For the third straight year, the U.S. military has shrunk.

THE BIG STORY

Three Years of Decline

The U.S. military’s recruiting woes have failed to arrest its shrinking

Thursday, December 14, 2023, I watched one of my fellow officers retire. He’d hit 20 years, and alongside a couple dozen others, he was ceremoniously separated from the Army with all the pomp and honor those many years of service merited. He’d been wounded in Iraq, and when we served together in Afghanistan I saw him to be an energetic and capable combat commander.

While his wife is thrilled that he’ll no longer be in danger, and I’m thrilled for both of them that he’ll now be able to spend more time with his children and family, to watch them develop in person rather than over a grainy video, I also know that he should have been a battalion commander, and that in the case of a big war, he’d have been an excellent brigade commander. The military needs people like that — fierce leaders who inspire the love of their soldiers and sergeants, rather than the competent administrators who advance during peacetime. The institution of the military likes to say that in a good officer both traits are necessary, but that is a lie; in war, the administrators must be placed on staff, they are mostly useless in trenches and under heavy artillery barrage. From this perspective, the Army lost an asset yesterday; a rare asset, and precisely the type of leader that is needed to emerge from a war victorious.

With his departure and that of those like him, the Army got smaller. It shrank. It lost capability that it may not need very much now, but which it will certainly need, and badly, if worse comes to worst.

This is a strange place for the military, and for the U.S. At the same time that the military is bleeding mid-level leaders with years of priceless and hard-earned combat experience, the kind you can only get on the battlefield, not enough people are joining to replace them. The timing is execrable: the military is hoping to rejuvenate lost capabilities (air defense artillery, artillery) and expand from a brigade-centric model back into a division- or corps-centric model. Too few people are signing up to backfill existing positions, let alone grow those positions that are needed to conduct modern combined-arms warfare on the offense. And U.S. doctrine is all about the offense.

What does that look like? Consider the active duty military in its relation to the overall population between 1939-1941, before the U.S. entered WWII.

As war proliferates across the world, beginning with Japan’s invasion of China in 1937 and expanding to include Nazi Germany’s invasion of Poland in 1939, and Soviet Russia’s invasion of Finland and the Baltics in 1939 and 1940, respectively, the U.S. military began to grow. From about 334k in 1939, the military expanded to 458k, by 37%. And from 458k in 1940 it grew to 1.8 million in 1941 (~293% growth). It got much, much bigger from there, after Japan and Nazi Germany’s declaration of war.

How does that match up to today’s trends?

Not well! Although the current U.S. military is more professional, better trained, and bigger than its predecessor before WWII — much bigger when one counts reserve and national guard formations — it is below where the generals and admirals say it needs to be, and heading in the wrong direction.

Another thing to note is the national reluctance to serve expressed by the military as a percent of the overall population. The military of today is much larger than its peacetime equivalent in 1939, but about the same in terms of how much of the population feels inclined to serve. .25% of the population were serving in 1939, and .34% of the population were serving in 1940. .39%, .38%, and .37% of the U.S. population were serving in 2021, 2022, and 2023.

Very little is being asked of Americans, from this perspective — even less than was asked before WWII, and under very different circumstances. In 1939, the U.S. was still flush from playing a decisive role in the Allied victory of German-led Central Powers in The Great War. The nation had emerged from that conflict having burnished its national prestige — a thing about which many cared greatly in those days — and acquired important economic clout, partly as a result.

Today the U.S. remains the most powerful country on earth, as expressed partly by economic power and influence, and partly by its military. One of the best measures of this military strength is that U.S. air power, as expressed by size and sophistication, occupies the top two slots of the most powerful air forces on earth, with the Air Force as number one, and Naval Aviation as number two. Who’s making that determination? Kyle Mizokami of Popular Mechanics. Worth mentioning that he ended up being wrong about Russia occupying the third space, though most people I know would’ve made the same error.

If the trend of a shrinking military continues, it could mean deep trouble for the U.S. in the event of a war. Recruiters have been asked to shoulder much of the blame for falling numbers — rightly or wrongly, it’s difficult to say — but retention is also a problem, as is a sufficient well of native patriotism. This all adds up to a big problem for the military, for the United States, and for the centuries-old democratic experiment on which both depend for strength and purpose.

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