

To be very clear, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates is not at all calling for a draft. What he really wants is for more young people to join the military. But Gates' speech today at Duke University still offered a rare senior-level view of the downsides of the military's 35-year experiment with optional military service.

In Gates' view, the all-volunteer force, an outgrowth of political anger over Vietnam and the draft, has been an "extraordinary" success in terms of military professionalism in one conflict after another. But that success has come "at significant cost" – namely, the lopsided burdens that emerge when fewer than 1 percent of Americans serve in uniform during a decade of war.

Some of those costs are material. The all-volunteer force is expensive: the military's personnel costs have ballooned from $90 billion in 2001 to $170 billion today. Military health care costs rose $30 billion in that period. "There is no avoiding the challenge this government, indeed this country faces, to come up with an equitable and sustainable system of military pay and benefits that reflects the realities of this century," Gates told the Duke audience. But he didn't offer a solution, either, since no political figure wants to cut veteran benefits or troop salaries during wartime in the name of balancing a budget.

Then there are the greater "cultural, social" and human costs of the volunteer military. Putting only a narrow slice of the country into uniform – though not the overwhelmingly poor and uneducated enlistees that many feared would be the result of scrapping the draft – means repeated deployments in a time of protracted war. Those pressures lead to elevated rates of depression, substance and family abuse, "and, most tragically, a growing number of suicides," Gates recognized. He might also have mentioned post-traumatic stress.

Culturally, Gates warned of a self-perpetuating cycle of civilian-military alienation. Fewer percentages of Americans are serving in uniform, but a big factor determining who serves is "growing up near people who served." As military budgets shrink, that's going to mean that the services concentrate themselves in enclaves like the south and mountain west, while large urban, wealthy and coastal populations increasingly grow distant from military life. "There is a risk over time," Gates said, "of developing a cadre of military leaders that politically, culturally, and geographically have less and less in common with the people they have sworn to defend."

It's usually wonks and wags who make these points, not defense secretaries. In 1996, Tom Ricks reported for the Atlantic about a yawning cultural gap between the Marine Corps and the rest of the country, with young servicemembers growing contemptuous of soft civilians. (And that was before the U.S.'s decade of war.) In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, the Washington Monthly ran a piece headlined, "Now Do You Believe We Need A Draft?" Politicians have found it much safer to cheer on the troops than to address the structural failings with the volunteer force.

Gates, who says he's retiring next year, doesn't have that inhibition. But he left a big subject unaddressed in his Duke speech. Some of the problems Gates identified are endemic to a volunteer military. Others, like the troop and family stress issues, are more attributable to the fact that the the U.S. has been at war for nine years with no end in sight. And all the issues Gates identified are exacerbated by prolonged combat. There aren't just social and material costs inflicted on troops and families by the all-volunteer military. There are social and material costs inflicted on the all-volunteer military by U.S. strategy. Gates, a supporter of the troop surges in Iraq and Afghanistan, left that difficult subject alone.

Again, Gates didn't come close to calling for any structural changes to the volunteer military. He sought to sell the Duke student body – and other elite youth – on military service, noting that troops at war have found themselves "dealing with development, governance, agriculture, and diplomacy" while their civilian peers "are reading spreadsheets and making photocopies." Gates wants the kids to enlist. He also wants them to recognize the social consequences if they don't.

Photo: DoD

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