Volunteer Military Research Articles

Managing the all-volunteer force in a time of war

After a rocky start to the volunteer military in the late 1970s, since 1980 the United States military services have met or exceeded their recruiting and retention goals in most years and have done so at reasonable cost. The ongoing conflict in Iraq is the U.S. military's first protracted conflict since the inception of the volunteer force and raises questions about its impacts on recruiting, retention, and cost. This article briefly examines the effects of the war on recruiting, retention, and cost and studies ways of expanding the size of the active Army force, including a return to conscription.

Shouldering the Soldiering

As the American death toll in Iraq surpassed 1,900, some international research scholars may have been perplexed. Only a few years ago, foreign policy makers in Western democracies, including the United States, were described as being extremely sensitive to the risk of military combat casualties. Among the factors that influence the number of casualties that a democracy will experience in conflict, one variable that should not be ignored is its military manpower system. The author contends that democracies with conscript armies experience fewer combat casualties than democracies with volunteer or professional forces because the societal actors most closely affected by conscript casualties are more likely to have the political power and access with which to constrain policy makers. Using several selection models, the author finds that democracy and conscription contribute to fewer casualties than democracy and volunteer militaries, with democracy alone being responsible for casualty numbers that lie somewhere in between.

The Multicultural Military: Military Service and the Acculturation of Latinos and Anglos

Using the Latino National Political Survey, this article examines whether military service helps explain the responses given by Latinos to questions on acculturation. The data show that Latino veterans (and particularly draft-era veterans) had more friendships with Anglos (non-Hispanic whites), spoke more English at home, were more likely to experience discrimination, and were also more likely to correctly identify Cesar Chavez. Service in the volunteer military, however, was related only to the first two questions. In addition, there is evidence that Anglo veterans were more familiar with Latino culture. The article concludes that the end of the draft may have eliminated a useful forum for intercultural and intracultural learning for both groups, although the volunteer military does have an impact on Latino acculturation.

U.S. military weight standards: What percentage of U.S. young adults meet the current standards?

Purpose Each branch of the U.S. military enforces maximum allowable weight standards that must be met to join the military. We wanted to determine what percentage of U.S. civilians between the ages of 17 and 20 years met these standards. Methods The height and weight of adults between the ages of 17 and 20 years, as measured in the nationally representative sample of the Third National Health and Nutritional Examination Survey, were matched against the height/weight charts of the military services. The percentage of men and women in each population subgroup who weighed more than the maximum allowable weight was calculated. Results The percentage of young adults whose weight exceeded the military weight standard ranged from 13% to 18% for men and 17% to 43% for women. When stratified by race, 15% to 20% of non-Hispanic white men and 12% to 36% of non-Hispanic white women were over the weight standards, 11% to 19% of non-Hispanic black men and 35% to 56% of non-Hispanic black women were over the standards, and 13% to 24% of Mexican American men and 26% to 55% of Mexican American women exceeded the military weight standards. Conclusion A large percentage of the young adult population from which the U.S. volunteer military is drawn is over the military weight standards, particularly among minorities, who comprise a disproportionately large proportion of the military. There is a marked discrepancy between the weight standards for men and women, and the appropriateness of these standards needs to be assessed.

DOES THE WELFARE STATE HELP THE POOR?

Does the welfare state help the poor? This surprisingly simple question often generates more heat than light. By the welfare state, I mean transfer programs aimed at helping the poor through the direct redistribution of income. (This excludes general economic policy, antitrust, the volunteer military, and many other policies that affect the well-being of the poor.) Defenders of the welfare state often assume that the poor benefit from it, while critics suggest that the losses outweigh the gains. The most notable of such criticisms is Charles Murray's Losing Ground, which suggests that the welfare state has failed to achieve its stated ends.

A General Equilibrium Model of the Volunteer Military

Textbook discussions of the economics of the military labor market usually adopt the partial equilibrium reasoning used by Oi [8] and Hansen and Weisbrod [5] in arguing for the efficiency of the volunteer military.' The basic argument is that a draft will tend to misallocate individuals between the civilian and military sectors. Without necessarily disagreeing with that conclusion, we maintain that a volunteer military must be placed in a general equilibrium framework in order properly to analyze all of its important features. Our relatively simple model assumes a pure labor economy where all individuals have the same utility function and the same productivity as soldiers, but individuals vary according to the civilian real wage they could earn. The persons in the economy face an external threat which can be reduced by having some of them devote labor time to being soldiers. The wages of soldiers are paid for by taxes on civilians. The voluntary nature of military service requires that all soldiers are at least as well off as they would be as civilians. Equilibrium in the labor market requires that those serving as soldiers are the individuals with the lowest civilian wage rates. Since the formal model is timeless (static) in nature, the volunteer decision to be a soldier is essentially moment-to-moment. In actual practice, volunteers agree to long term contracts for military service. Because long term contracts restrict the option to leave military service in the short term, the utility of a soldier may not be as high as it would be as a civilian. While the analysis of our simpler version of the volunteer military without long term contracts may lead to less realistic conclusions, the model is more tractable and offers insights into why long term contracts may be desirable. A virtue of a general equilibrium model is that it requires a rigorous specification of the factors giving rise to the demand for a military. Clearly, a military is only useful if the labor of

Book Review: America's Volunteer Military: Progress and Prospect

Book Review: America's Volunteer Military: Progress and Prospect

The Future of the Volunteer Military

The Future of the Volunteer Military

Combat Effectiveness: Cohesion, Stress, and the Volunteer Military.

Combat Effectiveness: Cohesion, Stress, and the Volunteer Military.

Combat Effectiveness: Cohesion, Stress, and the Volunteer Military.

Combat Effectiveness: Cohesion, Stress, and the Volunteer Military.

Combat Effectiveness: Cohesion, Stress, and the Volunteer Military. Edited by Sam C. Sarkesian. Beverly Hills: Sage, 1980. 305 pp. Cloth, $20.00; paper, $9.94

Combat Effectiveness: Cohesion, Stress, and the Volunteer Military. Edited by Sam C. Sarkesian. Beverly Hills: Sage, 1980. 305 pp. Cloth, $20.00; paper, $9.94

Book Review: Combat Effectiveness: Cohesion, Stress and the Volunteer Military

Book Review: Combat Effectiveness: Cohesion, Stress and the Volunteer Military

The Draft, The Volunteer Military, and Peace Defense: A Contention

Registration of American male youth for the military draft has regenerated the traditional rhetoric concerning wage slavery and military preparedness. This paper examines the draft and volunteer military from a theoretical perspective and finds both systems wanting. A major point of the paper is that neither the draft nor the volunteer military should be examined in isolation. The study begins by stating the standard position. A broader perspective to the draft/volunteer military debate is then presented. Next, an alternative defense system is suggested. The conclusion summarizes the crucial issues and points presented in the paper. The standard position Karl Marx may well be considered the popularizer of the wage slavery theory.1 From a Marxian perspective the choice of working for pay or starving to death hardly constitutes freedom of exchange. The rise of real incomes in industrial society has somewhat abated the popularity of that view as an axiom of market capitalism. The existence of wage slavery is, however, alive and well in relation to the military draft. The draftee is forced to perform a military function or to exercise some draft avoidance technique. He is paid something for his services but not necessarily his reserThe author is Assistant Professor in the Masters in Business Administration

Marketing Issues

Each quarter, business and government leaders discuss issues of concern to marketers. This time, Archie R. Boe discusses rising insurance costs and creating a better industry image. A. J. Martin discusses marketing's application to the volunteer military.

The volunteer military and the rest of the iceberg

Most discussions of the volunteer military have concentrated upon either the social costs of conscription or the level of entry pay needed to attract sufficient numbers of volunteers. These studies have neglected the impact of movement toward a volunteer military on the management of the military force as a whole. The central theme of this paper is that many of the largest personnel problems are exacerbated, if not caused by, the incentive system. Many of these incentives—incorporated in the pay and retirement structure and the training and utilization patterns for personnel—were developed for historic reasons that are no longer applicable. With the introduction of a volunteer military, mistakes in the personnel system become more costly. Adjustment of the most perverse incentives could lead to a self-correction of many glaring problems.

“Moro”: The Resupply of German Submarines in Spain, 1939–1942

The outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936 manifestly occasioned fundamental adjustments in European strategic considerations. While few powers had given serious thought to Spain's diplomatic, military, or even geographical importance, the rising produced numerous useful opportunities for Germany. It created a potential friend on France's southern frontier, drew the senior, more aggressive dictator, Benito Mussolini, closer to the more recently arrived Adolf Hitler, threatened Great Britain's control of the Mediterranean at Gibraltar, and redirected the focus of international diplomacy. In order to obtain a position of greater influence within the unstable vector of forces created by the new situation the two dictators had dispatched socalled volunteer military and air formations in support of the rising. While these troops and their equipment were of fundamental value to the Nationalists, their presence forced the participating military high commands to reevaluate carefully their positions and intentions.

Volunteer Military Companies: A Form of Recreation in the 1850's

(1969). Volunteer Military Companies: A Form of Recreation in the 1850's. Journal of Health, Physical Education, Recreation: Vol. 40, No. 1, pp. 50-52.