The Recruits

An interview with Peter Mansoor on who serves and why they do it.

With this interview, we continue our “war issue.” The civilian-military divide remains as large as ever, so we’re looking at war through simple questions: who, how, and why are we fighting. A lot of people ask what our “angle” is when we talk about the military, but we don’t have one, our point is simple: “The nation that makes a great distinction between its scholars and its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting done by fools.” This interview with Peter Mansoor was conducted and condensed by franknews.

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Do you mind starting by introducing yourself, your work, and your background?

I am Professor Peter Mansoor. I graduated from West Point and had a 26-year career in the military as an Armor officer, with two tours in the Iraq War. I finished up as executive officer to General David Petraeus - at the time he was the commander of Multinational Force-Iraq. I teach military history at The Ohio State University and have published extensively on World War II and the Iraq War. I’m also a member of the Hoover Military History Working Group, which examines national security issues across the spectrum.

I’m interested in starting with this question of recruitment. There was a recent piece in the New York Times about a recruiting crisis and an uptick in the Future Solider program. I’m wondering if you can explain what that program is and what problem it is trying to solve?

Sure, so ever since the pandemic, the military has been having issues recruiting enough young men and women to serve in the military. Part of the reason is that only 23% of American youth are eligible to serve – others have mental health issues, drug use issues, they’re obese, or they can’t pass the ASVAB. The Army decided to get ahead of the curve and offer a soldier prep course in order to solve some of those issues. It’s a 90-day course at Fort Jackson, South Carolina, and helps those who want to serve to meet the qualifications to do so – i.e., they’ll either have to lose weight or they get extra tutoring to pass the ASVAB test.

Why are they having trouble reaching their goals?

The pandemic did a couple of things. One is that military recruiters couldn’t contact young men and women in high schools and in other venues where young people hang out. The recruiters have to go to sporting events and places where young men and women are – that’s where recruiters make contact with them. Well, in the pandemic, that all ended, and the following year, in 2022, the US Army fell 15,000 recruits short of its goal. Not a catastrophe, but a huge dent for the service.

The second thing is that you have a smaller group of eligible young people who turn 18 every year. The Great Recession of 2008 caused a dip in birth rates, and that has continued ever since. The pool of young people is declining and will continue to decline at least through 2026.

Economic security has always been a big reason people enlist. Is that still the case?

So ever since the inception of the all-volunteer military, the primary motivation for joining the armed forces has been to get a job and job training. And then secondarily, money for education and recruiting bonuses. Recruiting numbers rise and fall with the health of the economy. When the economy is hot, then recruiting falls off because young people have more options. And when the economy is not so great, as has been the case more recently, then recruiting numbers rise. That’s the biggest driver of recruiting.

What role do politics play ever in recruitment? Is politics ever a reason for people enlisting?

People who serve are Americans, and they have their thoughts about politics. They obviously like serving under a president that they admire, but that is rarely the reason they join. The fact that you have a Democrat in office—well, I’m not going to serve under a Democratic president—that just doesn’t come up in the recruiting conversations. Where politics does have an impact is in the sort of broader Congressional support for the military, whether it be pay raises, bonuses, other aspects of recruitment that are very tangible. And those matter much more than who’s in office.

And do you mind explaining to me how that works on a logistical level? Is that a yearly discussion that happens in Congress?

Yes, it does. The defense procurement bill and the national defense budget provides money for pay raises, for bonuses, for other aspects of military service, along with educational benefits such as the GI Bill. The most recent version of the GI Bill was passed in 2007 and has been a huge bonus for service members who want to go to college. It essentially provides four years of college education for free. So those are the sorts of things that Congress does on an annual basis that make an impact in military recruiting.

And would you say the pay raises and bonuses have kept pace with the economy?

Yes, by and large, they have. And bonuses have been increased, especially when the military is not meeting its recruiting shortfalls.

But what the services found is that bonuses alone didn’t solve the issue. It wasn’t simply a lack of money. It was maybe in some cases not having the right people in the recruiting field. The Marines do the best job of this. They put their best people in positions as recruiters, and it’s something that the Army and the other services have now copied and followed, and that has made a difference in recruiting as well.

You’ve written about how myths in military culture shape perspectives and influence decisions. Could the current recruiting challenges actually shift any of those myths or change the culture?

You know, service cultures are developed over a very long period of time. And what we’re seeing is potentially a shift in military culture with the ending of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, a return to major combat operations and a focus on places like Ukraine and Taiwan. But in general, the military culture isn’t going to impact recruiting on a year-by-year basis. It’s going to be over a very much longer period of time. And I don’t think that we’ve seen a significant shift in military culture recently.

I think the focus on large-scale war, as exemplified by the Secretary of Defense renaming the Department of Defense the Department of War—will, in general, be a net positive for recruiting. Recruits didn’t like the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The military had trouble filling the ranks in those years. And I think recruits are much more attuned to let’s just train for combat, and then when the big one comes, we’ll take part.

Can you say more about that?

Well, they look at history. They look at World War II, which is sort of the typical large-scale conflict that everyone thinks about when you think about large-scale wars, or Desert Storm, which is closer to their lifetimes. They like the idea of going into the military to get job training, to train hard for combat, but not necessarily putting their life on the line every single day the way that seemed to be the case during the War on Terror. But then when the big one comes, a World War II-type conflict, they see value in serving and defending the nation.

Something that maybe feels more moral or more purpose-driven—

Oh, they’re Captain Miller in Saving Private Ryan, yeah.

Is there a world where, especially looking at technology, where we might just need less people and less bodies fighting war and these recruiting numbers don’t matter?

Yeah, so two things there. One is the equipment and the skills needed to operate it are much more technologically advanced today than they have ever been. And so we need recruits that are smart, and this is part of the reason why a lot of young people don’t qualify, because they don’t score highly on the ASVAB test, which is a kind of general measure of intelligence. And so the Army, the Marines, the Air Force, Navy, Space Force, and the Coast Guard—they all need smart young people to operate advanced equipment, to be cyber warriors in some cases, and other very new specialty fields that have defined warfare lately.

But the other thing that’s going on is the older ways of fighting—infantry, armor, field artillery—are not going away. It’s very clear from the war in Ukraine that artillery, for instance, is still the king of battle, and you need lots of it. So that means you need lots of soldiers in cannon and missile and rocket artillery units. So you need mass at the same time that you need technological savvy, and that’s something that the military is dealing with now, and the recruiters are trying to fill both needs.

We spoke to an academic a few months ago who made this argument that as war gets more technologically advanced, there’s greater physical and psychological distance from the war itself, and that makes it easier for us as a society to sort of mentally distance ourselves from what’s actually happening. What do you make of that?

Yeah, in many people’s view we are headed toward a sort of push-button war. That won’t be the case if the United States ends up in a war with a major power, with China or Russia. I think what we’ve seen is that in the War on Terror, there was such a small percentage of the population that was involved—less than 2% wore the uniform during the War on Terror—that the American people weren’t involved. They were told to continue to go shopping and keep the economy humming. But if there ever is a major state-on-state war where the United States is at war with Russia as part of NATO, or at war with China, it will hit home to the American people in a big way.

The other aspect of that, though, is for the people who are involved in the war but find themselves at some distance from the front lines. So I’m thinking of the drone operators in the Air Force. They operate out of Creech Air Force Base, which is near Las Vegas. And initially they would go and they would serve a 12- or 24-hour shift, and then they went home, and they went to their kids’ Little League practices, go shopping, and have dinner with the family.

They would go back to their trailers at Creech, and, you know, they would be dropping bombs on people. And it caused a real psychological problem for the drone operators, because they were being yanked back and forth between combat and not combat, then combat, and again not combat. And they were actually getting PTSD.

So what the Air Force did is they said you’re assigned to Creech Air Force Base. Your family’s there, you’re going to serve a month as a drone operator, several weeks you’re going to be in combat, and then you get leave. So when they were in combat, they were in combat, and when they were not, they got a break. That helped solve the issue. But I think it’s really interesting that you can get PTSD while serving in the United States.

Totally. It speaks to a sense of shared experience too.

My last question — you mentioned the case where the US goes to war with China or Russia. What do you think the likelihood of actually going to combat with them is?

Well, never say never. It’s more likely today than it appeared to be after the end of the Cold War. We had a three-decade hiatus in major power conflict since the Gulf War of 1991, and, you know, that was a good thing. But the fact that the United States now is out of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and is focused on the potential for Russia invading a NATO ally, for instance, or China invading Taiwan, which could drag the United States into a major war in Asia—these are places where the risk has risen in the last few years. The military has to prepare for these sorts of potential large-scale wars, and it’s a different beast than fighting terrorists and insurgents in the Middle East and South Asia. It is possible that the United States could have to fight one of these large-scale wars again, and they’ll be bloody. So let’s hope it doesn’t come to pass.