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??–???
1999
[H.A.S.C. No. 106–26]
TRENDS IN THE U.S. DOMESTIC FUTURE AND IMPLICATIONS FOR NATIONAL SECURITY—A REPORT OF THE NATIONAL SECURITY STUDY GROUP, UNITED STATES COMMISSION ON NATIONAL SECURITY/21ST CENTURY
HEARING
BEFORE THE
MILITARY PERSONNEL SUBCOMMITTEE
OF THE
COMMITTEE ON ARMED SERVICES
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
ONE HUNDRED SIXTH CONGRESS
FIRST SESSION
HEARING HELD
NOVEMBER 4, 1999
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MILITARY PERSONNEL SUBCOMMITTEE
STEVE BUYER, Indiana, Chairman
ROSCOE G. BARTLETT, Maryland
J.C. WATTS, Jr., Oklahoma
MAC THORNBERRY, Texas
LINDSEY GRAHAM, South Carolina
JIM RYUN, Kansas
MARY BONO, California
JOSEPH PITTS, Pennsylvania
ROBIN HAYES, North Carolina
STEVEN KUYKENDALL, California
NEIL ABERCROMBIE, Hawaii
MARTIN T. MEEHAN, Massachusetts
PATRICK J. KENNEDY, Rhode Island
LORETTA SANCHEZ, California
CYNTHIA A. McKINNEY, Georgia
ELLEN O. TAUSCHER, California
MIKE THOMPSON, California
JOHN B. LARSON, Connecticut
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John D. Chapla, Professional Staff Member
Thomas E. Hawley, Professional Staff Member
Michael R. Higgins, Professional Staff Member
Edward P. Wyatt, Professional Staff Member
George O. Withers, Professional Staff Member
Nancy M. Warner, Staff Assistant
(ii)
C O N T E N T S
HEARING:
Thursday, November 4, 1999, Trends in the U.S. Domestic Future and Implications for National Security—A Report of the National Security Study Group, United States Commission on National Security/21st Century
APPENDIX:
Thursday, November 4, 1999
THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 4, 1999
TRENDS IN THE U.S. DOMESTIC FUTURE AND IMPLICATIONS FOR NATIONAL SECURITY—A REPORT OF THE NATIONAL SECURITY STUDY GROUP, UNITED STATES COMMISSION ON NATIONAL SECURITY/21ST CENTURY
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STATEMENTS PRESENTED BY MEMBERS OF CONGRESS
Abercrombie, Hon. Neil, a Representative from Hawaii, Ranking Member, Military Personnel Subcommittee
Buyer, Hon. Steve, a Representative from Indiana, Chairman, Military Personnel Subcommittee
WITNESSES
Hillen, Dr. John, National Security Study Group
Killebrew, Robert, National Security Study Group
Kohn, Dr. Richard H., National Security Study Group
Moskos, Dr. Charles, National Security Study Group
APPENDIX
PREPARED STATEMENTS:
[The Prepared Statements can be viewed in the hard copy.]
Abercrombie, Hon. Neil
Buyer, Hon. Steve
Hillen, Dr. John, Dr. Charles Moskos, Dr. Richard H. Kohn, and Mr. Robert Killebrew
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DOCUMENTS SUBMITTED FOR THE RECORD:
[There were no Documents submitted for the Record.]
QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS SUBMITTED FOR THE RECORD:
[There were no Questions and Answers submitted for the Record.]
(iii)
TRENDS IN THE U.S. DOMESTIC FUTURE AND IMPLICATIONS FOR NATIONAL SECURITY—A REPORT OF THE NATIONAL SECURITY STUDY GROUP, UNITED STATES COMMISSION ON NATIONAL SECURITY/21ST CENTURY
House of Representatives,
Committee on Armed Services,
Military Personnel Subcommittee,
Washington, DC, Thursday, November 4, 1999.
The subcommittee met, pursuant to call, at 9:30 a.m. in room 2212, Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. Steve Buyer (chairman of the subcommittee) Presiding.
OPENING STATEMENT OF HON. STEVE BUYER, A REPRESENTATIVE FROM INDIANA, CHAIRMAN, MILITARY PERSONNEL SUBCOMMITTEE
Mr. BUYER. The Military Personnel Subcommittee hearing on future domestic trends will now come to order.
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Several months ago when I heard reports that some of the military services were beginning to talk about requesting more end strength and force structure, it struck me that, at least from—and some here in the Congress even were advocating such ideas—it struck me that, at least from my understanding of the problem, such requests were premature.
My reaction was based principally on three factors. First, the desire for increased end strength and force structure appeared to come from a need to better accommodate the exceedingly high optempo and perstempo demands of a national strategy of engagement, but without asking fundamental questions regarding the future validity, scope, and supportability of the strategy that was driving such requirements.
Second, in the midst of the most significant challenge ever to the ability of the military services to sustain an all-volunteer force, the ramifications and feasibility of adding to the challenge by increasing force structure and end strength did not appear to have been fully thought through.
Finally, as I had learned during the subcommittee's deliberate approach to understanding the underlying causes of recruiting and retention shortfalls, the complexity of the military personnel problems today defies ''silver-bullet'' solutions, for it is multi-facetted, and until the full scope of those complexities are understood, proposing solutions could easily be an ineffective and wasteful effort.
That brings us to today's hearing. I would mark this as the beginning of a deliberate fact finding and evaluative effort that will culminate in the fiscal year 2001, even perhaps the fiscal year 2002, National Defense Authorization Act. I think there is no better place to begin than an inquiry into the broad context and direction of domestic trends that will shape America's future national security generally, and more specifically, to gain further insight into factors challenging the health of an all-volunteer military.
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To that end, the recently completed work of the National Security Study Group is especially timely and pertinent. Like the phase-one report of the Hart-Rudman Commission, which the study group supports, the study group's analysis is descriptive, not prescriptive. Such prescriptive effort will develop through phases two and three of the study group effort. Nevertheless, the study group's phase-one analysis of future U.S. domestic trends is thought provoking, insightful and particularly relevant to the focus of the subcommittee.
Before I introduce our witnesses today, I would like to offer Mr. Abercrombie the opportunity to make any opening remarks he may have, and I also would yield to any other members and welcome the ranking member, Ike Skelton, to the subcommittee.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Buyer can be found in the Appendix.]
Mr. BUYER. Mr. Abercrombie.
STATEMENT OF HON. NEIL ABERCROMBIE, A REPRESENTATIVE FROM HAWAII, RANKING MEMBER, MILITARY PERSONNEL SUBCOMMITTEE
Mr. ABERCROMBIE. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I also want to extend a welcome to you folks that are here today. Aloha.
This week is the 10th anniversary, as has been indicated by the chairman, of the fall of the Berlin Wall. During the past decade, we have seen the bipolar Cold War geopolitical realties on which we had previously based our military force structure change dramatically. I think the commentary that we have had a chance to review reflects that. We have had several studies such as the Bottom Up Review, the Quadrennial Defense Review and others which have been used to try to help us as policymakers attempt to adapt to the resulting shifts in national security requirements.
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I want to compliment the chairman on his decision to hold this hearing on the Phase I Report on the Emerging Global Security Environment of the United States Commission on National Security in the 21st Century, also known as the Hart-Rudman Commission. The members of the National Security Study Group who produced the Section III report on the U.S. domestic future provided a very thoughtful sketch of the kinds of trends which may have a very real impact on the future composition of our military forces.
I believe that one of the more difficult tasks before this Congress and the Congresses to come, the Administration and the Administrations to come is that of correctly anticipating our country's future national security needs, and then being able to provide the resources and direction to right-size and right-equip that force. What sort of individuals may be available and who may be inclined to join the military is an important aspect in this regard, particularly in an all-volunteer military.
Parenthetically, Mr. Chairman, with that I think we need to look no further than the sensationalizing of the so-called food stamp question in the military to understand that the social and economical components of our society are changing dramatically and yet we haven't necessarily come to grips with them at all.
Research into our national domestic future has the potential to work hand-in-glove with that effort, and I appreciate the effort that I mentioned about understanding the all voluntary military and the context in which that military will be drawn. I appreciate the opportunity to hear from our guests today and the implications of their study.
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Once again, I want to indicate to you, Mr. Chairman, how grateful I am—and I am sure that I speak for all minority members of the committee—how grateful we are to you for having this hearing. Thank you.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Abercrombie can be found in the Appendix.]
Mr. BUYER. Thank you, Mr. Abercrombie.
Anyone else have any opening remarks? Mr. Skelton?
Mr. SKELTON. Mr. Chairman, let me join my friend from Hawaii in complimenting you on holding this hearing. Your leadership in this area will prove very important and very effective, and we thank you for that.
The panel before us is a very distinguished panel. From time to time we are pleased to have outstanding Americans testify before us, but those today are very special. And I can't help, Mr. Chairman, but point out one in particular who one time not too long ago was the official historian for the United States Air Force and a good friend and, frankly, Mr. Chairman, I call him my personal historian, Dr. Richard Kohn.
Let me welcome all of you. We look forward to hearing from each of you because you have the ability and the understanding and the research in projecting where America goes based upon where America has been. We thank you for being with us.
Dr. Kohn, it is a special thrill to see you here today.
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Mr. BUYER. Thank you, Mr. Skelton.
I would like to thank and welcome our witnesses today who are appearing as members of the National Security Study Group, offering with them distinguished academic and professional credentials.
Dr. John Hillen holds a Ph.D. in International Relations from the University of Oxford and most recently was a Senior Fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Dr. Hillen commanded a unit in the Second Armored Cavalry regiment in the Gulf War and just returned from a tour in Kuwait as an Army Reservist.
Dr. Charles Moskos is a Professor of Sociology at Northwestern University and can justifiably lay claim to being the Nation's preeminent social science expert on the United States military. We claim that you are. You must be then. If Congress says you are, then you are. I think you can lay claim to that because a lot of us turn to you. Not only do we but a lot of newspaper writers turn to you and you are able to articulate and put your hand upon the pulse. I think that you have been able to do that because of your work over the last 3 decades. So it has been earned.
I last worked with Dr. Moskos during the—he served as a member of the Congressional Commission of the Assignment of Women in the Military. I appreciate your work on that Commission.
Also with us is Dr. Richard Kohn. He is the Chairman of the Curriculum in Peace, War, and Defense, a Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He most recently co-chaired the important research effort to examine and assess the gap between the United States military and the American society.
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Also with us is Robert B. Killebrew, who is a retired United States Colonel and infantry officer who, among his active duty assignments, was Deputy Director of the Army After Next Project. Mr. Killebrew also worked as a consultant to various armed services projects centered on future war, national security strategies, missile and space defense, and power projection.
I might also add that he is a graduate of the Citadel, a 1965 graduate which in my mind fully qualifies him for about any project that the world could imagine.
Mr. KILLEBREW. The school concurs.
Mr. BUYER. Outside of north Georgia, perhaps.
I understand that all of you have one joint written statement. Without objection that statement will be entered into the record.
[The prepared statement of Drs. Hillen, Moskos, Kohn and Mr. Killebrew can be found in the Appendix.]
Mr. BUYER. Dr. Hillen, if you would begin with your opening remarks.
STATEMENT OF DR. JOHN HILLEN OF THE NATIONAL SECURITY STUDY GROUP
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Dr. HILLEN. Thank you, Mr. Chairman and members of the subcommittee. I want to thank you once again for taking the time and having the foresight to explore the long-range issues that are under consideration here today. I would like to single out in particular the support of Mr. Skelton for our entire enterprise which we hope will pay big dividends for national security planning down the road.
I want to take a brief opportunity to explain our approach and our purpose in this study before turning to my colleagues for further comments on their particular areas of expertise.
As you know, Federal advisory commissions come and go in Washington. More than just a few are oriented towards national security planning for the future. Our Commission is very different in several respects, including the one that brings us here today.
So far as we know, our Commission is the only recent effort to include a study of who we will be as a nation in its exploration of the future national security environment. This is a critical difference. Too often national security planners treat only those events and trends happening off our shores or track scientific and technological developments because they can be quantified or tabulated. Very rarely do national security planners turn to look at the United States, its national cohesion, levels of public support, and civil military relations issues that are sometimes harder to measure and analyze.
It is most often assumed that all is well here, that the domestic scene is a constant and can be taken for granted. Surely the U.S. will be a stable and cohesive country, the public will support fairly well considered foreign ventures, and the military will be standing tall, ready and confident to serve in line with its Constitutional duties.
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We have been fortunate throughout most of our history that this is usually the case. It is, however, by no means assured for the future. In our report we chart the trends and outline the implications of the demographic, social, technological, economic, and political trends that might shape our country, who we are and who we will be in 2025.
While we outline some concerns, the Commission had a relatively optimistic prognosis for the health and stability of the country in general. We do have, however, some unease about trends affecting national security. It is those issues we will put before you today.
For almost all of our country's history, we have had but two dominant civil military traditions. Up until World War II, our Nation relied on a militia-based force that expanded in times of war and then returned to civilian life. Since the onset of that war, we have supported a large standing military, first conscript and now all-volunteer, that existed in the face of an imminent threat. Neither of those models appear to fit our current epoch or the future. Quite simply, we are going into uncharted waters.
Some have suggested we return to the models of the past and others have proposed that we invent a national security strategy to fit our current structure rather than the other way around. Neither approach is realistic, and the strains of continuing to do business the way we are doing it today are starting to show.
The challenge that this Commission will take up in further study, and one that we hope the subcommittee will as well, is to figure anew the way in which we fit our military personnel policies to a new strategy in a different America that will emerge over the next 25 years.
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You are today confronted with a series of problems in military personnel policies that are a good indication of the sorts of issues that will animate civil-military relations in the future: recruiting and retention, the growing gap in experience and understanding between the military and society, and the role the public support in America's willingness to serve and sacrifice. My colleagues and I will reflect on these questions as we feel they may impact on our national security strategy over the next quarter century. After our initial statements I hope we can engage in a dialogue that not only answers your questions but gives us some guidance on how we can make our further work in this area useful to your subcommittee.
Thank you. I will be followed by Dr. Moskos.
Mr. BUYER. Doctor.
STATEMENT OF DR. CHARLES MOSKOS OF THE NATIONAL SECURITY STUDY GROUP
Dr. MOSKOS. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Chairman, as John Hillen has also remarked, you have hit the nail right on the head on how are we going to address national security issues for the coming century. Of course, one of the central issues is what kind of armed forces are we going to have.
My specialties have largely dealt with recruitment and retention, among other issues. I would just say a few words about that. I want to make the point that the Commission's recommendations are not yet final in any form, and some of the remarks that I make may turn out not to be in final recommendations of the Commission.
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The basic issue, as I see it, is that recruitment problems are becoming more severe even though the force is smaller. From year to year we are seeing increasing problems in recruitment and to some degree in retention as well.
One of the outstanding features of our contemporary all-volunteer force is about one-third of our entering recruits do not complete their initial enlistments. We have an attrition rate of approximately 35 percent, varying somewhat from service to service. It is particularly high among our women recruits. So we do have a kind of short enlistment, only sort of volunteering out rather than completing one's assigned term of service. I fear that we may be seeing the beginning of a rationalization of lowering quality, that if we can't get enough recruits we will lower the quality and make excuses for doing so. The issue is usually do we take high school dropouts or not or restrict ourselves to people at least with a high school diploma.
Another issue is that, when you look at recruitment, one size doesn't fit all. Each of the services has unique capabilities and needs, varying degrees of technology, varying needs for shorter or longer term service.
The Marine Corps has had the fewest recruitment problems compared to the other three services. We also have a retention problem. Part of this, I think, is attributable to the way the pay scales have been arranged with the advent of the all-volunteer force. For example, an E–8, a senior master sergeant, in Army terminology, used to make seven times the compensation of a private. Today, that same E–8 makes three times the compensation of a private. The jump between E–4 and E–5, which is between that of a junior enlisted person to a Non-Commissioned Officer (NCO) status, is now an insignificant $110 a month.
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As we look toward retention, we have to look at the Non commissioned Officer (NCO), corps. To sort of put it broadly, I think in a way we have overpaid recruits and underpaid sergeants.
Another issue also is that our forces—contrary to the general American pattern, there is a gap. Our junior enlisted force is becoming increasingly married. At the level of E–4, for example, proportionally there are as many E-4 married as there are first lieutenants today. This is somewhat of an anomaly because in the United States society as a whole people are getting married later and later. It is about 28 for a male and about 25 for a female, according to census data. In the military, it is approximately 3 years younger for either sex.
I would also argue that we have to consider giving an all-volunteer framework the need for reintroducing for our 20th century national security issue some form of citizen soldier. The militia of old won't be the draft of old, but I don't think that it can be the all-volunteer force of present, either.
Options should be allowed for shorter enlistments to complement the longer enlistments. Shorter enlistments should be geared towards college students, 18 months or 15 months, 3 or 4 months of training, reemphasis of on-the-job training. On-the-Job Training (OJT), used to be an expression in the military that has now dropped out of circulation. These people could be single, would look forward to an overseas assignment, and then return to a Reserve obligation, which also faces recruitment problems as well.
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Finally, just to make one note here. We graduate in the United States 1.2 million bachelor degrees each year. If you could recruit 1 or 2 percent of those for a citizen soldier option, you would solve some recruitment problems. But recruiters like to recruit themselves. The recruiting establishment wants to recruit professional people, and they do recruit professional people. But in order to enhance that professionalism, I think we have to think of reintroducing a citizen soldier motto as well.
Thank you.
Mr. BUYER. Dr. Kohn.
STATEMENT OF DR. RICHARD H. KOHN OF THE NATIONAL SECURITY STUDY GROUP
Dr. KOHN. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, for this opportunity to speak with you today and especially my thanks to Congressman Skelton for his kind remarks. I am honored to appear before the subcommittee as a member of the National Security Study Group.
Among the assumptions underlying the report ''New World Coming'' is that the security of a nation depends not only on its human and material resources but on the ability of the state to translate those into military power and apply that power in ways appropriate to defend the country's existence, territory, values, and interests. Therefore we believe it essential to consider some of the domestic factors that relate to national security.
My focus is on the relationship of the military to society. Civil-military relations are critical to national defense. If the armed forces diverge in attitude or understanding beyond what is expected of the military profession in a democratic society, have less contact, grow less interested in or knowledgeable about each other, the consequences could be significant. Each could lose confidence in the other. Recruiting could be damaged. Military effectiveness could be harmed. The resources devoted to national defense could decline below what is adequate. Civil-military cooperation could deteriorate, with impact upon the ability of the United States to use military forces to maintain the peace or support American foreign policy.
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Therefore, the subcommittee might want in the coming years to monitor these areas and subjects, among others: the social, ethnic, racial, gender and geographical diversity of our armed forces, Reserve as well as active duty; the quality as well as quantity of our recruits and those who make military service their career; the education and training of our forces and, in particular, the officer corps; the broader issues of career development pertaining to the officer corps, including assignment, promotion, and retirement policies; the quality and quantity of contact between the military and society.
I bring these areas to your attention not only because of their intrinsic importance to national defense but because our current military institutions and policies are deeply rooted in the past and the, quote, new world coming, unquote, already differs fundamentally from our history. For the first time in a history going back to the first English settlements on the Atlantic coast of North America in the late 1500s, Americans face no great or overriding external menace, military or political, to their independence or existence or even to their system of political, economic, and social values. For the first time since the 1920s, the United States is at peace with no nation posing a demonstrable threat to our population and homeland. Yet also for the first time in its history the United States has decided to base its defense in peacetime on a large standing military establishment of active duty and Reserve forces, rather than on the strategy of mobilizing the citizenry and converting civil industry to war production when the danger materializes.
Thus your subcommittee's work is, paradoxically, more important now than it has ever been, even at the height of the Soviet threat when the exigencies of that struggle were so obvious. Wars are won more by people than by weapons, even in the most high-tech of circumstances and, above all else, by leadership. The recruitment, education, training, and development of our military leadership deserves your most careful attention.
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Thank you, Mr. Chairman and members of the Subcommittee.
Mr. BUYER. Thank you.
Mr. BUYER. Mr. Killebrew.
STATEMENT OF ROBERT KILLEBREW OF THE NATIONAL SECURITY STUDY GROUP
Mr. KILLEBREW. Mr. Chairman, members, thank you for having us here today. I will keep my remarks brief, but I will introduce by just making two comments.
One is, my field of expertise is military strategy and not personnel. I couldn't pretend to have the competence of the three gentlemen to my right. So I will try to frame my remarks in the context of future military strategy and what personnel issues do to that strategy.
Second, just parenthetically, I served a tour as a captain in Army recruiting in the 1970s. And I couldn't sign up more to what Dr. Moskos said about recruiters tend to recruit more people like them. The quality of our recruits has gone up because the quality of our recruiters have gone up. But if we could take that step into the college ranks and junior colleges, that will take some other incentive besides just raising objectives to the recruiters who have experience in that regard.
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My first concern is that our forces today are probably too small for the jobs they are being given to do. It seems to me that that is one of the fundamental issues involving personnel at this time, both retention and recruitment. I don't find that the result of any particular Administration strategy but simply the fact that the world is a lot more complex than we thought it was going to be when we started taking the force down in the early 1990s. For the period of time covered by the Commission's report, the world is going to grow even more complex.
In my opinion, the size of our armed forces in some regards is going to have to be judiciously increased, and I stress ''judiciously.'' How we manage to do that at the same time confronting the recruitment and personnel policies that we are talking about here today is a major issue to me and seems to be fundamental to any consideration of future national security. In the short term, recruiting and retention shortfalls can be made up to some extent by fully funding recruiting budgets and by better pay; but in my opinion those are short-term expedients.
As a nation's memory of the citizen soldier continues to recede, it seems to me that we have to find some third way to encourage military service to the country. I think that we all agree that the draft in any form is not liable to be a feature in the future landscape, but I think my colleagues would agree that the methods we have been using so far for the long term, even if successful, threaten to sunder the bond between the citizen soldier if we think that is a model worth keeping and the armed services. I think this is a model worth keeping, and we should think of it in that regard.
That solution is probably not going to come from the services themselves. I believe it is incorrect to think that the services can take major bold initiatives of a societal nature to reconnect or somehow rebuild the bond of the citizen soldier of the country in military service.
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The services are presently undergoing their own transitions to the 21st century. I heard Mr. Thornberry yesterday at the Fletcher Conference talk about that, and I thought, ''You were right on, sir, in the things that you said.''
Although the experience is at times painful for the services, major studies like the one conducted this year by the Center for International Studies affirm that sound military values and dedication to duty continue to characterize the services today. It is the thrust of our study and I take it the thrust of this hearing that those values and traditions continue to activate the services in the future.
It is an inescapable fact that warfare is changing rapidly and the battlefields on which our 21st century soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines will operate will be more technologically challenging than they are today. But in my opinion and I think in my colleagues' opinion the most significant change will be human, not technological. Post-modern warfare is pushing and should push more decisions and more responsibility further down the chain of command than previously and will require more maturity initiatives at lower levels even as the tempo of operation speeds up.
I know within the services, not necessarily within our committee now, we are finding a need for more and more maturity at more and more junior ranks. And the model of the 18-year-old high school graduate enlistee may not be precisely what the services will need in another 10 to 15 years.
I might add this trend reflects the decentralization and devolution of information age businesses and organizations everywhere around the world, at least the ones that survive. I think that the services are doing what they can to adapt to that, in some ways more successfully than others.
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So the more traditional bureaucratic structures, both civilian and military, multiple layers of command, rigid hierarchies, vertical communication channels just don't work effectively in the information age in the military any more than in business. The services face the challenge of opening up to new technologies and developing initiative of their soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines while at the same time maintaining the discipline and cohesion so necessary to successful military operations. This is not especially a new challenge, and some elite units in the service are at this level already. But changing entire institutions will be difficult, and I am not sure the services themselves can completely find the answers. Your support for that is going to be invaluable.
Finally, a short excursion on the subject of homeland security. My research indicates that while we face many new and serious challenges, we are not so unprepared or short on resources as some might think. With the exception of missile defense, for example, I see no compelling reason in my research for the Commission to think there should be any large-scale involvement of regular military forces in homeland defense, although I certainly see reorganizations of other existing agencies of government in that regard. More imaginative work with regard to Executive Branch and Congressional initiatives and interagency relationships would markedly increase our abilities to defend our homeland. The chief obstacles I have found so far seem to be bureaucratic inertia and indifference.
Thank you for this opportunity to make a statement. I look forward to your questions.
Mr. BUYER. I thank the gentleman. Your input here is extremely important.
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The personnel subcommittee, not only do we deal with those personnel work issues within the military, but when you bring up issues of recruiting and retention, the more that we know and understand about the people of our own country, the reason they serve, the reason they stay, it helps us. We also make those force structure decisions about the size of our force. So, Mr. Killebrew, your contribution here is extremely important, and that is why you are part of the panel and why you are here today.
We are going—we wanted this hearing to be a very good exchange between us and you. I wanted to be able to start with the big picture and understanding as we then funnel it toward our bill in the next several years. So let me throw out some general trend lines that sort of—that concern me. And they may concern some others.
Take, for example, what is happening to our country and our industries here over the last 20 years. We have had this strong advocacy towards free trade, to opening up many different trade routes around the world. We have gone to the North American Free Trade Agreement. We have gone to the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). It has impacts upon our relationships with other nations. It has fostered the President's engagement policies. I am not saying I am for or against, but I am laying out some realities here.
I supported GATT. I supported the North American Free Trade Agreement. But when you talk, Mr. Killebrew, you mention about national strategies and that we don't seem to have as a national strategy a mobilizing industry or mobilizing citizens. Even here in Congress it didn't appear to support selective service. There are some stunning trend things here.
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We will have debates on the House floor about the protection of the steel industry. We have lost a diminishing maritime fleet. We have an earthquake in Taiwan that sends a hiccup into the computer industry because of its reliance upon computer chips. Have we as a Nation placed such emphasis upon our own increasing—''greed'' is such a strong word—but our own desire to increase the quality of life of our own country through our business ties and contacts that we are losing touch here that in case of dire needs and threats to mobilize industries they are not here? If we continue this trend we become more of a service nation instead of an industrial-based nation, that we may be forecasting problems in the future. I just throw that out as a thought. Mr. Killebrew.
Mr. KILLEBREW. I think as a viable part of any way of thinking about future national security you have to break your concerns into component pieces. We are well past the point except in time of a major war where we can address national strategy as a coherent whole sort of like we did in World War II. Certainly the protection of the American industrial base as it relates to national defense is an issue that in my opinion hasn't received quite enough attention. This report will take it on.
But the trend, particularly in the European Union, to consolidate defense industries and the impulse of some of our industries to migrate overseas in search of other markets is something that we should regard as separate from allowing other industries that have perhaps less defense implications to trade freely.
Dr. Hamre spoke yesterday at some length about the need to understand the military industrial partnership in national defense. I certainly second that. I think that is worth far more serious attention than we are giving today. Certainly Lockheed Martin is not like McDonalds. We need in some way in our policies, both in the Department of Defense and with the Congress, to make those distinctions and have the appropriate legislation involved.
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In regards to other kinds of defense industries that are becoming much more critical, and I refer to the software industry and the migration of electronic technology overseas and that kind of thing, that is a different kind of animal, and I am not sure that either the Department or the Congress or the industry itself yet knows how to regulate that to the extent that we should.
As you probably know, some of our own defense programs are written overseas and filtered through Microsoft and sold to us here in the United States. This committee's work is not in technology, and certainly my expertise is not in technology, but I know that is an area that we must pay serious attention to soon, particularly as it regards homeland security and the defense of our technological base here. I can talk more about that if you like.
Mr. BUYER. I just wanted to know if you concur with my thoughts.
Mr. KILLEBREW. I do.
Mr. BUYER. Mr. Thornberry.
Mr. THORNBERRY. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I just want to say, first, that I appreciate this hearing and the work of this panel because I think these are the kinds of questions and work that we do too little of in Congress. We worry so much about what is right in front of us that we don't spend nearly enough time thinking out ahead.
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Let me see if you agree or disagree with this, that in the future we are going to have to have better educated, better trained, more highly trained, as you say more mature, at least in the sense of judgment, people in the military than we have ever had. In part because technology is growing and you have to have smarter people to work all of this stuff. In part because we are asking them to do very difficult missions like peacekeeping where you meet somebody on the road and you have to exercise judgment about whether you are threatened or not. And if you exercise the wrong kind of judgment you could have a major sort of international incident.
So do you agree or disagree that the need for highly educated, highly trained, mature judgment is going to increase in the future?
Dr. HILLEN. Mr. Thornberry, not only do I agree, but you have hit on the principle, the dilemma that is going to animate recruiting over the next 25 years. We need the best people. Not only for the reasons that are going to be a high technology force, they are going to have to be adept at accommodating that technology, but, as you said, in Kosovo right now there are 22-year-old American kids who are the de facto mayors of towns and governors of provinces, and they are doing an incredible job. They need a degree of geopolitical sophistication at a very young age that we have never required of our military before.
There are several layers, as you noted, to that. How are we going to get the best people when we are competing at the same time in the military against a thriving, vigorous, entrepreneurial American economy that can offer extraordinary benefits and, for the most part, represents a country that is—I will state this—fat, smart, and happy, which is what we think America will be over the next 25 years, and we are happy about that. But how is the military going to recruit in this environment to get the best people?
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I do think that Charlie Moskos has hinted at some of the steps that we need to think about taking, which is going to a different base, moving away from only recruiting the new high school graduate with no other options as the principal component of our force. We are going to need to be very creative, as creative as industry has been over the past 10 to 15 years to fuel its own revolution in high-tech business affairs.
Dr. MOSKOS. Mr. Thornberry, I think you put your fingers on a core issue. I would make the distinction between highly educated and highly trained. It is for the military to train people in military skills, but highly educated people can enter the military. Indeed, many of those may know more about high-tech stuff coming into the services as a junior recruit than some of the professional corps because of what they have learned in their higher education.
I might add about peacekeeping—I have been to Somalia, Haiti, and Bosnia and others, but I was also in Vietnam. Peacekeeping was a lot easier in Vietnam. Everybody makes the story about how complex. It is complex, but war is worse.
I might add here there is something about the diversity aspect which Dick Kohn did not mention. In Somalia, the American behavior toward the local Somalis was far superior to that of any other country, including the western countries like Belgium, Italy, and Canada. If you ask any Somali cab driver in Washington, by the way, which country do they like best—it was obviously a mixed adventure, there but we argue on that based on our research with Laura Miller that one of the reasons that we were better—and I don't think that it was a matter of more professional because most of those other people had been in the service at least as long as America—we were the only mixed-race, mixed-gender force in Somalia. That had an impact on the treatment of the locals unlike the other countries which are all one color and all men.
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So there are some aspects in peacekeeping in which diversity helps. How that helps in combat cohesion is another kind of a question that we want to look at.
But talking to John Hillen's point, two out of every three high school graduates today goes directly on to higher education. Not that they all graduate, but it is not the economy, stupid, I would say here, it is college. If you have only one third of the population not going on to higher education and of that one third a significant fraction are unqualified for military service for a variety of reasons, to focus one's recruiting goals on that shrinking element seems to me in the long term self-defeating. So we have to think what does help.
I might add when I talk to the advertisers who make these advertising contracts and all of that, why don't you talk to your own children or your children's friends and see why they are not joining rather than talking only to recruits?
One of the recent ad campaigns in the Army, by the way, has a bunch of six guys in battle regalia falling out of the back of a C–130, and you don't see the chute opening. This is the most off-putting advertisement I could think of, whether you are a college graduate or high school dropout.
My research—this has to be done more systemically, mine is much more anecdotal—is the biggest turnoff for a college student about joining the service is the long enlistment. Four years for a college person is a lifetime. If you talk about a year and a half and 2 years, then you are talking about a different set of parameters.
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One other final point here. In terms of educational benefits for our military service, we have now created in the United States a GI Bill without the GI. We have spent $17 billion a year giving Federal aid and loan subsidies to college students not to serve their country. I think it would be very advisable to think that all Federal aid to college students, with proper exceptions, should be linked to a term of civilian or military service. You get more not serving your country than going into the military in certain cases. Let's put this kind of educational benefit, link it to a form of national youth service.
In 1949, the peak year of the World War II GI Bill, we spent 1 percent of the gross national product on the GI Bill. That is about $80 billion in today's terminology. We all look upon that as an investment well made, and I think that is the principal issue we turn to in the 21st century, as we did in earlier times.
Dr. KOHN. Mr. Thornberry, I agree with my colleagues in most respects. Let me just say a word about the Officer Corps. I think there has always been in the last few years a division in military thinking between whether you want more high-tech young officers or more broadly educated officers, particularly in the high-tech services of the Air Force and the Navy. And the kinds of issues that John and Charlie and Bob are talking about calls for judgment in not just a technogeek background. Furthermore, we need to retain these officers for their careers, and we need to draw them from a wider base.
Our research has shown that over the last 25 years an increasing percentage of the Officer Corps is coming from the academies. While they provide great opportunities for young Americans, there are many young Americans who do not want to spend their college years in the military environment and then have the obligation afterwards.
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And, finally, there are the issues of lateral entry. The military profession really hews to an 18th century model of officership. That is, that you come in at the bottom and work your way up to the top. And with lateral entry at the midranks for a particular expertise and we make some provision for medical and legal officers, but we don't make any provision for high technology or information systems people who might want to come in at the midlevels and so on. So I think those are things to consider.
Dr. MOSKOS. Just a footnote on what Dick Kohn said, I have Army captains study under me at Northwestern who are going up to West Point to become faculty members. My question is, if you had 5 minutes with the chief, what would you tell them? One of them said to me, very interestingly enough, that I would say every battalion ought to have a computer whiz to help out the junior officers and the sergeant who spent hours trying to figure out that stuff.
Mr. THORNBERRY. I think you raise lots of points. I would like to talk about more mandatory national service of some sort and whether people join the military for pay and benefits. This subcommittee has had a lot of debate over the past year about how much pay and benefits and other factors play a role, but both of you said something earlier, that recruiters like to recruit themselves. And maybe that is good, but maybe that limits us in exactly the way that you are talking about.
You used the term, I don't know, computer techno—whatever, geeks. Maybe some of those people don't show the kinds of leadership qualities we traditionally reward in the military, but maybe we need them more than we ever have. And we have got to look for ways to get them and keep them. That includes not just recruiting but promotion and so forth.
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Dr. KOHN. This is not a thought original with me, Mr. Thornberry, but someone pointed out that perhaps what we need are some Reserve and National Guard units in Silicone Valley that would offer to us some of these people who have kind of different behavior patterns and, in fact, have very high responsibilities when they are very young, which again the military personnel system finds difficulty in accommodating, and having them come in for a year or two.
If we could train a lawyer or a doctor in basic military courtesy and behaviors in a few weeks, we might do that for those people and have them serve a term and then come back out. It might be helpful, and perhaps they don't have to serve in uniform. Perhaps they could serve as civilians attached. It is very clear that in recent military contingencies that we have had contractors out in the field with uniformed forces and so you get a blurring of civilian and military lines.
Mr. BUYER. Mr. Skelton.
Mr. SKELTON. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I appreciate you allowing me to sit in with you today.
Dr. Kohn, let me think out loud with you for a moment. I am concerned with this thing we call the gap between military America and civilian America. I am not sure exactly where the thought originated, but I am convinced that it is a real phenomena that we have.
Maybe Tom Ricks of The Wall Street Journal in his book, Making the Corps, about the Marine Corps recruits might have been the first one to give that term popular understanding. If that problem is fixed, a lot of the other problems go away.
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Dr. Kohn, you mentioned or made reference to the 1920s which historians said—and you do refer to as the Roaring '20s, prior to the Wall Street crash and the Depression that followed thereon. I came upon a speech given by Major George C. Marshall in 1923 to an education group here in town where he talked about the doing and undoing of things military by Americans. Now, remember this is after what we now call the First World War. It was after the Great War. America at that time had a habit of building up during a conflict and immediately drawing down after the conflict. He also stated in that speech that the Army at that moment was 125,000 in size and that it would have gone down to 75,000 in size had Congress stayed in session a bit longer.
It was rather interesting to note that America before World War II, thanks to the greatest generation, as Tom Brokaw calls it, won a miraculous war, a miraculous victory in that war. And we did. Of course, the core of that was the George C. Marshalls of the day.
My question to you is a comparison. This is probably a good final examination question for you, Doctor. Would you be kind enough to explain similarities, if any, and the differences, if any, between the 1923 era and the 1999 era?
Dr. MOSKOS. That sounds like an essay exam.
Mr. SKELTON. Exactly.
Dr. KOHN. That might be a Ph.D. general examination rather than a course, sir.
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I think there are some parallels and also some differences. Like most historians, I tend to see both sides of the problem. The parallels are this sense that we are the greatest democracy in the world and that we are looking forward into an era of, quite likely, peace and that there is no major peer competitor or threat on the horizon for the United States. We are in a very prosperous situation. The health of our society is good and, as far as we can see, things look well.
But a very large difference is the United States' feelings about its role in the world. The United States had just rejected its membership in the League of Nations and was not engaging itself politically, although it was economically, in the world system at the time. And near the end of the year, as you remember, we signed on to the Kellogg-Briand Pact which outlawed war as a form of international behavior. And so those differences translate to the 1920s.
I think we are now a much more diverse country. In 1924, we passed a historic exclusion of immigration and closed our doors after 50 years of a wide opening of our doors. And today we are in an era of wide-open doors although immigration is an issue again. But, most importantly, the United States now, it seems to me, recognizes its role and its responsibilities in the world, and it also recognizes the value of military power and the value of the existence of military power for the purposes of either deterrence or, as Secretary of the Navy Danzig said recently, after one of our scholarly meetings of ''dissuasion,'' and also the value of the very careful application of military power to stabilize and keep the peace.
We are still in an era in which many of our foreign obligations hold over from the Cold War. That is, the withdrawal of the United States from the Middle East, from Central Europe, from Northeast Asia would be destabilizing. And thus we are really burdened with obligations that we might not have taken on ourselves had it not been for the Cold War struggle. And yet our military policies are fundamentally different, as they have to be, because, as the experts tell me, the issue is speed. The issue is the complexity of modern warfare. We have to have standing forces and Reserve forces so highly trained, so highly technologically levered and so capable of being projected overseas quickly in order to damp down or prevent the problem.
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But, as the chairman mentioned, we have no provision or very little provision, at least in our thinking, much less in our bureaucratic preparations, for the sustainability of American military power over time if we have to go to the population beyond the 2.8 million Americans in uniform, Reserve and active duty, if we have to turn to the industry and say we need these high-tech weapons, and we need them quickly.
So one of my concerns is, while we can see parallels and we can emphasize differences, some of those old military policies that served this Nation well all the way back to the beginning of our colonial history may still have relevance just because we cannot predict the future, and I think we historians believe that, in the end, the one thing that we are sure about is that we will be surprised.
Mr. SKELTON. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. BUYER. Mr. Hayes.
Mr. HAYES. In this conversation I, too, appreciate you all being here.
Mr. BUYER. Can you pull your microphone over?
Mr. HAYES. I forgot it.
Is there a need for creating a branch within the military that deals with geopolitical issues that one of you mentioned earlier to attract people who might have political science and civics type interests as opposed to purely military, given the number of missions that we have such as Bosnia and Kosovo?
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Dr. HILLEN. I will let Charlie get in on this, too, Mr. Hayes, because he has some views on that.
We actually do have a branch such as that today. In fact, I serve in it. I am a civil affairs officer in the Reserves. I have got a Ph.D. in the field. I work as a scholar, but three weeks ago I loaded up with a group from the 5th Special Forces because I am special operations qualified, went off, rigged up in parachutes, got on an aircraft, and jumped out in the middle of the night of an MC–130 into the desert in Kuwait with a rock on my back with Green Berets and ran around for two weeks.
I was their geopolitical expert. I was to make contact with civilian authorities in the area under the notion of the exercise and work that set of issues for them while they fought the fight. So we have skills such as that.
What we chose to do in the early 1970s was put 98 percent of those skills in the Reserve forces. As the chairman is well aware, because he has been on top of this for a long time, we are using those Reservists over and over again.
I am in a unit here out of Riverdale, Maryland. An extraordinary unit, extraordinarily qualified people, partners from Hogan & Hartson, people that make a half million dollars a year and come in on the weekends to jump out of airplanes and do this sort of thing. We have Reservists in my unit who have been to Bosnia three times for 6-month tours, and it is starting to disrupt, as you might expect, their family life.
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I would think in the future among the creative solutions we need to look towards is how to get a larger percentage of that expertise which is needed for these sorts of missions into our active force so we are not tapping into the same groups over and over. I think in general we will need to expand that.
I know Charlie has done some original work on how we can recruit more of these types of specialities under a different kind of bargain than the one that I enlisted under.
Dr. MOSKOS. Congressman Hayes, I was focussing more on the enlisted ranks, being an E–4 retired. But the question I think that you are discussing is more for professional officers to have that kind of geopolitical expertise.
There is a group of officers called Foreign Area Officers (FAO), who learn local cultures and languages. Until recently—Bob Killebrew I think should add to this because he is more of an expert on this than I am, but Foreign Area Officers traditionally have had very truncated careers. The fact that you could know Chinese or Swahili might be a handicap rather than an asset in that kind of environment.
There have been recent changes in Army promotion policies to encourage that kind of activity. General Shalikashvili is one of the exceptions. He was a Foreign Area Officer who did, of course, become Chairman of the Joint Chiefs.
I think the silver bullet that I would use to address your question is advanced graduate training for career military officers in good civilian universities where those kinds of subjects can be well covered and there are programs that exist throughout country. Rather than recruiting civilians to go in there temporarily as foreign experts, have professional officers to go and get graduate degrees at schools where these subjects are well taught.
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Dr. KOHN. Mr. Hayes, if I could add just one point, in peacetime, as the military shrinks, promotion seems to favor the operational people in Officer Corps. So I would add and agree with Professor Moskos completely. But, remember, it is not just education and training, but, as he suggested, it is also the ability to have a full career and advance to the level of responsibility that they might need to have.
Mr. KILLEBREW. Mr. Hayes, I will just back up on this. Recent changes in the way the officer manages its Officer Corps are designed, among other things, to identify young officers who want to become area experts early in their career and then track them in that year competitive only with people in that career field up through the rank of colonel.
The Army did this specifically because at the beginning of our drawdown in the late 1980s, we had a real bloodletting among Foreign Area Officers when they were compared to operational specialists. So at least the service I am most familiar with, the Army, is very aware of the need for operational expertise in areas and has taken steps to identify those people, let them self-identify, shelter and protect them, send them off to school, and keep them in areas through a productive career to lieutenant colonel and colonel.
I might mention on a broader scale also that the Army has, through the special operations focus, the area of focus of the special operations group, through the civil affairs officers of who we need more—pardon me, the Army needs more, I am not doing that anywhere—has a considerable well of foreign area expertise.
I was the chief of staff a number of years ago of that expedition to Rwanda. One of the early people that went into Kigali to try to start up a city that essentially had been murdered and was vacant was a civil affairs officer from New Jersey, as I recall, who was really the town manager of a large-sized town. He and other people of his kinds of talent, many of whom are African specialists and all of whom spoke French, as I remember, which is the local language, did a wonderful job in Kigali kick starting that and helping the U.N. sort out that terrible tragedy.
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But the problem is, as John mentioned, this was about his fourth deployment. And as a Lieutenant colonel who was also a town manager, he was beginning to have problems with his elected board that was beginning to say, what are we paying this guy to do? Mr. Skelton likes to use the George Marshall quote, and I have one also from George Marshall who I think typifies the military in its proper role of enabling national strategy. Marshall said in 1947, to mark the change in American policy, he said, ''We have now undertaken to ensure the peace of the world and peace can only be maintained by the strong.''
Marshall to me was not a militarist at all. I hope that you don't think that the people running the armed services are militarists in that sense. But what we are talking about here today, where the foreign area expertise is and all of the other things, are examples of the kind of strength that we have to learn to manage over the long term so that we can remain strong and continue that peace that Marshall talked about in 1947.
Mr. HAYES. One more quick question, Mr. Chairman. In my district, the eighth in North Carolina, I have been just really pleased at the impact of several ROTC units in high school. Is that a potential area for expansion in interest of military careers in your opinion?
Dr. MOSKOS. It has an interesting ambivalent effect. On the surface, you would think Junior ROTC would increase enlistments. What it also does is it improves the quality of the student, which makes them much more likely to go on to college. So the net effect for the country is very positive, but its effect for military recruitment is not clear. Because they do go on to college, where they might have just stopped at high school had they not had Junior ROTC.
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Mr. HAYES. I have found that to be true in talking to one group. They said they loved being involved in ROTC, but it didn't necessarily make them more interested in going into the military as a career. However, it seems like that may expand this pool that we talked about as shrinking as potential, particularly if we look at career possibilities for military service.
Mr. KILLEBREW. Sir, I might just add anecdotally that my wife is a high school teacher and has taught over many school districts including some in North Carolina. We find what Charlie said to be absolutely true. Her comment commonly is, if there is a strong high school ROTC or Air Force ROTC in the high school, the tone of the high school is better.
Mr. HAYES. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. BUYER. Thank you.
Mrs. Tauscher, before I yield to you, I would like to point out part of the purpose of this hearing is for us to think globally. We can get into the minutia, but what I am trying to do is be helpful to all of my colleagues here. We have a great deal of expertise in front of us who are historians and experts who can give us great understanding so we can help forecast what should our policies be in the next 25 years.
So, Dr. Hillen, when you respond by saying we need a larger percentage of civil-military officers on active duty, that may be true, but that is a responsive solution within a particular syllogism which is causing pain at the moment. We are trying to figure out if those are the best policies.
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Your working group has talked about the supportive indifference about particular policies. Is engagement policy the right policy? And if it is the right policy for our country, then, obviously, we have a force structure that doesn't match it. Because if the United States is to be the global guarantor of security it doesn't work.
I will compliment the President for what he did in response to an intercontinental conflict that poses no threat to destabilize the region off Australia. I think what the President did to address that was correct. But that is where we want to be.
Let me now yield to Mrs. Tauscher.
Mrs. TAUSCHER. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I will try to keep my nose above the 35,000—.
Mr. BUYER. An interesting idea.
Mrs. TAUSCHER. Gentlemen, thank you for this hard work. I came from the business sector, and I can't tell you how much I appreciate the opportunity to kind of look at this in a very macro-sense. I think we have a good skeleton here that we now, Mr. Chairman, need to look toward in the next—the second session of the 106th Congress to put some meat on the bones and figure out where exactly these challenges lie.
We are in a pickle. We have very dramatic change in the lifestyles, working lifestyles of the average Americans. It has had a tremendous dilatory impact on our opportunity to protect ourselves.
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On top of that, we have this very complex post Cold War environment that I think, very frankly, is more dangerous to us than the Cold War might ever have been. But we are certainly well armed to have this report, and, hopefully, we will be able to call on you subsequently to crawl into it and get some more information.
I am interested, though, in kind of a side comment, that was made, and now we are going to have a vote. So if—could you tell me what is it about the training and recruitment of women that has created such a dramatic exit in the early years? The numbers for women are, I think, much worse than they are for men.
Dr. MOSKOS. Well, it is interesting. I had it broken down by race because one of my areas of specialty is race relations in the military. Interestingly enough, black women have an attrition rate equivalent to that of males of any race, around 30 to 35 percent, which is high anyway. But white women are in the 55 percent category, much higher than their black sisters. When you ask why is this the case, you get different reasons. Some say there are more opportunities for white women on the outside than there are for black women. Black women, on the other hand, say that white women can't march. I am sort of being facetious there. But that the physical strains and the kind of demeaning conditions that necessarily go with military training are less acceptable to white women than they are to black women.
There is a huge race difference which doesn't exist among white men and black men in terms of attrition. Generally speaking, by the way, blacks do reenlist at a higher rate than their white counterparts. Today in the U.S. Army, for example, there are more black women soldiers than white women soldiers, which is probably unique in any kind of mainstream organization. But there are those race differences.
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I think part of it, it is easier to get out than it used to be when you had a conscription system. I think the attrition rate during the draft was 10 percent versus the approximately 35 percent today. There are different standards getting in and out than there were during conscription. Obviously, there are stricter rules of getting out when you have a draft than when you have a volunteer force. But I think that deserves closer attention as to why there is such a racial disparity as well as the general high attrition rates across all groups. Why white women are much more likely to—almost double—to leave than their black female counterparts is really a hard question to answer.
Mrs. TAUSCHER. If you could just quickly tell me, the citizen soldier paradigm, how do we begin to get our heads wrapped around that? I do think that, as a number of you have said, Dr. Hillen and others, that that is coming out of Mr. Thornberry's questions, this question of about what we do about college, about tying national service potentially with the kinds of grants and aids that we have been giving, how do we make the GI Bill relevant for the 21st century—all of those things. What are the first two things that we need to do, aside from the political issues which we will handle earlier?
Dr. MOSKOS. John will answer quickly. Just to say that I believe that the biggest turnoff for a college student is the long enlistment. Four years is just too long for somebody to think about that. Recruiters want to recruit themselves. I want to recruit myself. I volunteered for the draft after graduating from Princeton in order to get out two summers later so I could go on to graduate school. I didn't want to wait for the draft to catch up with me. It would have put my cycle off of kilter.
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I had a very enjoyable time. I travelled to Europe. I think a lot of single college students would view an opportunity to go abroad not as a disincentive as it is for many current recruits but as a positive thing. If you are really good, I will send you to Bosnia, you know. This is the kind of attraction.
Plus coupling this with generous educational benefits like forgiving student loans and things of that sort. Some number of that will stay in. Ten percent of draftees, for example, made a career out of it. That is not going to be the group. We expect these people to go off to Reserve components, which, by the way, melds quite nicely with going to college and graduate school and things of that sort.
So that is not the only way to recruit people, but it has to be an option. That presently does not exist.
Dr. HILLEN. Let me make one comment as well before turning it over to Professor Kohn. It brings us back to the point the chairman was making. I think one of the things that we can do for the long term is eventually we are going to have to reconcile our foreign policy objectives with the citizen soldier paradigm if we wish as a Nation to keep it.
There are a couple of things we are doing right now as a Nation our Founding Fathers would probably have some concern over. They didn't like large standing military. They didn't like imperial foreign policy. Well, we have got both.
How does that fit with our natural attraction as a mass participatory democracy to the concept of the citizen soldier? I think that we can reconcile those. That really gets into the whole mix of Reserve policies and enlistments and recruitment and retention. If we can reconcile those in some way, I think that would go a long way toward solving future problems.
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Dr. KOHN. Congresswoman, if I could make one recommendation to you that would happen to be in synchronization with that reconciliation would be for this committee to insist on a zero-based review of the entire military personnel system, which was formulated after World War II in response to some of the problems of 1940 and 1941 in mobilization and then shaped in legislation between World War II and the early 1980s exactly on the Cold War paradigm of forces and being able to go fight two and a half wars and then one and a half wars.
There are policies that go from the whole life cycle—I am focused particularly here on the Officer Corps—the whole life cycle of the Officer Corps that need to be rethought. People are not as old as they used to be when they are 55 years old. Military service is equally stressful today as it was in the industrial age, but it is a different kind of stress. We have a series of personnel policies that are predicated on an unlimited supply of highly talented Americans going through our armed services for careers so that we can train them, assign them differently, get breadth to their experiences. We give them as good a postgraduate education as any profession in the country, and then we throw them away in their late 40s and early, mid 50s.
Mrs. TAUSCHER. I agree. That is a very young age, by the way.
Mr. KILLEBREW. If I could, just briefly, from the point of view of our future strategy, three points. One is, Dick has got it exactly right. Men and women are reaching their mental and physical peaks now later than they used to. That is not just because I happen to be approaching it. In the 82nd when I was there, the best people in shape in my battalion were typically people 35 to 40 years old. We can put the 18- and 19-year-olds into the ground.
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The second—.
Mr. BUYER. We have to vote. You will have to hold onto your second and third thoughts.
Mrs. TAUSCHER. Mr. Chairman, I recommend that we take a good look at Dr. Kohn's recommendation on a zero-based study.
Mr. BUYER. Thank you. We will return after a vote on the journal.
[recess.]
Mr. BUYER. The personnel subcommittee will now come back to order.
The chair will now yield to Mr. Taylor for any questions that he may have.
Mr. TAYLOR. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, especially since I am not on your subcommittee. I definitely appreciate it.
Gentlemen, I really do appreciate you being here, and I thought you said some things that I have not heard before and that I always welcome.
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You had mentioned the need to try to diversify the people who join. I certainly agree with that.
One of the things that you did not mention, Dr. Moskos and I were talking informally about it, that it tends to be the folks from the less fortunate. I can now refer to them as Democratic families.
Mr. BUYER. Well—.
Mr. TAYLOR. But I do not say that as an insult, but folks who tend to vote Democratic, you can look around, and it is their kids.
The other thing that I notice is it is the same families over and over. You will see third, fourth, and fifth generation families, and then you will meet another family where no one has ever gone. Again, that is not fair.
You had mentioned the need to try to encourage recent college graduates to join, even if you just get a year of them—which has served the Marines very well having, I believe, something like 60 percent of all of their folks do one tour and move on and go back to civilian life.
Has any thought—and the other thing that perked my interest was for some exceptional people the importance of avoiding the ladder—if someone is an exceptional engineer, computer programmer, whatever, let them start as a Navy captain or a major. Has any thought been given to doing the same thing in the enlisted ranks?
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I am absolutely amazed as I walk through barracks at meeting recent college graduates who are drawing an E–2 salary. It is not the exception anymore. I see it quite often. And then you think of another recent college graduate who is sleeping in another barracks who is drawing second lieutenant pay, and there is a certain unfairness to that. Has any thought been given to when you have an exceptional diesel mechanic, welder, computer programmer, et cetera, who joins the ranks of making them—put them on an expedited course to make E–5, E–6, so that we can start compensating them a little bit better?
I happen to have been fortunate enough. I just caught a seam when I enlisted in 1971. I made E–5 in a year. Not that I am exceptional. I happened to pass the test, and I was in the right place at the right time. It sure made my drill pay a heck of a lot better than those poor guys getting E–2 and E–3 pay. Why not do the same thing if you happen to get, like I said, someone of exceptional capabilities in a skill that the services need?
Dr. MOSKOS. Well, you outrank me. It took me 14 months to make E–4, so you must have been exceptional.
Mr. TAYLOR. No. I hit a seam, that is all.
Dr. MOSKOS. There are enlistment options now. If you are a college graduate you can start off at a higher, like an E–3. Don't hold me to that, but you don't have to begin as an E–1 anymore. That doesn't distinguish the point that you made, with someone with a valuable skill, that just a BA will get you at a higher entry level than a person without that diploma. I think the term of enlistment is important, between being jealous about the ROTC officer who is also a college graduate—.
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Mr. TAYLOR. I don't know if it is jealousy. It is just the fact of one sitting there saying I have the same degree and I am making substantially less money in a world that more money is important.
Dr. MOSKOS. That, I think, goes with the territory. If you want to be an officer for 4 years, fine. If you want to be an enlisted person for 15 months or 2 years, that is the trade-off. That was a trade-off, by the way, for almost all college graduates during the peacetime track that I am a product of.
One reason I did not go to Officer Candidate School (OCS), was because it was 3 years after commission. I said, I will do my 2 years, thank you.
I think there are two different groups here, Congressman Taylor. I am talking about the short-term college type enlistee versus the officer who has gone through an ROTC program or its equivalent.
I might add on your point about Reserves, in my Princeton class of 1956, 750 men, two-thirds of us went into the military. One-half were draftees and one-half were ROTC officers, including people like Neil Rudenstine, the current President of Harvard University. Last year, 1998, Princeton had 11 people into the military. So we have gone from 500 to 11. That is where the class imbalance begins. It very much underlines the point that you made.
Something else you said which is very interesting which I have not heard talked about in recruiting circles, and maybe Bob Killebrew can respond to this, is the skilled blue collar worker rather than the college diploma type. Perhaps the skilled blue collar worker should be the beneficiary of some of that advanced promotion that you were mentioned.
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Mr. TAYLOR. That is why I mentioned the diesel mechanic or welder.
Mr. KILLEBREW. If I could, in terms of long-term security strategy, there is a question in my mind that the American—the rising American youth population would want to serve in organizations where rank and responsibility are so rigidly defined and maintained as they are in today's military. The services from time to time, as you know, just to address your direct question, do offer more rapid promotion to people who enter with certain skills, although, as Charlie pointed out, it is never to the point of making a guy an NCO when he joins immediately.
Within the services and within the Army in particular, the traditional rank, caste system is beginning to fracture. It fractures particularly in the elite units.
I point out a current program that the Army Special Forces (SF), has of taking superior NCOs and turning them into warrant officers and putting them second in command of A teams. The SF has always been famous for blurring the rank between commissioned and enlisted at any rate. But you are beginning to see more and more now, particularly in units where the bonds of leadership are strong enough to permit it, a blurring of the differences between commissioned officers and noncommissioned officers, particularly at the lower levels.
That is a sociological trend caused, first, by increasing professionalism; second, by better-educated NCOs; and I suspect, third, by a general society that is not producing people anymore who are susceptible to discipline by traditional 19th century means.
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Now, it seems to me the implications of that for the services and for this committee are to think about the ways in which discipline and authority could be maintained in the future services with a population as highly technologically qualified and familiar with the information age and accustomed to rapid access to information and authority and how we will maintain traditional military standards and military missions in that kind of environment.
The Air Force is thinking now, for example, about permitting their pilots to serve briefly on active duty, go out and fly for the airlines, and then come back at call. There are other forms of lateral entry that may be worthwhile to think about also.
But certainly, just as happened in the 19th century, as the population changes the military rank system has to start changing, too, or it becomes an outdated anachronism that no one will serve under.
Mr. TAYLOR. If I may, Mr. Chairman, you made a great observation, I think all of you to some point, Dr. Moskos in particular, of pointing out what I think is basic unfairness that some folks are given a free college education the day they graduate, nothing to repay. Other folks are out there earning it as we speak. How do we change that, how do we come up with some new incentives given the fact that—let's face it. You have about 60 members of this committee who I think would vote in a heartbeat to say only those who earned it get it. I don't think that you could find 218 members of Congress who could do the same. And the facts of this place, unless you get 218 votes, nothing happens. So what other incentives are there out there that we could be offering to these recent college graduates or someone with 1 or 2 years of college to encourage them to do one short enlistment and help us through this situation that we have?
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Dr. HILLEN. Congressman, we need to restore the principle of reciprocity and what Charlie was talking about, the GI Bill. We now have got essentially GI Bills in the form of Federal aid to college students and no reciprocity required.
Everybody misses the point of the original GI Bill, which was that service would be compensated in some way by the government. As Charlie mentioned, it is an investment.
The problems twin up nicely, actually. You have a huge majority of American high school students going on to college, more than ever before, at quite a sharp increase in the past 20 years. Yet at the same time we have this huge percentage of American college students all desperately looking for money and finding it through a lot of different means, including Federal loans. And we also need more of them serving in the military and I think under more creative short-term enlistments, as Charlie and others have proposed.
So if you marry these issues up it seems to me that there could be room for study of creative legislation that ties together the support a lot of college students get with some measure of short-term return service to the country, whether it is civilian or military or otherwise. But I think those needs could match together nicely.
Dr. KOHN. Mr. Taylor, maybe I could add that it seems to me as we go into the 21st century that the functions and needs in the military are increasingly blurred between uniformed and nonuniformed. Perhaps one way to make such, if you will, scholarships from national or community service available, and encourage people to go into the military, would be to have a system whereby other forms of nonuniformed service—perhaps for a longer period of time or perhaps under some different circumstances—would also attract youth to national service or even to state and community service. That might, in fact, attract more of your colleagues to support such a program.
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Mr. TAYLOR. Mr. Chairman, last quick one. Looking back on my own experiences, I remember there were times where, if someone came to me and said, ''How about giving us a year?'' I would have done it. There were other times in that same 6 months if they said, ''How about giving us a year?'' ''No, man, I am going to college next week and chase girls,'' or something like that.
Has any thought been given to the dynamics of when you make the pitch to Reservists or Guardsmen as far as trying to get them to give a little extra time on active duty? I was not alone. I can think back to the company that I went through with, and almost all of them would have made the same decisions at the same times had the question been asked at the right time.
Dr. MOSKOS. Mr. Taylor, I hope that you can still chase girls in uniform.
Mr. TAYLOR. It was hard to do at sea back then.
Dr. MOSKOS. Willingly, that they want you to be chasing them.
Mr. ABERCROMBIE. I thought the exact opposite.
Dr. HILLEN. Keep digging.
Mr. ABERCROMBIE. You have to look at the company that you are in.
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Dr. MOSKOS. The point that you raise is one thing that I would underscore on the issue of what point in life do various options seem more attractive or less attractive. I would recommend to the committee—I will make it a flat assertion that all of the hundreds of million dollars that are spent in advertising, in recruiting, people do not talk to college students. I think a project would be—it would not be a very expensive thing—go to some community colleges, historically black colleges, some very selective private universities, half a dozen or something and say—I am going to do that at Northwestern for free, I might add—and ask kids what is it that may or may not be attractive.
Now if you are going to get to somebody in the middle of senior year versus somebody who doesn't have a job or fallen out of a love relationship, there are individual factors that enter into it, but I think that you can make some generalization, particularly the short-term thing. When I talk to college students on various campuses but particularly my own, it is the long enlistment that always is brought up as the biggest disincentive. There are others, too, like I might get killed. But the kids will say that, I don't want to get killed. These are legitimate reasons of having attitudes toward military service.
But we do need, as we have all said, the growing youth population, particularly the growing qualified youth population, are college bound or college students. And that is where you have to look for recruits in a 21st century environment.
Mr. TAYLOR. Thank you, sir. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. BUYER. I wanted to, before I yield to Mr. Kuykendall, Mr. Taylor, my groan—I wanted to define and articulate my groan to your personal comment. It was taken up by the study by Dr. Kohn, and I think it is very relevant.
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As they were looking about the present make-up and influence upon the present day military, in your findings and studies, the digest of your findings and studies, Dr. Kohn, I appreciate your comment. You said that, ''The partisan and ideological gaps found that the military elite level were considerably narrower at the level of accession to the military mass''—military mass defined as the enlisted ranks. ''those entering the enlisted ranks were more partisan Republican than civilians not going to college.''
Then you began to talk about, wait a minute, we have got this trend line here of a shift in the make-up, ideological make-up and partisan, perhaps, make-up of the military becoming those of who are Republicans as opposed to Democrats. And in the Officer Corps it is almost 65 percent of the military elite is Republicans, which I think that trend is not healthy. Now, you would think, as a Republican I would say that is a good thing, but it is not a good thing. If you could speak about what are the influences of such a trend, it would be very helpful to us. That is why I groaned, Mr. Taylor.
Mr. TAYLOR. You groan every time I speak.
Dr. KOHN. Mr. Chairman, our study, which is still in progress—we have got the survey, and we have completed the studies. We are still working it. The apparent inconsistency in those findings has to do with the nature of that study of entry level people by Professor Siegel and his colleagues at the University of Maryland. He was studying mostly enlisted accessions.
Our survey work on the political affiliation and ideological bent, those findings came from studies of the Officer Corps. Some longitudinal studies undertaken by Professor Ole Holsti of Duke University integrated with our own findings of the Triangle Institute for Security Studies (TISS), study.
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I think that my co-principal investigator, Peter Feaver of Duke, and I must admit to being dismayed, not by the press coverage—we were delighted to have the press coverage—but by the prominence given to the partisan issue of all of our findings. When we go to revise that digest of findings as we continue this study, I think what we will do—we won't move it. It is still important. It still perhaps belongs at the top. But I think what we will emphasize is not the growing numbers of Republicans in the Officer Corps. It is the declining numbers of nonpartisan independents or what I would call uninvolved in political thinking on the part of the Officer Corps. That is the change we have seen in the last quarter century.
Mr. BUYER. I don't want to belabor this, but you even noted that those of whom are Democrats in the Officer Corps are less likely to identify themselves as such. That is a little stunning. That is a little disconcerting to all of us.
Dr. KOHN. That is largely anecdotal evidence that we hear from people. Because the Officer Corps is clearly more conservative in its views than the equal cohort of what we call elite civilians and certainly of the mass civilians. So there seems to be an ethos there.
One of the things that we were trying to do is actually get some data on this. These issues have been discussed publicly the last 5 or so years almost completely on an anecdotal basis. We were trying to—I think we succeeded in getting some survey data here. I don't think that we have any—my memory is, I may be wrong, but my memory of the results of the survey is we don't have any survey data of people saying they are unwilling to identify themselves as Democrats. So I would want to stick to that survey findings.
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Mr. BUYER. Thank you.
Mr. Kuykendall.
Mr. KUYKENDALL. I didn't hear all of your opening comments. I have had them related to me. So if I touch upon something that you have done, just bear with me.
One of the things that I have done some work on in my previous life in the state legislature and even as a member of the local board in Selective Service, what I found interesting was that the Federal Government will deny you Federal aid for college if you don't register for Selective Service.
Now, obviously, it was a big deal to the Federal Government because we wanted you to at least voluntarily register before you got a free check from us for college. We made that law change in California, and that was the legislation that I carried. They had an immediate uptake in people sending in their registration.
We are nowhere near drafting anybody. It is not even on the agenda. But it certainly gives the awareness factor. What is does is it raises people's awareness that there is a trade-off, a compensation difference here between you are available in the manpower pool by virtue of registration and in exchange for that you will get some benefit down the road. I think that touches on what you were dealing with.
If I could quote, GI Bill—the GI Bill was for somebody who had served. It isn't for somebody who is getting well compensated necessarily and could get the money without serving just by going to a financial aid program.
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I don't know which of you want to touch on it or if all of you do. I am concerned about do we need to be looking at some form of a draft again in order to maintain a pool of talent that has a certain face to it, that is broad-based in skills, broad-based across our economy, broad-based across our ethnic groups and culture across America to give us a military that maybe better reflects the composition of the Nation they are to defend? Or should I worry about that at all?
From a strategic point of view, that is not a question. Just as long as I have enough bodies, we will deal with whoever they are. This whole question of the draft and how—I would just like—give me some thoughts on that.
Dr. MOSKOS. I am sure that we are all going to respond to that one.
Let me give you different models of how the 2040 or 2050 armed forces might look at it, which will get to the question of conscription. One view is they will be very small, highly technical, a lot of heavy capital equipment. The average soldier will have more firepower than the tank does today. That is one model.
Another is one that Dick Kohn has alluded to and myself, some people call the post modern military, civilian military blurring, women in combat, open gays, civilian contractors doing a lot of work. That is another model.
A third model is no change. Somebody said to me, well, if you look at the 1960s soldier, is he that much different than the contemporary soldier? There are a lot of parallels between a 1960 soldier and today's soldier. The 2040 soldier might not be all that different.
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The fourth one that gets to your question, the citizen soldier, national service type approach. The question of conscription, which I am philosophically in favor of but I realize politically it is not in the offing, if one did have conscription I think the answer would be you would have to have a lot of civilian service options. Even during conscription, of course, we did have conscientious objectors as well, although a smaller number.
The issue there is, can you find enough work that is useful for everybody or just take a smaller number and start from the top of the social ladder? If you had to have a draft, I would say start from the top.
Parenthetically I might note here that Germany is one of the few modern European countries which has maintained conscription—most of them are doing away with it—because 4 out of 10 German men now choose civilian service in which they perform hospital work and things of that sort and driving old people to doctors and delivering services of that sort. They don't want to get rid of the civilian servers in Germany. That is why they keep the draft going. So there are those kind of tasks that could be performed.
There was the Nunn-McCurdy bill which was introduced in 1989 which didn't get out of committee which did argue that all Federal aid to college students should be limited to those that perform a term of service, whether at the community level or state level or Federal level or uniform or civilian.
There was—I did manage to ask that question on a Gallup poll about 3 years ago, and cold. Forty-one percent of the population agrees with that proposition, but 59 percent do not. On the other hand, it has never been articulated as a policy yet. But I think 40 percent of the population think it is a good idea with just a straight question out of the blue shows there is a strong reservoir of support if somebody wanted to make a linkage between some form of service and student aid.
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The other problem that arises with conscription is what about the gender question. Now, of course, only males register for the draft. Thanks to the Solomon amendment, however, we got the universities. If you didn't do the registration, you couldn't get Federal aid for education. The issue of women, which probably wasn't an issue in earlier drafts, that might come up, I think, in the talk of a renewed conscription. But, again, Israel is the only country in the world that drafts women today.
Dr. KOHN. Sir, my concern is to attract the finest American youth to the Officer Corps. We have two programs that do that. One is the service academies, which is basically built on the late 18th century model of military education when there were not many alternatives for a youngster to get education to prepare for a military career.
The other is ROTC, built basically on a model of the mobilization of society, the Morrill Land Grant Act of 1862, and the National Defense Act of 1916.
Maybe it is time to think about how we attract our best youth to not only military service as officers but as career officers. I know this may sound like a radical thought, but it is not so radical and, in fact, some other countries do practice this policy. And that is to do your GI Bill in reverse. Pay for the college before service like an ROTC scholarship except invite American youth to consider financing their college with a national scholarship that they take to a college of their choice no matter what the tuition cost. I am telling you, as we try to attract kids to the University of North Carolina (UNC), versus Duke, North Carolina will choose to go to Duke if they get into both because it costs more so they think they are getting more.
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Mr. HAYES. And they are.
Dr. KOHN. That is an eternal North Carolina question, sir. It might be a question that we could man and woman our Officer Corps with youngsters who come from all sorts of colleges throughout the country and then they could do their professional military training at installations like West Point and Annapolis and Colorado Springs where, in a year, a year and a half, or 2 years they get trained for the military profession. And if while they were accepting the benefits of that college scholarship to anyplace they wished, they were enlisted people in the Reserves, they might find out, in fact, what military service is all about down at the working level, and we might attract our very best people on a merit basis for such a scholarship.
I don't know how much that would cost. I have never investigated it. I have only thought of it.
Mr. KUYKENDALL. It is interesting that you mentioned that. I have a daughter who applied for ROTC scholarships and was given a $60,000 ticket to go to college. I said, be an engineer. She didn't take it. She went to one of the academies. To me, that is almost the program that we have got now. It doesn't require much—probably changing perhaps to do something—.
Dr. KOHN. Sir, it would require a radical change in the nature of our service academies, which have very large and very powerful and very respected and very vocal constituencies. It would mean publicly the end of intercollegiate football at these academies. I do think that it merits thought and research. It might mean the end of ROTC as we know it, ROTC being, in effect, an industrial-age program for mass mobilization. I don't know all of the full ramifications of it. But I think if this really is a new world coming, we need indeed to think about what a new world might look like that is new.
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Mr. KUYKENDALL. Mr. Killebrew, do you have anything?
Mr. KILLEBREW. The direction in warfare clearly is toward smaller, more expert, more long servicing armies. It is not clear to me—and I writhe a little bit when Charlie talks a bit about 1- or 2-year enlistments, because the direction of warfare that we are on now sees the United States relying on very competent long service junior enlisted and NCO corps. But I personally believe, and as we get further into military strategy we will find this, that does not mean that there should not be a large reservoir of military experience in Reserve component capability in the country that sponsors a small regular force.
There are two differences here that we are talking about that should be noted. One is attracting the best kind of people in the active force and the other is retaining people in the active force. They are two entirely different issues.
People are attracted to military service, I believe, by things they understand like personal benefit, profit, college education. They stay because they like the life. We have plenty of college grads in the ranks of the Army today because they like the life they find, camaraderie or whatever, to be the reason they stay.
It seems to me that, as a component of national military strategy, that what we should be thinking about is attracting large numbers of young men and women to service, retaining relatively few, and returning the ones who are not retained to the Reserve components or other forms of vetern Reserve so that if we ever do miss a lick and need the large Army again we have those high-quality people who, if you follow the kinds of ideas that Dick has had, will not only be capable of military service but also community leaders and people who are involved in their communities, which we don't have today.
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Mr. KUYKENDALL. So you would be saying that you would have more Reserve units, perhaps more people in an inactive Reserve status in order to just maintain a self-identified pool of people who have gotten some beginning service obligation behind them and now are in a pool of talent and use that as your kind of surge capacity if you ever needed it again?
Mr. KILLEBREW. That is correct, but not only as a surge capacity. When we start talking about the subject of homeland defense, you begin to find various forms of activities, Reserves and National Guard that have—that continue to be mobilizing to support the active force but also discharging other duties as law enforcement agents, crisis management agents, forces for the governors to handle their internal problems. I don't find it incompatible at all with democracy to have a small—a relatively small—you have heard my words about how it would have to be a little bigger, but in terms of population and Gross Domestic Product (GDP), a relatively small professional standing Army and a large Reserve force. To me, that is totally compatible with the way that I see warfare shaping up in the next 20 or 30 years.
Mr. BUYER. Thank you, Mr. Kuykendall.
Mr. Abercrombie.
Mr. ABERCROMBIE. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
It is serendipitous, Mr. Killebrew, that you finished up with that last statement because that is what my question was going to address, that area. They are very provocative statements. We can't go through it all in this hearing. I hope that we will stay in close touch.
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It is important in a democracy that is burgeoning in so many different ways that, as the United States is, you go into the 21st century burgeoning in a way that—let me just state a premise. In some respects, we are going more to de Tocqueville than we ever have before. I don't want to be facetious by saying the more things change the more they stay the same. But the observations, the characterlogical observations of de Tocqueville have been—I hope everybody agrees, at least in general—that those observations that de Tocqueville made about what motivates the characterlogical base of the United States probably still applies and would apply in the 21st century, up to and including mass influx of immigrants coming in and becoming Americans, self-defined.
On the other hand, it is just as important as it was when de Tocqueville was making his observations that we don't have then, with respect to the military side of this democracy, the emergence of a praetorian guard or praetorian guard mentality.
Now, I also understand very clearly just from my own sociology background that it is painful to academicians to have something seized on out of a paper that is put forward in a broad context and something saying military becomes Republican or something like that. It gets seized on. I know one of the reasons that upsets the chairman is the Republicans are having a tough time figuring out what Republican is right now.
Mr. BUYER. No, we don't.
Mr. TALENT. Does the gentleman mean a Republican with a large R or small R?
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Mr. ABERCROMBIE. These definitions evolve. If you will grant me the—for conversation's sake the idea of the praetorian guard mentality. In other words, we happy few, we are, in fact, the embodiment of the values of the society. And you couple that with the military capacity, and it is something that we don't want to see evolved to any great degree.
So my thought on that was—is that, go back to the second amendment. My own view of the second amendment is a little different than how some people define it. I actually thought the plain meaning of English was at stake here that there will—shall be a well-regulated militia. I presume that the well-regulated militia in today's context means the National Guard and Reserves and perhaps auxiliary forces of some kind in our police forces.
So my feeling is that if we have a small standing Armed Forces—small meaning in today's context a million, million and a half, two million. It could be as many as two million people. It doesn't sound small arithmetically, but if you have between 270 and 300 million people, that is not necessarily a large number. And given the technological components that have been mentioned by the panel as well, those numbers constitute an enormous firepower and range and flexibility, et cetera.
So, in that context, shouldn't the direction we be moving in emphasize Guard and Reserve, that well-regulated militia, as the foundation of a 21st century continental democracy's military base, military foundation, and that we encourage, perhaps by some of the observations you have made today about bringing people in, up and down, not just college educated but all across the board, and that we emphasize, rather than active duty service more or less up front, the moving into Guard and Reserves in combination with an active duty element, and that we encourage a very—try to figure out ways to encourage an expansion or at least the sustaining of a vigorous, broad-based Guard and Reserve program to supplement—or not even to supplement but to coordinate with an active duty military that for all intents and purposes would remain relatively static in terms of numbers.
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Dr. HILLEN. Mr. Abercrombie, let me take a shot at that.
One of the cochairs of our Commission, a former Senator, wrote a book expressing similar thoughts. I think the tension that he was trying to solve in his book and in your question was, as Colonel Killebrew suggested, the way of future warfare militates towards small professional armies. The spirit of a mass participatory democracy and civic virtue military towards a militia model, the citizen soldier model—and certainly the spirit that animates our country to this day. Our foreign policy and our national security strategy militate towards a large force, maybe mostly active, some Reserve, but on call and ready to deploy at any time.
We have on any given day, including today, forces in over 120 countries around the world. We are engaged. You have seen the strains on this committee that that is inducing. I don't know how we are going to solve those tensions. That is what I meant earlier in my earlier comments, how to reconcile our foreign policy with the way in which we build a future military to be successful in its core task while at the same time recognizing it needs to reflect the core values of our democracy. That is something that we are getting towards and Colonel Killebrew is hinting at it.
In further work we will be doing in the Commission, we will actually come forward, and hopefully in a year's time, to you with recommendations for what we might actually do, is to somehow reconcile in creative ways these tensions. But right now we are obviously not there. As Professor Kohn has hinted, we are still sort of lurching along with a model from post World War II that is not satisfying really any of those three imperatives that are driving us.
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Mr. ABERCROMBIE. Let me just amplify a little bit. I will try not to take more time in this. Maybe you can think about it. It doesn't even require an answer.
In the 1960s, when my contemporaries and those a little bit younger than I were dealing with the National Guard, it was strictly—I say strictly. Obviously, there are exceptions. You put the bell curve up there. Most of them went in so they could stay out of Vietnam. They were hoping they weren't going to Vietnam and get killed.
It was no news to everybody that most of the people dying in Vietnam were teenagers. It was a teenaged war. They were mostly poor, they were mostly kids that didn't have a chance to get into college or some way to maneuver around, deal with it.
I don't say this in any pejorative way or anything else. People didn't think that way. This is all of that revisionist crap that has come up about what they were doing during the war. Everybody was hoping they weren't going to get killed. People were volunteering and so forth hoping they weren't going to get killed. They were just trying to deal with it.
The point is that the psychology of the time was a lot different towards the National Guard. The people in the National Guard now that I see and observe and talk to have an entirely different attitude. Those in the Guard and Reserve are there for entirely different reasons than they were at that point. So that is the kind that of thing that I am driving at. There is an atmosphere which I don't think is transitory. I think it is reflective of the period of time that we are in and likely to experience, absent the draft, for a significant period of time. That is why I bring it up.
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Mr. KILLEBREW. We are coming to the heart, Congressman, of what we said when we made our initial presentation about finding some way to reinvigorate, if we think it is worthwhile, the idea of the citizen soldier in a 21st century society. Our regular soldiers will always be regular soldiers, and the demand for their specialized talents would always be there. But if we believe that a participatory democracy requires some sort of military obligation as well, and I say that deliberately, and not just a service obligation—emptying bedpans is not the same as being a soldier—then we have to come to some way of allowing the mass, both male and female, in a democracy to participate in military service as well as discharge real duties.
Mr. ABERCROMBIE. Would you think that the Guard and Reserve experience might be a way to do that, to achieve this citizen soldier aspect absent a draft? There isn't going to be a draft, so we have to figure out what to do now. There isn't going to be a draft in the foreseeable future. So what we need to do is discuss realistically what we do now.
My thought is—and I will conclude with this. My thought is that what we need to do then is define a citizen soldier as I think it was meant to be defined essentially in the first place, which is the well-regulated militia transposed into the 21st century.
Mr. KILLEBREW. I think as long as we think of it in terms of a militia or Reserve organization, and not in terms of the organization and missions of today's National Guard, but something that can transcend into a new state, I believe that we are on the mark.
Mr. ABERCROMBIE. Thank you very much.
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Dr. KOHN. Mr. Abercrombie, if I could just make a couple of comments.
In the late 18th century when that was written into the Constitution and considered by the framers and thei