Fixing the Mix: How to Update the Army's Reserves

Editor's note: About this essay, on March 4, 2004, the New York Times editorialized:

"Financing and equipping two new divisions could cost upward of $5 billion a year and could easily be paid for by cutting back spending on unnecessary weapons systems. Lawrence Korb, an assistant secretary of defense in the Reagan administration, writes in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs that scrapping the costly F-22 fighter and not rushing into a premature deployment of the technologically unripe missile defense program would save enough to pay for the two divisions."

Look here for the full New York Times editorial (free registration required.)

The swift victories won on the battlefields of Afghanistan and Iraq vindicated the recent transformation of the U.S. military into a leaner, more high-tech operation. Subsequent problems in winning the peace in these two countries, however, have highlighted the failure to transform another, critical aspect of the U.S. armed services: namely, their personnel systems. Since the effectiveness of the U.S. military depends not just on "smart" bombs but on smart, well-trained, highly motivated people, this shortcoming must be corrected quickly. If it is not, the quality of the United States' all-volunteer force, especially that of the Army, will suffer. As David Segal, director of the Center for Research on Military Organization at the University of Maryland, noted, "Our volunteer army is closer to being broken today than ever before in its 30-year history."

The personnel system currently in use by the U.S. armed forces was created 30 years ago, in the aftermath of the Vietnam War. During that unpopular conflict, despite the fact that the United States maintained a draft, most of the country's elites managed to avoid service. Moreover, in order to minimize the public impact of the war and hence a damaging public debate, President Lyndon Johnson refrained from mobilizing or activating the National Guard or the reserves -- even though this meant that he had to expand the active-duty services by nearly a million people solely by increasing draft calls.