FEATURE AUGUST 22, 2023
Saluting Those Who Freely Serve
rebecca burgess
The civic bill for our all-volunteer military has come due, but we seem unable to pay it.
Fifty years ago, the All-Volunteer Force of the United States came into the world wrapped in the swaddling clothes of economic theories about rational actors and supply and demand. The free-market economists of the Gates Commission who stood godparents to the AVF (Milton Friedman and Alan Greenspan famously among them), had long been coaxing an already-sympathetic Richard Nixon into embracing a volunteer military. Only by unchaining the American military from draft dependency could the United States procure the better-quality soldiers needed for the complexities of modern warfare, they argued; fixing the military pay scale to better reflect civilian sector wages would be the key to attracting that requisite talent.
There would also, they avowed, be a secondary benefit to American democracy. Because conscription had proven to be inefficient, distasteful, and even dangerous for democracy, an entirely volunteer military would surely be more truly reflective of the central American value of liberty. This would strengthen civil society. Thus, an all-volunteer military would have the most widespread—and the most enduring—support from the American public.
Fifty years later, what’s more apparent is that there were some errors of calculation in the birthing of the AVF, however celebrated the AVF may be, and however valuable free-market principles may remain. Meeting the requisite accession numbers for a given year has repeatedly been a nail-biting scenario, especially for the US Army, even outside the twenty years of the Global War on Terror and despite needing nearly a million fewer pairs of boots due to repeated drawdowns in force size since the 1980s. That uncomfortable scenario has become a full-blown crisis of recruitment for two years running now, and with no relief in sight: few can answer Uncle Sam’s call, and fewer yet want to.
https://lawliberty.org/features/saluting-those-who-freely-serve/
