Review: America's Army Making the All Volunteer Force

Abstract

AMERICA'S ARMY Making the All Volunteer Force Beth Bailey Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009. 352pp, US$29.95 cloth ISBN 13978-0674035362Beth Bailey has written a marvellous book about an important topic. Her exploration of the US army's transition from selective service to an allvolunteer force is well researched, persuasively argued, and written in a clear and easy style that is too often missing from both military and cultural history. From the draft protests of the 1960s to the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, America's Army narrates how the nation's largest armed service survived the tumultuous 1970s, rebounded in the 1980s, and fashioned a winning formula for public acceptance and support in the present. While scholars have already given some attention to the army's adoption of an all-volunteer force, Bailey's book situates the transition in a broader social context, using the debates over the army's future as a window into American race relations, gender relations, and the role of social science research and business methods in military affairs.Bailey begins in the Vietnam-soaked political landscape of the 1968 presidential campaign when candidate Richard M. Nixon first proposed abolishing the draft. Nixorf s promise was an act of pure political opportunism, but the actual work of designing an all-volunteer force, which fell to a White House commission of economists, soldiers, and business leaders, involved a deeper ideological struggle. Should providing for the national defence be understood as an obligation of citizenship ora labour market issue of supply and demand? Prominent free-market economists Milton Friedman and Alan Greenspan believed the latter and argued forcefully that the key to a successful all-volunteer force was improved pay and benefits to buy a steady supply of enlistees. Other members of the commission - including retired generals Alfred Gruenther and Lauris Norstad - had greater reservations about the intrusion of market principles into military life. Despite these conflicts, the free marketeers seized the initiative, and Bailey believes that their ideology has undergirded the all-volunteer force ever since. In her view, the army saved itself by turning increasingly to modern business practices: social science data to identify target Audiences, marketing consultants to interpret that data, and Madison Avenue ad agencies to sell the army as everything from as a path to college to a journey toward personal fulfilment. And while Bailey lauds the army's transition as a tale of progress and achievement, she notes in the book's final line that there is something lost when individual liberty is valued over all and the rights and benefits of citizenship become less closely linked to its duties and obligations (260).While Bailey the citizen has reasonable concerns about the intrusion of the market, Bailey the historian must have been grateful for it, because the marketing data compiled by the military and its ad agencies provide a fascinating window into the relationship between the army and the public. From basic demographic data on race, sex, and region to advertisers' youth studies and the military's youth attitude tracking study, statistics undergird Bailey's arguments but never cloud the writing. The chapter on race gives detailed attention to the army's use of social science research and the debates over whether such methods were effective or even moral. Bailey profiles two secretaries of the army with divergent opinions - Howard H. Bo Callaway and Clifford Alexander - with Alexander receiving the harsher criticism. Under his tenure, the army had so much trouble recruiting the men and women it needed for a modern high-tech military force that in the spring of 1980 President Carter asked congress to reinstitute draft registration. Many commentators at the time took this as proof that the all- volunteer force had failed. …