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Foreign Affairs
Fixing the Mix: How to Update the Army's Reserves
By Lawrence J. Korb
The swift victories won on the battlefields of Afghanistan and Iraq vindicated the recent transformation of the U.S. military into a leaner, more high-tech operation. Subsequent problems in winning the peace in these two countries, however, have highlighted the failure to transform another, critical aspect of the U.S. armed services: namely, their personnel systems. Since the effectiveness of the U.S. military depends not just on "smart" bombs but on smart, well-trained, highly motivated people, this shortcoming must be corrected quickly. If it is not, the quality of the United States' all-volunteer force, especially that of the Army, will suffer. As David Segal, director of the Center for Research on Military Organization at the University of Maryland, noted, "Our volunteer army is closer to being broken today than ever before in its 30-year history."
The personnel system currently in use by the U.S. armed forces was created 30 years ago, in the aftermath of the Vietnam War. During that unpopular conflict, despite the fact that the United States maintained a draft, most of the country's elites managed to avoid service. Moreover, in order to minimize the public impact of the war and hence a damaging public debate, President Lyndon Johnson refrained from mobilizing or activating the National Guard or the reserves—even though this meant that he had to expand the active-duty services by nearly a million people solely by increasing draft calls.
Relying on draftees to fight the war had disastrous consequences, however. It forced the military to send individuals, rather than cohesive units, to Vietnam on a constantly rotating basis. Moreover, since most of the nation's elite managed to avoid the war entirely, the quality of new recruits was much lower than in past conflicts. Thus it came as little surprise when General Maxwell Taylor, former Army chief of staff and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who served as U.S. ambassador to Saigon in the 1960s, quipped that although the Army had been sent to Vietnam to save that nation, it had to be withdrawn in order to save the Army. Vietnam, quite simply, was destroying the U.S. military.
Richard Nixon, in his successful 1968 presidential campaign, promised to change all that by getting the United States out of Vietnam and by ending conscription. He accomplished both goals by the end of his first term. But the creation of an all-volunteer force (AVF) in ...
Lawrence J. Korb is Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress, Adjunct Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, and Senior Adviser to the Center for Defense Information. From 1981 to 1985, he was Assistant Secretary of Defense for Manpower, Reserve Affairs, Installations, and Logistics.