know the armories in small towns where people go to drill. as we have tapped the National Guard in particular for a lot of active duty [snorts] and you're I I did some work a while back for the Army's National Guard for the National Guard Bureau said well you have a lot of guardsmen who are doing 60 70 days of active duty a year at that point they're no long they're part-time >> professionals they're no longer you know part-time soldiers in quite the way that we used to think about them and it's not sustainable for a lot of people and small businesses So, help me sort through this conundrum. It has a lot of different pieces. Maybe we can start by saying, okay, the operational reserve. We get into a war and we need more soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines than um than we currently have on active duty. Is the system set up to provide them and to provide enough of them or under what circumstances is enough? Whichever one of you wants to talk about that. Yeah, I you know I think um there are also some real structural issues that were debated over the last 20 years, right? It was easy for the active component to say, "Oh, our little brother, the National Guard, or you know, uh the reserve component isn't at the same level as us." And so we saw commissions by the Air Force and by the Army [snorts] thinking about how do we better integrate some of our capabilities? And part of that was to drive some cultural change and some respect of the National Guard and the Reserve when we were deploying them, when we were factoring them into the deployment schedule, um, which is essentially what the operational reserve means and not treating them with the same level of respect. And so in the in the air force, what we saw was a bunch of capabilities are actually taken out of the active component, put into the reserve or the guard to ensure that we were integrating and training together between the the compost and also as kind of a sign of respect. The army tried to do something similar. Um and ultimately, you know, there are a lot of other factors that need to go into changing culture. Um, but I think there was a real tension when it came to the high deployment cadence of the reserve component. Um, and and thinking about what do you do if [snorts] you know there yes there's legal protections to maintain their day job in their community. Um, but what does a small business owner do with that law? They can't leave a position open for a year or 18 months by the time they're mobilized, deployed, and come back. And so it did lead to some real tensions or frictions at the community and the employer level. Um although I do think that we saw the private sector really evolve in the way that they were dealing with it because it was so much more common than it had been in the past. >> This is so complex. I'm I'm glad you highlighted those. You know, at at the strategic level as well, you know, this shift from a strategic reserve to an operational reserve. You can make an argument that actually started around the Gulf War um and then just continued on and then the reserve component has been used almost interchangeably at times with the active component and not everyone can necessarily make a distinction sometimes between an active duty soldier and a reserve or national guard soldier which has its own set of implications. I think when we when we started this I talked about well 1973 was the advent of the al volunteer force. It was also had an interactive effect with the war powers resolution i.e. that which governed at least in theory how we would leverage the military as a as an instrument of national power but also the implementation of the total force policy. And there's a theory there that if you're going to enter into a conflict that it would require some sort of mobilization of broader society. And over time we've seen that that actually hasn't been the case. Now, would that be the case if we were fighting a near peer? I think that forces potentially an entirely set of different conclusions. But when you're fighting someone that is not a near peer, you can rely, at least we've proven that you can rely with some policy changes on the margins, the all volunteer force to sustain that. But that does have some significant ramifications for how the nation goes to war. You kind of air quotes on the use of war, at least how it uses military force. >> [snorts] >> Did you want to comment on this? So, how large would a war have to be before it essentially you you just said, "Okay, look, the all volunteer force cannot handle this. We have to revert to some form of conscription." >> Well, so that that's a really interesting question for a variety of reasons. And and that was actually a question we left on the cutting room floor you know when we we wanted this book to be very accessible and you know to look forward look uh forward leaning up to the hundred years and that was one issue in the aspect of mobilization like there's a lot of ink that's been spilled on like and rightfully so uh on the health of the defense industrial base there has been less ink spilled on what it would take to mobilize moreover what it would take for that decision. Uh we had a colleague that that offered that there is perhaps a schism in elites meaning senior civilian uh decision makers and senior uniform uh decision makers or advisers rather on what that threshold be would be. Is it you dwarf the operational requirements or the extent manpower that you have? Is it some sort of preemptive measure? And then what would be the political cost of doing that which is probably more on the calculus at least I hope it would be more on the calculus of the civilian decision makers is because Kate will tell you it requires like dual key authority basically like you have to be all in and that's both the commander-in-chief and Congress. >> Yeah. And I think one of the things to Jared's point about, you know, we we constantly look at the defense industrial base and everybody wants to talk about how many shells we can produce, uh, you know, how many interceptors we make and I think we really need to spend some time on the human dimension of all this because one of the things that those of us who study this constantly talk about are are two factors uh, eligibility and propensity. And the all volunteer force as currently built requires a very educated force, a very disciplined force and folks that kind of want to be there. And so in terms of eligibility, we know that because of rising obesity rates, drug use, uh lack of educational attainment, we're down in the 20s in terms of percent >> criminal records, >> in terms of percent, right? And the whole, you know, who's gotten busted for using drugs, right? We most Americans aren't even eligible to join the military and so >> and you said in the 20s >> I think what eligibility 20 20% 24% I think. >> Yeah. >> Right. >> Propensity is much lower. >> Propensity% >> yeah propensity drops down the single digits. So among those who say yes I want to join. You combine those two you have a very very small subset of Americans who are willing and able to serve. And what we saw at the height of Iraq and Afghanistan was a lowering of standards, waiverss. Um, and I will tell you having having been an operational unit at that time, >> you know, your waiverss always account for your biggest disciplinary problems, you know, and so, uh, and we haven't even addressed that. And it's as important if not more important than what factory is building shelves of how are we going to restructure this force to accommodate people who are maybe don't have the educational attainment maybe are slightly overweight unfit um and what incentives we have to give them if they're not naturally leaning forward and say I want to serve but we say no we really need you short of a draft how much money would we have to throw at the American public and our youth just to get a small bump in a short period of time in our in strength >> and and a lot of that is even just about getting them in the door. If you're talking about retaining people who have high >> levels of technical skills that they can then market in the commercial world, I I'm think about like your cyber warriors for example or or even just pilots >> uh who can, you know, take the training that they've gotten and uh and run with it. You know, that that issue of lowering standards is is interesting. I mean, I remember during the Iraq war that was a big issue. The truth is it was a big issue in the 70s as well. And I think it was I think the Mar this is one where the Marines led the way by just kind of purging >> um an awful lot of people and saying we're willing to be under strength so long as we're not carrying >> deadly >> the uh the kind of the bottom quarter of the of the force. I think there's one other aspect that we don't talk about as a society that's uncomfortable to talk about in the military that's uncomfortable for civilian leadership to think about which is what's the casualty rate at which we need to replace individuals and for you know every single person I think at this table has lost someone in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan the casualty rates that we saw there pald in comparison to every other major conflict that we've been engaged in outside of maybe the Persian Gulf War. Um, and the it is the it's while it is uncomfortable, it is the job of policy makers and decision makers to think about the worst possible case scenario and plan against that. And that's not necessarily a conversation that we're willing to have as a society. And it would require a much larger conversation than just the president or the department of defense, right? It would require we have to have a whole scale understanding of what our labor market would require back here at home. um you know, we don't want to deploy all of our doctors overseas for a conflict. We actually also need them here at home. And so in order to do the hard planning, we have to take a hard look in the mirror and think about, you know, what how bad would it have to be for us to trigger that? >> Yeah. >> If I could go back because Jason raises a good point and Kate's brought this up before about this nexus between propensity and eligibility. Um, you know, eligibility is a societal problem with military ramifications and often times we get that, you know, reversed. Um, it's not on the military to solve that problem. On the propensity side, you know, we're we quote stats all the time on on what percentage of America of the American public is inclined to serve. The fact of the matter is most people that end up coming to serve were not in that initial uh population. So the question becomes how do you increase that? How do you using a political term expand your base? And that comes down to a variety of factors many of which we address in the in the book. I I'll point out one variable which is often a fickle variable which is the aspect of trust. You know the military is almost always the most trusted institution in the US government. I want all the institutions to be tr uh want want everyone people to have trust in all the government institutions. But also another way to consider this is how much trust is too much trust. >> Do you reach a precipice where you start to become different because you trusted the entity so much. And so all these things like contribute to your ability to recruit and retain. You know, it's one thing to get people into the military and then we owe them the experience to enrich their lives where they want to stay. So, we've we've seen a dynamic and this is there's a lot of inks spilled on this as well about this growing warrior cast. Look, that's real. It is 100% real. And is there data out there on how many people who join the military or sons or daughters of um people who served? >> There is. I'm blanking on the data point at the moment, but there is a um greater than you would expect um or or perhaps we might expect uh kind of familial sense of service. In part that's because uh youth growing up in a military family are exposed to opportunities. It is not that different from families of doctors, families of firefighters. >> Say yeah. But the nuance to it as well is >> what we should be lerary of is if there happens to be a a nuance in this data where you start to see a veteran population and there has been some evidence of this where they don't support necessarily their children going or they they don't want them to but once they go in they do choose to support them and there has been some evidence please correct me if I'm wrong that that is actually starting to be the case. >> Although I suspect that's true in other professions. No doubt I have not encouraged any of my kids to become a professor. Okay. [laughter] >> Let me ask you a different kind of question. What were some of the most interesting You've made a point repeatedly Jared in particular you that the folks in the uh uh who wrote for this you've got what 20 30 authors >> just shy of 30. >> Just shy of 30. What what were the biggest points of disagreement? H there's definitely disagreement on you know should we impose a draft as a form of driving citizenship and also meeting the needs uh or the requirements for manpower within the services. Um and u but we thought it was important to highlight and draw out the fact that these are debated questions throughout the book. you know, just want to check. No, we have it again. We're open for questions from those of you who are listening to it. It always seemed to me that that idea is I I'll put my cards on the table. Dafted because if you really drafted everybody, >> male and female, >> I cannot imagine the military being able to cope with that. >> No. >> And I can't imagine them actually being able to make good use of them either. And you know I you know again I'm old enough to remember a draftbased military but I've also visited other countries which have very extensive drafts. You get a lot of concealed unemployment. You know >> uh a lot more guards in certain areas than you really need. You know a lot more >> kind of scut work that probably doesn't need to be done. Uh and so that that the the it seems to me one of the challenges of the modern uh volunteer conscription systems is how do you create what are frequently kind of partial conscription systems. So I've I'm very interested in the what's going on with say the the Norwegians, the Swedes. I think the French may end up in this direction too where you have a draft that's sort of on the books but actually it's just a way of motivating people to volunteer and in Norway until now uh I'm told it's been very successful uh you um you know they get a lot of motivated volunteers it's high prestige they're expanding their force as they expand it one official said to me at some point we'll probably begin drafting people who don't want to and that we're not really quite ready for that. >> So, do you have thoughts about how you might square that circle? >> I think this is where the conversation's generally it's it's broken to your point, dafted in, in some ways. And I think one there's there's two dynamics. One is the idea that it took a long took the military a long time to move away from treating people like they're drafties. Uh and there's still legacies of that now in the way uh we impose discipline and work with folks. The assumption in a lot of the things that have kind of carried through is well you don't want to be here but I'm going to beat the crap out of you and tell you you know to keep you in line until you sort of bele Bailey uh view of [clears throat] military culture a comic strip that is still running even though bears no resemblance to [laughter] contemporary military life. >> Yeah. So the one hand it's like we we want people to look in and say hey well is the military right optimizing its people well and it's always great to have an outside view to say wait you're still doing that that seems kind of dumb that's very industrial era >> you know personnel policy training policy etc you've got smart motivated people >> the flip side of it of course is what you alluded to is this idea that and Jiren mentioned this you know about this trust we have this idea with the military being the most trusted institution that everybody says well If the military is the most trusted institution, let's just make everybody join the military or let's do national service or all these things that somehow we can extrapolate from the military to solve all the rest of these societal ills, which is not the military's mission, right? We're not a character building summer camp for wayward youth, [snorts] right? Our mission is to fight and win wars. And so people lose that and want to use the military for all these other things. And I think if people will engage in some of these debates and issues and look at it and say, "Okay, well, yeah, we need to fix the educational system. Let's not put it on the military to set up camps where we're literally training people how to pass the ASVAB um or get themselves physically healthy. These are societal issues and I think if there's we just really need to recognize the limits of this institution both for its missions and for us wanting it to do everything." You know, one of the things that's always struck me is if if you look at the United States, um, set aside other democracies, there's only one other area in which we will conscript people's service rather than take their money, and that's jury duty. >> Okay, jury duty. [snorts] We are drafting your service. We're not, you can't pay your way out of uh jury duty. And I think there's something actually very important about that which is in in this particular democratic system which is very much libertyoriented the only way you can say I'm going to make you do this is for an absolutely essential function of society the administration of justice or national defense because we think it's good for your character >> that kind of sounds like involuntary servitude in some ways or I or I I I think it it would um how much do the three of you Well, first does anybody else want to talk about some of the disagreements in the book. Were there other disagreements beyond draft no draft that are worth highlighting? >> I think I think that was the major one. Um you I think there was where we had consensus was really powerful though, right? And you know, a lot of our authors, a lot of our editors have either taught in PME or served or >> professional military. That's right. Professional. My apologies. >> And there was a there was this common thought that we needed to continue to educate the American public on on the what healthy norms look like. And so every chapter was like carefully crafted. So we have people for at least two particular authors, Cory Shaki and Bishop Garrison from very different sides of the political spectrum wrestle with the question is can the military remain uh remain political without becoming partisan. What an important question to to wrestle with and you know thematically uh and Heidi Urban describes this really really well is an understanding of what she describes is three Ps right political a lot of times we say hey the military is is apolitical that's actually a misnomer that that's not true it is a political actor it it lobbies it has a budget it nominates people so on and so forth it it participates in the policym process what it cannot become is partisan or politicized. And these are really important when you look at the future of the all volunteer force. You know, by design again, we looked at our dependent variable was the all volunteer force at 100 because if you talk about spec, you know, specifics like Kate pointed out an issue earlier, um when we were talking about for example, uh the possibility of women in the draft, people can immediately go into their partisan FFTs. And what we didn't want to do is do that. We wanted to elevate the discourse and one way to discuss that is through solidifying or at least having a healthy accessible conversation about norms. >> Anybody else on uh on this one? >> I'd say just to tee up not necessarily the disagreements from the book um but the areas where we think are really rich for further >> discussion. uh one is the role of technology as you alluded to earlier you know we've gone from an industrial era base where all the technologies can be developed inhouse and they're all governmentally designed and husbanded technologies um to now a lot of cutting edge or most of the cutting edge technologies developed outside of the military system and so what does that mean for our developing expertise and use um and is it even possible to raise uh a cyber warrior and say, "Hey, you're going to work with us for 30 years at government salary, right?" >> And expect that person to have cutting edge, >> right? And would you even want that, I guess, is the uh is the question. >> And so, how do we move this industrial era model to like, well, can we bring somebody in after they've run their own AI company or developed this? And then how do we one integrate them into the norms and ethos of government service, which is obviously very different from, you know, the startup uh mentality. Um that's one of them and the other part of disagreement the part of I guess contention where uh we didn't really finish the conversation is a lot of us are very military internally focused right we think about the norms that the military should have and the way the military should operate where we really haven't had discussions and where we only kind of allude to it in this book is what is the role not just of the civilian public but of civilian policy makers to develop the right kind professionals who can oversee this now $ 1.5 trillion dollar endeavor and institution of millions upon millions of people. What does it take to really get somebody in office uh the appointees and the career service people who are also imbued with those norms and values so that they can communicate with the military and be most effective at the mission. >> That's a huge issue. Let me ask a a um question just sort of spurred by some of what you folks have been talking about. Uh it's always struck me if you think about the military, it is basically, you know, the basic recruitment model is you get people at the junior level and they work their way up. It's kind of like the Catholic Church. You don't get to go go from being a rabbi to being a cardinal. It just doesn't operate that way. um with officers maybe you know you can come in as a judge advocate corps officer as a captain or a chaplain or something like that. Um, is that a necessary feature of military organizations going forward, do you think? Or I mean, in the past there have been all kinds of interesting lateral >> lateral entries. I mean during, in fact, World War II is a prime example of that where you had >> people who were civilians one day and six months later were lieutenant colonels or even colonels. >> I think the military is overly wed to the concept. I remember a a general officer uh describing once, well I you know the the the soldiers wouldn't respect me if I hadn't been in the trenches and I had to point out that he was an aviator in charge of an infantry division. Um you know but in his mind right just growing up in uniform was enough. I would say one you can argue the merits internally and we should about what does it mean to belong to one organization for 40 years. You know, there's an old phrase of if you only know one country, you don't know any countries. And listening to army leaders, particularly now that I've left service, talk about leader development and service and the and the ways we organize, you're like, wait a minute, there's another universe out there that maybe we need to be thinking about. >> But more importantly is this demographics. Think about who right now if we do not change the military system. Right now we're asking the senior leaders who will be running the military in 20 56 um they're going to be people who joined on the assumption that they were going to be in one career for 35 to 40 years that they were going to have a single earner family and a campfollowing spouse typically a woman >> uh and that they were going to stay in that organization 40 years. That is such a vanishingly small segment of the population is willing to do something like that that we have to ask ourselves just how weird are military leaders going to look compared to the society they serve 30 years from now. >> I think some if I can say [laughter] they already look kind of weird. I mean it >> and and again I mean I'm you know maybe I'm just dwelling on my age. It happens to you when you're in your 70s. I mean, that was much more the norm that you decide, okay, I'm going to become a tax lawyer. Well, by golly, you dec you become a tax lawyer and you spend >> 30 or 40 years as a tax lawyer and you retire or an orthopedist or something else like that. Um, and while there's still plenty of professions in which something like that is true, you know, anybody who's dealt with young people, which I did just as a professor, knows no, that's not >> those are not normal career paths >> anymore. And it's and it's and and you're right, it does >> it does look weird. >> And there there's a couple other dynamics at play, too. So, one is part of why you don't stay in a career for 30 years anymore is that pensions don't exist anymore in the private sector. That shift happened in the late 80s, early 90s toward the 401k system. We have a chapter in the book on the compensation system for the the current force where the the retirement system has changed to more of a portable 401k type system for those who entered service in 2019 and later. So, we don't even know what the bow wave of the no more golden handcuffs is going to look like when people can move with their feet and bring a retirement account along with them. Um, and to your earlier point of do we need to shake up the the way that we bring in lateral entries um or access talent from the private sector and bring it into the military. Back in 2019 uh in the 2019 NDAA, there were 11 provisions that Congress said military services were unshackling you from some of the things that you say are constraining at least for officer management. um the the Defense Officer Personnel Management Act or DOMA uh that you know was generated in the early 90s and has been added to over time, the services would always say, well, we can't access this person because our hands are bound by DAOma. And so what Congress said was actually we're going to lift a lot of those restrictions. We're going to allow you to bring in lateral entries up to the grade of 06 um without having prior military service if they meet a critical need and you can demonstrate that their experience aligns with that. Now, Y06, uh, it it's, um, you don't necessarily want to bring someone in as a lateral entrant who is the general officer, which we did see some of that in prior conflicts where you could bring someone in at the top. Um, to kind of address the need to have some uh, professional experience in the military before you're leading the military. It was largely focused on technical roles where you would want that external expertise and you don't necessarily want an infantry battalion commander who just, you know, comes from FedEx, right? [laughter] Um al although we may find ourselves in a situation where that flexibility needs to be used, there were um ways that you could lengthen or shorten the amount of time that someone was in a particular rank. So if you had a high flyer in a critical skill, you could actually say, well, they have to meet for two boards. Um but those boards can be one month apart or they can be 18 months apart. So it gave the services a lot of flexibility. There was no additional financial cost. Uh there was the law changed, policy and regulation could change, but the thing that is hardest to change is culture and actually like accessing. >> So yeah, I was going to say it sounds like and the shoe that's about to drop is and they didn't take any any advantage. >> Although we have seen some examples in the last couple of years, some might argue that um uh is the meets the law but not the spirit of the law, right? where we ha we do have uh industry leaders coming in as 05s um to get some of that technical expertise in uniform in in the Pentagon even if it's in a um in more of a demonstrable way than a you know this is what they're working on on a day-to-day basis >> and sometimes those people have leadership qualities too I I once went to uh was doing leading a staff ride for a group of colonels to Gettysburg this was quite a few years ago >> and I said, "Okay, so today, you know, would would you consider direct commissioning some professor who seemed really promising as a lieutenant colonel, then, you know, promote him to colonel within within a year?" Absolutely not. I said, "Well, you know, here we are at Little Roundtop. They have the story of Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain. You have five pages about Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain at Little Roundtop in the Army's leadership manual. Why not?" And it would led to a very interesting discussion about what's the nature of leadership in general as opposed to military leadership. And there's obviously something to that. But I think you're right. It is it I think it's for understandable reasons. It's kind of hard hard for the system to to imagine those things. We are running we are almost at the end. So I'm going to um close this out with um this question um and that is do you think that I won't even say 50 years from now I'll say 20 years from now we will still have the all volunteer force in something that kind of looks like what we have now and say why yes or why no and tell why don't we start with you, Kate, just because you're you're caught in the middle. You're caught in the middle there. >> My optimism, I say yes. Um, and I think it takes understanding the population that we're actually trying to recruit versus those who are in service right now and sticking to what would incentivize them. So when we look at and and if you buy kind of generational literature which which I think in large part does explain some of the challenges we had in military recruitment when we look at Gen Z who you know now are actually towards the upper end now we're thinking about Gen Alpha who is coming up behind them. But when we think about what has motivated their career decisions, it's been a desire to um be mission focused in in the work, whatever it is that they do. Um it's a desire to have multiple jobs over the course of a career. And I think there's a piece of military service where we actually need to tell the story better. Over the course of a 40-year career in the military, you live in multiple different places, have multiple different roles, you grow through the organization. when the military is functioning at its highest ideal good, um it is a mission focused organization that does look different from the rest of society. I think we just need to find a way to match the reality of that military service with what it is that those we're trying to recruit are looking for. >> Jason, >> um I'm not as optimistic. Um, I think because we're kind of on dual tracks, as Kate alluded to earlier, we have uh Congress and a public who largely don't want to touch these what are seen as third rail issues. And you have a a bureaucratic institution with just a ton of momentum that likes doing way things the way it's always done it, right? Well, this is what happened to me 40 years ago. It must be good for the up and cominging lieutenants today. And so my question is not that we'll adapt but what catastrophe will force us to adapt and whether uh you know I would I would say one you know the old phrase it's easy to be stupid when you're rich. Uh and right now we're very very comfortable both as a nation and as a military where whenever there's a issue just throw more money at it. Uh and right now we're able to throw $1.5 trillion at our military. I'm not sure that's sustainable. Uh, and so I'm not sure how long we can keep putting off some of these third rail hard conversations about what real structural reform means. >> Yeah, I don't think we can put off those conversations. So, I'm kind of a happy medium between the two of you. So, I'm I'm optimistic or >> unhappy. [laughter] Good point. So, I'm optimistic absent with a heavy caveat of absent an existential crisis >> because that fundamentally changes the game. We have got to have some really hard conversations of which this was designed to be a primmer to have those because this is it's an enormous cost to to maintain this experiment and it requires change on the margins whether it's you know reasonable minds can disagree maybe that's in a rebalance across compos of the army maybe that's pulling on levers more for lateral entry more less maybe it's a grander uh conversation about What happens when when people cross that threshold from being in from wearing a uniform to becoming a veteran status when really what's happening is you're becoming a line item in the federal budget from discretionary spending to mandatory spending. And during the global war on terror for example, we threatened to dwarf the absorptive capacity of the VA. And so what does that mean in a large scale combat operation? And these are things that we have to wrestle with and we just can't go into our echo chambers of like, well, this is something that we're going to wrestle with today. No, it's got to be looked at holistically. >> And that's where, like look, I am optimistic that we can have those conversations because I'm convinced that the nation is has and continue to have leaders that lead with empathy, humility, and intellectual curiosity. And we have to maintain a healthy sense of skepticism for everything that we do. >> What a great way to end. Uh the book is Bend but do not break shaping the future of the all volunteer force. I want to thank our guests Jiren Morton, Kate Ksminsky, Jason Dempsey. Um, and uh, again, I'm Ellen Cohen and this is CSIS. [music]