OPINION:
In a recent essay, professor Edward Luttwak argued that plummeting fertility rates greatly restrict the ability of political leaders to go to war and, once at war, circumscribe the amount of bloodshed they can countenance. Mr. Luttwak concludes that nations with below replacement-level fertility rates (both democracies and dictatorships) are loath to go to war because each casualty potentially represents the end of a family line.
His argument, while compelling, tends to equate the recruited militaries prevalent in most of the West with the conscripted militaries (or hybrid conscripted-recruited militaries) more common in authoritarian regimes. While there are similarities, recruiting and conscription are subject to somewhat different pressures. Both sets of pressures are demographic and socioeconomic.
Recruiting for the U.S. military demands relatively low numbers (around 150,000 new enlistments per year for the total force). The much smaller non-U.S. Western military forces demand much smaller annual recruiting totals. Given the size of the cohort that enters the prime recruiting age (18 to 24 years old) every year, there are plenty of available and qualified people — even when considering the well-publicized low propensity and high disqualification rates present in all Western nations.
In other words, our recruiting challenges are more a result of socioeconomic pressures than demographic issues. In a full-employment economy, young men have many options that pay better and appear less risky than military service. Political division in the United States and the related social pressures have resulted in a mass disengagement of White men. And with the exception of the Marine Corps, our armed services have chronically underinvested in their recruiting components.
These trends explain why the three larger U.S. military branches continue to miss their recruiting targets. For example, the decrease in the Army’s ability to recruit White men explains almost all of its multiyear recruiting challenges. This persists even as the Army has reduced its active component target from around 80,000 a decade and a half ago to 55,000 this year. These factors suggest that an economic downturn, continued investment in recruiting, and more national attention to the socioeconomic crisis affecting young men generally and White men specifically would be more than enough to allow the Army to consistently meet its targets.
Contextually, a very small slice of the American population serves in the armed forces. Few Americans know anyone who has served, let alone served themselves. While this trend creates a recruiting challenge, it tends to minimize the sociopolitical impact that casualties (unspeakably painful for the circle of family and friends of those who paid the ultimate price) have on wider society.
In addition, the modern U.S. military has tended to sustain historically low casualty rates for various reasons. This has been true both for short, sharp conflicts such as Operation Desert Storm and for protracted limited engagements like Operations Enduring Freedom and Iraqi Freedom. These low casualty rates have persisted regardless of the overall strategic success of these military actions. As a result, combat and noncombat casualties, in the relatively rare instance they occur, tend to affect few people directly.
Mr. Luttwak may have a point regarding conscription. Leaving aside the question of whether we could actually execute a draft, it is highly likely that the resistance from families with only one child to wartime conscription would be intense. The pressure to limit casualties — irrespective of the military-strategic situation — could become unbearable. If the U.S. suffered casualty rates like those of both belligerents in the war in Ukraine, the mass of local community funerals could become a platform for “end the war now” demands.
The most pressing question in the event of war may be which side or which sort of political system would be able to bear losses best. During World War II, the U.S. generally and the Navy in particular routinely hid casualty figures from public view. Adm. Ernest King deliberately hid Navy and Marine Corps losses during the Guadalcanal campaign, believing that the massive losses U.S. forces were sustaining could undermine the nation’s support for the war.
The war in Ukraine is an interesting case study. Both Russia and Ukraine face among the worst demographic situations in the world, and both are sustaining massive casualties each month. While Ukraine is fighting defensively against an unprovoked, illegal aggression, the political pressure on the government that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is building. It’s not clear how long Mr. Zelenskyy will be able to hold on.
Russian leader Vladimir Putin can surely arrest and murder his way out of almost any conceivable resistance movement. The question is whether this capability will survive in the long term. Political resistance to mobilization and war casualties is, in some ways, a sociopolitical safety valve for a country at war. Mr. Putin’s (and Chinese President Xi Jinping’s, Iranian leader Ali Khamenei’s and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s) ability to silence any such resistance potentially robs dictatorships of this safety valve. At some point, this strength of the autocrats may become a weakness. Only time will tell.
• Dave Jonas is a partner at Fluet and a retired Marine Corps lieutenant colonel. Mike Samarov is a retired Marine Corps colonel. The opinions expressed in this piece are their own.
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