Is the U.S. military Really an “all volunteer force”?
When I was seventeen, right before my senior year of high school, some family problems arose that caused me to withdraw from high school and seek immediate employment in the military. It was midweek and I really needed to ship out by the weekend. I went to the local recruiting offices, starting with the Air Force, and one by one I talked to each of the recruiters.
I got a great contract offer from the Marine Corps, I would be trained as an air traffic controller (Reagan was in the midst of breaking the air traffic controller’s union) and the cash re-up bonus was huge. I signed the contract and hopped on the bus to the state capital, I would be in basic training by the coming weekend.
I got to the processing office in the capital, cleared my physical exams, did a bunch more paperwork, and when I went back to my hotel room to get dressed for my swearing in ceremony, the phone rang. It was my mother. She wanted me to come back and finish high school. I never wanted to quit anyway. So when the sergeant came to fetch me for the oath ceremony that would seal the deal with the Marine Corps, I backed out. He was furious.
A few years later, having finished school and out on my own, my employment circumstances had me looking again for the security offered by federal employment, and I ended up in the Peace Corps. It’s true that by this time, the Peace Corps was much closer to my values than the Marine Corps, but the truth is I was still very young and basically looking for a means of survival.
Many of my friends and family have treated their military service in a very similar way. My dad “volunteered” in order to find an avenue to escape unemployment in small town America, to build a career, to support himself and his family, to earn a paycheck, to survive. He encouraged all his boys to do the same. Necessity shaped his values, as necessity had shaped my own outlook. I, and I believe most people, faced with the same choices, would do the same.
Many have done very well by this choice of secure employment. Some have stayed in their military careers long enough to earn handsome pensions, lifelong benefits, some have socked away real estate portfolios, investments and serious savings accounts. Their “volunteer” service has worked out to be one of the most lucrative choices they could have made, considering the neighborhood and education background they came from. And most of the military men or women from my generation have escaped real front line duty, at least the fortunate ones. Most have never had to kill nameless and faceless foreigners or face enemy fire in order to follow orders or earn their paychecks.
I think our short and longterm survival instincts cause us all to adapt our values to the necessities that we each face. It's human.
My Peace Corps service was a little different than the military. Back in the late eighties, one of our training instructors informed us that the entire Peace Corps budget allocated by Congress that year for the entire program in over 60 countries was less than the amount allotted for the Marine Corps marching band for the same year. In my most recent overseas tour, 2002, my pay amounted to roughly $100 per month. Housing was of the local variety, in Africa, definitely not an air conditioned barrack or federal facility. No coke machines, no imported foods, no comfort items. Benefits included medical coverage while deployed, nothing more. The local language helped alot in locating food to eat. When I broke my eyeglasses at the beginning of our training, I saved up my extra money from my per diem to buy another pair. After serving and upon release from duty with the Peace Corps, there was a “re-adjustment allowance” of a few thousand dollars, enough to travel home and live for a month or two while looking for a job. The whole thing seemed like a very good deal to me, and I’ve served overseas twice. I was lucky to have the opportunity. Those experiences are among my life's greatest blessings.
But nowadays, when I hear the U.S. military described as an “all volunteer force”, I have to chuckle. How many of these young patriots would be enlisting and re-enlisting if they were not being paid forty or fifty thousand dollar re-enlistment bonuses (like the one I was offered back in 1982), active duty pay differential, education grants, retirement plans, housing expenses, moving and resettlement costs, along with the steady paycheck?
Even with lucrative pay incentives, the Iraq war caused a terrible strain on what would otherwise, during peacetime, have been relatively steady recruitment trends. Would our "all volunteer force" really feel the same duty to serve and give years of their lives, or risk their life entirely, if they were actually volunteering their time for free?
This week, March 10, 2009, U.S. military recruitment figures are rebounding after languishing at non-sustainable levels for most of the duration of the Iraq war. Why is that, do you think? Is it the tough economy? A spike in patriotism under our exciting and new African-American president? The economy was quite tough in the tail end of Bush’s tenure. Only fifty days have passed in the new president’s term in office. What could it be? What makes so many young men and women feel that it’s Now, the right moment, the right time to join?
I believe that when Obama talks about his foreign policy being based on diplomacy, young people all around the United States sit up and listen. They know that the military can be a great and profitable career option, providing that a soldier can survive it. Now that there is a sensible and sane voice coming from the White House, speaking of ending the war in Iraq and escalating in Afghanistan with an initiative of both military and diplomacy, a career in the army is looking a little more survivable.
Things have begun to change for our “all volunteer force” and the recruitment figures don’t lie.
read this article about spiking recruitment rates
