The All-Volunteer Force: Five Years Later

I F o r the approximately two million young American men who reach military age each year, there is probably no single public policy decision in the past quarter century more important than the termination of the draft in 1973.The importance of this decision, however, goes far beyond the implications for those most immediately affected by the draft’s removal. Whether viewed as an instrument of economic and social policy or in terms of its effects on the maintenance of the U.S. defense effort, the draft was a key element of public policy and touched on nearly every aspect of defense management. The advent of the All-Volunteer Force (AVF) accordingly marks the beginning of one of the largest and most important experiments of its type ever conducted. With the exception of a short 18-month hiatus in the draft following World War 11, the Armed Services have been forced to rely on true volunteers as their sole source of military manpower for the first time in more than three decades. Never before in modern history has a nation with such global military responsibilities or such an emphasis on defense been without the authority to conscript young men into military service. Together with the skyrocketing manpower costs and tight defense budgets that have characterized the 1 9 7 0 ~ ~ the removal of the draft has served to make military manpower one of the key concerns in the Pentagon and on Capitol Hill. Just as the volunteer force was born amidst some controversy, it has continued to attract considerable public attention during the past five years. From General William Westmoreland, who declared scarcely one week after the authority to draft had expired, ”AS a nation we moved too fast in eliminating the draft,” ro Senator Sam Nunn, who claimed about four years later that “The All-Volunteer Force may be a luxury that the United States can no longer afford,” the AVF has been the subject of an often heated public debate. The purpose of this article is to provide a brief, but broad assessment of these first five years of defense without the draft. Indeed, how policies evolve and how the military responds will clearly play a key role in shaping U.S. defense posture and social policy for the remainder of this century. The Decision to End the Draff Although the volunteer force is frequently viewed as an outgrowth of the Vietnam Richard V. L. Cooper is Director of Military Manpower Studies, The Rand Corporation. He has expanded on this work in his Rand study, Military Manpower and the All-Volunteer Force. international Security I 102 War, the move to end the draft actually had much deeper roots. To be sure, the Vietnam War did play an important role in the sixties’ draft debate, especially in dramatizing the issues. But the basic policy problem of the sixties can be traced to the growing inequities of the selective service draft-inequities created by the selective way that the burden of military service was applied to young men of military age. This selectivity came as a result of some simple demographic trends: specifically , increasing numbers of young men reaching military age each year and constant (or decreasing) force sizes meant that a smaller proportion of the military aged cohort would actually serve. By the mid-1970s only one out of every four or five young men would ever serve in the military. Coupled with the pay discrimination toward junior military personnel that characterized the post-war draft, the demographics of a growing military aged population meant that a decreasing proportion of the population would have to bear an increasingly large burden-hence, the inequity. The President’s Commission on an All-Volunteer Armed Force-or so-called Gates Commission-argued persuasively that those forced to serve in the military should not have to pay a large financial penalty in addition to the other burdens of involuntary servitude, and accordingly recommended that recruit pay should be raised to a level commensurate with that earned by comparably aged and educated civilian workers.’ Interestingly, the Commission estimated that if this “equity” pay raise-or market wage-were implemented, enough volunteers to staff...