The last two weeks we’ve focused on recruiting and veteran education. Today, September 11, we’ll look at how that catastrophic day affected military recruiting, for better or worse. Later this week, we will return to the topic of veteran education, speaking with some very interesting subject matter experts.

Thanks for reading. And take a few moments, if you haven’t, to think about 9/11 — what life was like before it happened, the people who lost their lives there, and the lives we lead now.

THE BIG STORY

What 9/11 Did for Military Recruiting

Studies say 9/11 was been a boon for recruiters. The truth is more complicated.

September 11, 2001, was a Tuesday — the most unexceptional day of the week. The perfect day for a terrorist attack. Monday you’re back from work, Wednesday’s “hump day,” Thursday’s basically Friday, and Friday’s basically the weekend. I don’t think many people (if anyone) knew something awful was due to happen. I don’t remember a feeling of dread or doom hanging over me the way those feelings did before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine had in months before Putin gave the order to his soldiers and tanks.

Life was normal, then. And when I say normal, I mean historically normal — so normal, it would never really get that normal ever again. It was 10 years after the collapse of the USSR. The world was at peace. People were free to pursue careers and goals where they made use of their talents, rather than forcing themselves to work toward victory for the democratic West over the forces of tyranny and oppression. The U.S. military was emerging from years of reform, changing into a more nimble and technologically sophisticated force.

In the surge of patriotism and outrage that followed Osama bin Laden’s deadly strike, over 180,000 people signed up for the military — many from the Tri-State area and Washington, DC, many who had been affected directly or indirectly by the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. 2,977 people were killed in the attacks, along with the 19 hijackers; those 2,977 people had families and friends and classmates and coworkers, and many happened to work in particularly gregarious and networked businesses — finance, law enforcement, firefighters.

The attack has been viewed in retrospect as having transformed recruiting for the military, much in the way Pearl Harbor had transformed recruiting decades earlier, as the U.S. formally (and reluctantly) entered WWII. Between that 180,000 burst and the wars that followed in Afghanistan and Iraq, it’s impossible to say that 9/11 didn’t have a tremendous impact.

But has that impact been good?

It’s difficult to think back to the days and weeks before the smoke started billowing out of the first tower. Thus, it is easy to overlook that recruiting was going pretty well; the military was in the process of reinventing itself after the Cold War, but seemed finally to have found its identity. The struggles with recruiting (with the exception of the USMC, of course) throughout the 1990s, had given way to a successful campaign that closed in September of 2001. This article — a true relic, published just days before the attacks on the Twin Towers — explains how the Army had turned around its recruiting woes, in part by abandoning what was seen as an old and out-of-touch marketing slogan, “Be All That You Can Be,” in order to better connect with a more individualistic society through the “Army of One” slogan.

The article is filled with extraordinary insights, including one where military leaders are asked whether they’d rather have their advertising budgets tripled or for Chelsea Clinton to join the military, and, anecdotally, those leaders all answered that they’d rather have Clinton join.

When we talk about recruiting and how to incentivize service, it’s easy to say “we need a better advertising strategy” or “we need to be better at incentivizing service with pay and bonuses.” But at the same time, there’s a sense that what’s truly needed is a more inclusive and pervasive instinct to serve — that something our society lacks is that willingness to sacrifice themselves in exchange for a safe and secure society. If given the choice between money for recruiting and Eminem enlisting in the Army (he’s too old now, but I remember this being a frequent topic of discussion years ago), most people would prefer the latter. Why? You’d know you were part of an effort that includes everyone.

Meanwhile, that surge of citizens joining the military in the wake of 9/11 had something in common with the group of people who had joined before, in response to the overhauled recruiting effort: they were, overall, much less qualified to join, from a physical and educational perspective. The Rand Corporation conducted a study of recruiting during the 1990s — an era typically associated with military impoverishment (austere budgets, low recruiting numbers). That study concluded that the 1990s had corresponded with a period when the military routinely attracted eye-popping numbers of what it considered “high quality” recruits. Throughout most of the 1990s, the overall percentage of high quality recruits throughout the Department of Defense hovered between the high 60s and low 70s. It isn’t until 1999 that this number dipped into the high 50s; a trend that 9/11 did not reverse.

There’s no question that 9/11 and the wars that followed had a huge impact on the military, and recruiting. As more people of overall lower quality (again, as defined by the military, this is not a moral judgement) joined; I do wonder if we tend to overestimate that impact, and assume that the impact was a positive one. Anecdotally, I can say I know many people who have determined never to send their children to the military, having experienced combat in Afghanistan and Iraq (who’s to say what they’d feel if they were serving in Ukraine, a very different sort of war). I’m not sure that it’s true to say that 9/11 transformed the military for the better — it was a catastrophe, and we all experience the desire to make good out of a horrible event — in many ways, 9/11 was a distraction from what the military does, and should do, and does well.

Perhaps the recruiting woes of today are actually a response to how the U.S. handled 9/11, rather than distance from the event. As time has passed, and that immediate outrage has dulled, what the military has left of 9/11 is its legacy: AUMF, Afghanistan, Iraq, COIN warfare, and a lot of movies about PTSD. Many people in the military today joined because of some direct or indirect connection to 9/11; similarly, many people who will not join the military do so because of those actions that followed in its wake.

I think it’s time to move beyond the idea that 9/11 was an unequivocal boon to recruiting, or to the military. The actions and events of September 11, 2001 were an unspeakable tragedy — lives that should not have been lost, people who were looking forward to peaceful and profitable futures. The U.S. responded the way that we did; there’s no point in engaging in counterfactuals about how it might have responded differently. Rather than wishcast about some way to reinvigorate recruiting the way people imagine it was after the tragedy, or lament a time when it was easier to attract qualified (rather than high quality) recruits, it’s time to move on. Time to figure out what the military needs to be, build it, and go about communicating that it has been built to the people we have, rather than complaining that things aren’t the way we want it. Ultimately, at that time, things weren’t the way we wanted it, either.

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HUMOR

Paratroopers might take exception to this claim.