Selling the Army
In light of the U.S. military’s recruitment crisis, it’s worth revisiting exactly what has made the all-volunteer force so exceptional.
Rebecca Burgess
26 Jul 2023, 1:08 pm
On June 30, 1973, a young California pipe fitter named Dwight Elliot Stone reluctantly answered his summons to serve his country and was inducted into the United States Army as “the last man”—Uncle Sam’s last draftee. The next day, July 1, 1973, the United States officially did away with conscription by initiating the all-volunteer force (AVF).
Ending the draft had been a 1968 presidential campaign promise of Richard Nixon’s, as part of both his political strategy to win the presidency and the broader need to quell the Vietnam War protests that were rocking society by the late Sixties. But Nixon’s proposal had also been encouraged by a prominent group of free-market economists, including most notably Milton Friedman and Alan Greenspan, who argued that only the labor market logic of supply and demand could procure the better-quality soldiers needed for the complexities of modern warfare.
Fifty years later, it’s worth reconsidering those economic swaddling bands, as it were, of the AVF. While the free-market approach has arguably helped shape one of the most professional and skilled military corps on the planet, the massive, two-years-long recruiting crisis enveloping the U.S. Armed Forces necessitates a reexamination of the foundations of the AVF—in particular at a time of heightened geopolitical complexity.
https://www.americanpurpose.com/articles/selling-the-army/
