September 18, 2023 - 1:10pm
The Russo-Ukrainian War has been a wake-up call for Western politicians and strategists in many respects, not least of which is a reintroduction to the realities of what a full conventional war against a hostile power involves.
In the decades since the end of the Cold War, American strategists (and their British foederati) have become used to asymmetrical conflicts against low-tech opponents. Such wars can be long and ugly (and, as in Afghanistan, unsuccessful), but they haven’t made the same demands of Western militaries or voters as the wars fought by earlier generations.
To what extent either is still prepared to make the sacrifices necessary to fight that sort of conflict directly is a question posed sharply by a new paper from the US Army War College. Most strikingly, the report asks whether the United States should reintroduce conscription.
The authors, Katie Crombe and John A. Nagl, are blunt about the implications of the war in Ukraine for the US Army:
At present, America is not recruiting anything like enough soldiers to sustain casualties at that sort of tempo. Worse, the recruitment crisis is a problem that compounds over time, for every soldier not recruited today is a trained reservist missing in the 2030s:
If the United States wants to be ready for a large-scale conventional war — for example, a direct intervention to defend Taiwan in the event of a Chinese invasion — then, the report argues, the implication is clear: “that the 1970s concept of an all-volunteer force has outlived its shelf life and does not align with the current operating environment”. More, “large-scale combat operations troop requirements may well require a reconceptualization of the 1970s and 1980s volunteer force and a move toward partial conscription.”
Crombe and Nagl don’t just rest their case on casualty rates. A war in which the US lacks the total technological and battlespace-information dominance it enjoyed in Iraq and Afghanistan is also necessarily more manpower-intensive. One needs more troops, empowered to make local decisions, to fight in a theatre in which satellites and drone strikes cannot be relied upon.
Yet realising this idea is another matter. A nation’s military is ultimately downstream of its culture. The US retains a far more Prussian attitude to its armed forces than any European nation, yet it still has a recruitment crisis. What’s more, it is now both deeply polarised at home and increasingly sceptical of interventions overseas.
The report urges America to heed the Ukrainian example, after its conscripted army has bought “lessons with blood that not only preserve their freedom but can also help the US Army deter and, if necessary, fight and win future wars at a lower cost of life”. Would any president be able, in the near future, to impose conscription? Especially in order to fight a war far from the US and its voters’ narrowing conception of its interests.
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SubscribePerhaps young Americans don’t want to sign up to defend Taiwan. The US military appears to be unattractive to potential recruitees (exactly the same as in the UK). The type of people who would have signed up, probably patriotic types, have been demonised by the US state so it’s hardly a surprise there us a shortfall. It’s funny too that nobody young enough to be affected by conscription or national service ever promotes it.
Precisely, who on earth would want to fight for absolutely worthless, net zero WOKE Britannia?
ps.In the unlikely event that they actually killed someone, they would be liable to prosecution for the rest of their days.
First of all I agree with you. With conscription/National Service there would just be a flat refusal from millions of young people.
But there is another way of looking at things like this. In all democracies there is the issue of Rights vs Duties. Inviduals have many human rights given to them by the state but the state expects things back in return. One of these duties is to join in defence of the land.
The erosion of duties – the duty not to keep killer dogs, the duty to not play loud music at night when people are asleep, the duty to work for the institutions of the state, the duty not to be violent to your neighbours, the duty not to commit crimes like shoplifting – are being ignored. The expectation is that the police should force the people to honour these duties but that would always be impossible unless pumishments were more severe and permanent.
You can’t have democracy without these duties. By not responding to conscription there is no democracy.
So, instead of blaming the government or the police or the university lecturers, we should be looking for an alternative to democracy – a failed system. Suddenly, China and Russia look more serious and important.
Why should the deplorables fight for a regime that hates them
The US need to create battalions of trannys and progs to defend Taiwan, let Hillary lead them into battle
Seriously- they have been spitting in the face of the young, lower class white men who make up their infantry. If you go to alt right sites they aren’t the slightest bit interested in fighting a war started by the Deep State and the Biden Democrats. I think everyone who has a Ukrainian flag in their online bio should be conscripted first.
‘Perhaps young Americans don’t want to sign up to defend Taiwan.’
Indeed. This is surely the key point and I would in interested to know how this report addresses questions about how far potential military volunteers/reservists etc see the likely conflicts as simply not wars worth fighting. Perhaps this is not a new question – I remember in the mid 1990s similar arguments being held in the US about Bosnia. Similarly I could I think argue that there is an interest in a North Atlantic Treaty Organisation existing – I’m less sure I can argue that Ukraine is in the North Atlantic.
As with all politics the matter at hand is one of power and interests. The US interest in Bosnia was about keeping NATO and de facto the US as the prime actor in global affairs. That is a very long way removed from what could be called ‘classic wars.’ Of course there is an interest that an expansionist China or Russia is not in US or Western interests either, but I don’t know that I’d be able to sell a military career to youngsters on that basis.
For that matter after the debacles of Afghanistan and Iraq it’s not clear that, ‘trust me,’ is exactly the selling point it was. If it is the case that people are, ‘increasingly sceptical of interventions overseas,’ then it’s not hard to see why.
I would hope that this report does not duck the question you raise.
Believe it or not, in France (my country) you’ll find buckets of youths who advocate conscription. And don’t think we’re under a less woke government, Macron is just about as woke as you can get.
The US forces are down on even its current recruitment targets as it is regarded by many as too “woke”. Conscription no chance.
THIS.
The proximate reasons for the drop-off in enlistments for the American all-volunteer forces include failed neocon military adventures, culminating in the atrocious mismanagement of the Afghan withdrawal, and years of increasing demonization of military service and country by the very folks who now run the Federal government, the Department of Defense, and academia.
After being fed a steady diet of woke, structural racism, trans ideology, and general disdain for one’s country, who would expect Zoomers to serve in the military? I’m always amazed by young people like my nephew, a midshipman at Annapolis, who genuinely wants to serve his country in this present age.
Get the elites to send their pampered sprogs to fight foreign wars. Let them, for once, be made to have skin the game. If they do it, maybe they can talk about conscripting the kids of the middle and working classes. But only then…
3,600 casualties a day? Are these people daft? That’s a rate of 1.3 million casualties per year. That’s WW2 Eastern Front levels of losses.
The US fought WW2 for 3 years and 9 months, fielded something like 12 million troops, and sustained 1.08 million total casualties, or 288,000 casualties per yer.
They’re positing casualty rates 4.5 times higher than WW2? Where and against whom are these massive land battles going to take place?
Kinda makes you wonder what they might be planning
Unless we invade China, there’s no possibility of getting enough troops in the field to suffer that many casualties.
By ‘casualties’, do you mean dead, or dead+wounded? About a factor of 4 or so, typically. The US WWII number you give must be dead+wounded; WW2 US deaths were about 300K.
Yes, dead and wounded.
Yes, what are these “experts” planning for? NATO ground forces for the “glorious liberation” of Ukraine? Or a massive conventional war against China over Taiwan? It seems to me that the first scenario would be hugely politically unpopular and threaten escalation way past what even the most diehard neocon war hawks might like, and the second would demand overwhelming sea/air control plus a rapid deployment force (in other words, come with what you already have, no WW2 style mobilization/draft and buildup).
The military depends heavily on family to join. Military members who would recommend the career to family members dropped from 75% to 63% from 2019 to 2022. That’s a significant number in three years. The Afghanistan withdrawal, vaccine mandates and wokeness don’t help with recruitment efforts.
I’m a US Army veteran. Served in Desert Storm. Served during the Cold War in the late 1980’s.
I come from a very long line of military men on both sides of my family. My father served as a surgeon in Vietnam. His father was a young captain in the Phillipines when the Japanese invaded. He spent the war as a POW after surviving the Bataan Death March. His father, my great grandfather was a Maj. General and commanded a division in Europe during the WWII and he served in WWI. His father was also a general. All West Point men going back to the Civil War.
My mothers father served in the Army. He saw D-Day and the Battle of the Bulge. His father was a Navy Commander.
I have told both my children that they are under no obligation to serve and that indeed, there are far better ways to spend their time and to make commitments to.
I’ve spent most of the last 20 years as a consultant for technology and organization to the DoD. Spent a lot of time working at the various military treatment facilities across the country during the surge in Iraq. I’ve seen the physical and psychological damage done, not just to my own family but to the young men and women I have seen at our bases.
Bottom line? Our government wastes our troops lives. It does so and rationalizes it, in part, by saying they are volunteers. Civilians look at the volunteer military as not much more than mercenaries. How can I argue with that when I personally have been asked to risk my life and health to protect oil but then ordered to stand by as women and children are mowed down by helicopters.
When it is not wasting lives it is wasting dollars. It wastes HUGE amounts of dollars on all kinds of things and then never spends on what it really needs and would be useful. Congress critters and lobbyists for the big defense firms have more say than does an experienced field commander.
The military has changed as a result of the volunteer force. Less honor. More greed. More looking to see how to capitalize on the time spent in the service, particularly by senior officers. Less integrity and more marketing. Less patriotism and lower standards with bigger bonuses. The military is no longer a patriotic calling, it is a career path and the culture reflects it. Less duty. More dollars.
But, sure, if it comes down to it, if we need a draft or obligatory service for all 18 yr olds. Ok. Who knows. Maybe that makes a difference. Maybe not a bad idea to have every single kid regardless of their social status serve in a unit for 18 months with a 10 yr reserve obligation. Who knows, maybe that would be good for the country as a whole.
Commercials like this help don’t help with recruitment either: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MIYGFSONKbk
Today’s Army: it’s all about you, ladies.
The report says: “large-scale combat operations troop requirements may well require a reconceptualization of the 1970s and 1980s volunteer force and a move toward partial conscription.” If we force our enemies to read such bureaucratic blather perhaps they would be brought to their knees without the need for violence.
Ignore anyone who advocated a military intervention unless you could imagine that person as an 18-year-old in battle. In Ukraine as in every case, the call for war is coming from the liberal bourgeoisie. That is the class least likely to join the Armed Forces voluntarily, or to see combat even in periods of conscription. Operationally, that is of course just as well. But if there is not a strong enough case for conscription, then there is not a strong enough case for war. Unless a country needed to mobilise its entire healthy and able-bodied male population of fighting age, then it is not under sufficient threat to justify going to war at all. Like the United States, Britain is not.
Of course, young Americans generally do not want to sign up to defend Taiwan. But, of course, conscription does not care what the conscripted want or desire. The process of conscription does not involve finding out the foreign policy views of the conscripted. Conscription involves the sacrificing of youth by the old and the more socially powerful. One can choose to sacrifice oneself for a higher cause. But forcing one into the military is not sacrificial, it is a form of murdering the young and/or turning the young into killers. In a free society, one should have the supreme right not to kill. Forcibly turning our youth into killers is not a form of patriotism or some form of higher calling. Conscription is no longer politically viable in the United States. In any case, one can learn from the American who used bone spurs to get out of military service.
Frankly, attempts at US conscription for proxy war wouldn’t surprise me. Even better if they could speed up progress towards nuclear World War III.
Insanity reigns and the world has gone to hell under this Democrat administration. I sense the hand of China in the cultural revolution that Americans have had to submit to in schools and child psychiatry, while James Lindsay might be right that an esoteric Gnostic cult may be operating that pairs naturally with the Maoists.
Anyone who doesn’t see the parallels between the woke takeover of American institutions and Mao’s Cultural Revolution and how it benefits present-day China is either openly supporting it or willfully blind.
Won’t the US military at least partly fund one’s gender transition ?
So you’ll end up with millions of youngsters who have no interest in the armed forces, doing the bare minimum required and counting down the days until their service has ended being babysat by those that want to be there. All the while the state is having to pay these youngsters a salary while losing the tax which would otherwise be collected by them working?
Doesn’t sound to be a useful way of utilising either the conscripts or the professional soldiers to me personally. If America itself was threatened then yes conscription is perfectly valid (as we’ve seen in Ukraine the number of volunteers would also increase dramatically) but to do it during peacetime seems a futile exercise
America has nuclear weapons. Unless it suddenly decides it wants to invade a non-nuclear country, like Putin, it doesn’t need a big groundforce.
As a twenty-something, I was completely against this. As a middle-aged man, I am not, even though I recognize that my own kids would be called.
However, I do not trust my government to not take advantage of the situation to push the militaristic agenda, so I am 100% against it.
I do think that States should have some sort of compulsory service, even if it’s the one-weekend-per-month variety, and I believe that it should include handling a weapon, outdoor survival, swimming/water rescue, firefighting, etc. – the kinds of skills that we may need in an emergency, that are dual-purpose in case the crap hits the fan – also relevant if we are ever called to test the notion that the USA is unoccupyable because there are more firearms than people. What it should be is that every adult has been trained in tactics and use of said weapons, sealing the sense of doom that any invader may have.