Patriotism Is No Longer Enough

Getting--and keeping--top people will be costly, says a TIME panel

To review and analyze the mounting problems with the all-volunteer force, TIME held a seminar that brought together five of the nation's experts on the subject: Morris Janowitz, 60, Distinguished Service Professor of Sociology at the University of Chicago and one of the nation's few academics to study the military as a distinct group within society; Melvin Laird, 57, who as Secretary of Defense from 1969 to 1973 led the fight for the all-volunteer force, and is now the Washington-based senior counsellor on national and international affairs for the Reader's Digest; Senator Sam Nunn, 41, the Georgia Democrat who is chairman of the Committee on Armed Services' Subcommittee on Manpower and Personnel and has become widely respected as one of Capitol Hill's most articulate defense analysts; Lieutenant General Glenn Otis, 51, the Army's Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations and Plans and recent commanding officer of the 1st Armored Division; and Robert Pirie Jr., 46, former commander of the nuclear submarine Skipjack, National Security Council aide during the Nixon Administration and now Assistant Secretary of Defense for Manpower, Reserve Affairs and Logistics. Excerpts from their discussions:

QUALITY OF THE TROOPS

Laird: While it is true that in the first three months of 1980 the Pentagon came very close to its particular recruiting goals, the quality of people that it took is not the quality that is needed in the 1980s.

Nunn: If you talk to the chief petty officers and sergeants and ask them about quality, they will tell you very quickly, Mel, that the quality deterioration is so severe that their ability to discipline, their ability to train, are greatly eroded.

Janowitz: We want more recruits from the higher intelligence categories. We cannot run the Army without a significant number of them, if for no other reason than because some 40% of our officer corps is recruited from enlisted men. We want people who are smart, not just average. Moreover, those in the higher aptitude categories make those in the lower perform better.

Pirie: The Army is getting fewer high school graduates than last year. But it is not at all clear that the people whom we are getting are not of adequate aptitude. So far they have done acceptably well.

Nunn: Although it wasn't picked up by the media, our military commanders both in NATO and in Korea have testified this year on the record before the Subcommittee on Manpower and Personnel that they are noticing a definite inability of an increasing number of their people to retain their training. This means that you must retrain often, which has a huge impact on costs and readiness. We are losing the confidence of our allies. Talk to some West Germans off the record and ask them what they think of the U.S. ability to fight a war. It's very, very low.

Otis: I'm within seven months of coming from a field command in West Germany and dealing with our soldiers on a day-to-day basis. They are of good quality. They can do the job with the equipment that they've got. They're trainable. For our units in Europe, the training is more demanding than it was five years ago, and the soldiers are responding every bit as well and in some cases better. Though the equipment we are fielding is getting very complicated, we are building in a simple means of operating and repairing it. The new XM1 tank is a complicated piece of machinery. But to the soldier using it, all that complicated stuff is hidden. Instead, he's got panels with a couple of dials. If you train a gunner on an XM1 tank and compare the amount of hours that takes with gunner training on an M48 tank two generations ago, the difference dramatically favors the XM1.

Pirie: On another subject, the reserve problems are really quite serious. For the first five to seven years of the all-volunteer force, everybody paid attention to the active force and nobody paid attention to the reserves. But over the past few years, we have made training options for getting into the reserves more attractive, switching them over to summers so youngsters don't have to give up their jobs to train. As a result of these and other things, including re-enlistment bonuses, the numbers that have declined have turned around.

KEEPING THE NONCOMS

Laird: The major manpower problem that we face is that those with the highest aptitude who are in their second, third and fourth terms of service are not staying in the military. And some of the poor performers are staying on.

Nunn: One important factor is the pay ratio between the sergeants and the people at the beginning levels. It used to be that a top sergeant made two or three times as much as the lowest ranks. Now he makes only about 50% or 60% more. That has eroded the rewards for a military career and the sense of authority of your sergeants and chief petty officers.

Otis: There are two basic aspects in getting people to stay beyond their first term in the service.

One of them is pay, the other is job satisfaction. This satisfaction has to do with a whole gamut of things, such as where the person works, the working conditions, how much he can look forward to in terms of a stable kind of life. A major problem is that we have a very turbulent Army today because of U.S. overseas commitments. Personnel are constantly being transferred. In comparison, the West German army is tremendously stable. Its troops are all stationed on their own soil and in units closest to where they live.

Let me give an example of poor job satisfaction. If you go to Europe, you will find some of our soldiers trained to operate a Vulcan Air Defense System. And they know how to do that. Their job is to train every day to be ready to go to war with that Vulcan. But if you do not have a place for them to train with their Vulcans, then motivation goes right downhill. And in much of Europe, we don't have training areas available.

Nunn: The authority of the sergeants and chief petty officers is being eroded. Officers today are charged with getting people to reenlist. Because of this, the officers are not backing up their top noncoms when they crack down on the troops --because the crackdowns hurt re-enlistment rates. When you talk to sergeants out there, the lack of discipline and the lack of being backed up when they try to instill discipline are things they bring up repeatedly.

Laird: The solution to the manpower problem is largely in the compensation area. Until you solve that you are not going to get the kind of people that this nation needs for a proper military deterrent. The military should compete for qualified, well-trained personnel. There is something wrong with a society like ours that is unwilling to pay adequate salaries for personnel in the military services.

Nunn: Theoretically, there is some pay level at which you can get enough quality people for the services. But what level is that? No one really seems to know. And then, could we afford it as a nation? Never in our history have we tried to man our military force at private enterprise rates from recruits up.

Laird: To say that we can't afford to pay these young people enough so that they will continue a military career just doesn't make sense to me. The Soviet Union is going ahead with the most massive military buildup in the history of mankind. We are devoting only 5.2% of our gross national product to defense. The Soviet Union on an effort basis is devoting a minimum of 15.8%. There is no reason that the American people cannot afford to pay for a military deterrent.

Pirie: If we spent the proportion of the G.N.P. on the military that we did in World War II, our defense budget would be $450 billion rather than the $131 billion that it is today.

Nunn: Spending 7% or 8% of the G.N.P. on defense instead of 5% is theoretically possible, but you are talking about reordering the priorities of this nation in a way that has not been done short of war. I don't know whether or not this country, politically, can do this.

Laird: I think that the recruitment and re-enlistment bonuses today are inadequate. I would pay larger bonuses to get more people into the combat forces. If I had an extra $5 billion in the budget, I would put it all into incentive bonuses for the people we need--doctors, flyers, combat troops. I would put the money right where it is needed. You would do that in business, wouldn't you?

Nunn: I agree. Pay where you need to pay, not across the board. But then you run into the historic issue of military equity in which soldiers of similar rank traditionally get just about similar pay.

Laird: When you combine equity with bonuses you could run into an intolerable fiscal burden. But it doesn't bother me to have a particular doctor, if you need him, being paid more than the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. For instance, an Army doctor with 20 years of service, under the new bill before Congress, is going to be paid $71,900; that is $9,200 more than is being paid to David Jones, the Chairman.

Pirie: You never had the military run that way before. And what would pay differentials like that do to the chain of command over a period of time? That's a question I can't answer.

Janowitz: I am in favor of the West German system where military service is the first step in a two-step public service career. After eight to twelve years, you can leave the military and have priority for civil service jobs.

EDUCATION INCENTIVES

Nunn. You need quality people and you will not obtain them with pay alone. You need something that motivates people who want to further their education. A big impediment here is that the civilian student loan programs are so generous now for the ordinary person regardless of whether or not they ever served in the military. It is hard for a military education incentive to compete.

Laird: Right now they are begging students to use federal money at the University of Wisconsin. I was just out there and it is a shocking situation.

Pirie: If the educators are waving money at the kids, it's not hard to see why the recruiters have so many problems. How can you expect the recruiters to succeed?

Nunn: Whatever you do with military education benefits will be affected by the generosity of the existing civilian educational programs.

Laird: Sam, you are never going to change the scholarship and loan programs that you have now over in the Department of Education.

Janowitz: You have to cut them down and give priority in educational benefits to those who have served in the military.

Laird: I guarantee that you can't compete with the colleges and universities, the whole educational establishment. It is never going to allow you to cut back on those particular programs.

PRIDE OF SERVICE

Janowitz: In addition to compensation, prestige and political appreciation are important to the troops. Every unit in the U.S. ought to be visited twice a year by Congressmen and Senators who should talk to the troops on a person-to-person basis. It does a lot to increase the military's self-esteem and sense of worth.

Laird: Maybe we have lost the respect that we should have for the military. I think that the lack of appreciation and respect do indeed have some effect on how the military view their salaries compared with those of civilians in similar jobs.

Janowitz: The cost-benefit analysis people have weakened the mystique that the military had as a special calling rather than just an ordinary job. We have pushed the heroic aspect of the military up against a wall.

REGISTRATION AND THE DRAFT

Laird: The present voluntary system would work a lot better if we hadn't done away with registration of 18-year-olds for possible military service. No one who recommended the all-volunteer force ever anticipated doing away with registration.

Pirie: Eliminating registration was a poor way to save a few million dollars.

Laird: Doing away with registration caused a significant change in attitudes toward the military. Every young person, just by the act of registering at age 18, was made aware of the fact that at some future time he might be called upon. This gave him pause to consider joining the military. You may not think that is significant, but I do. It is also important to maintain and have registration in working order in case of mobilization.

Otis: I go 100% with any force that is obtained first by volunteers and only thereafter by some sort of conscription. You also need registration to speed up mobilization. I agree wholeheartedly with Mr. Laird; registration confronts youth with their national commitment.

Janowitz: Most people on campus believe that registration has nothing to do with all this. They just think that it is another one of the President's covers for bringing back conscription.

Nunn: I don't think that you can return to a two-or three-year compulsory obligation during peacetime. I don't think that you can sell a program that disrupts lives for two to three years.

Pirie: To go back to a partial conscript system leads to unending pain. It won't solve any of the problems that we are talking about. I don't think that it will solve the problem of [disproportionate racial] representation or the problem of numbers. I don't think there is any way that you can conscript for quality. So you would go through a wrenching political upheaval to yield a manpower system that would have as many or more problems than the present one has. This is a way of saying that I prefer the present system. I think that we can fix it up and make it work in the long run.

Nunn: But you could draft for the reserves and have people serve three to six months; maybe spread it over two years by training three months per year so not to interrupt lives too much in peacetime.

Laird: I have no problem with drafting into the reserves; I have no problem with registration. But the only current solution available to you--and I hate to get back to this--is to use some money. Do you think that you could get the draft for the reserves through Congress?

Nunn: Absolutely not, unless the President comes out for it, unless there is a bipartisan coalition supporting it. I think that the form of draft used would be a lottery. The draft used at the beginning of the Viet Nam War was inequitable, but the lottery system that replaced it in later years was not that bad.

Laird: It was a very good draft, a fair draft. We put in the lottery system and did away with the college deferments.

Otis: Whenever there was a draft, it brought pressures to bear on enlistments in a very positive way. We first took all the enlistments that we could. Then the net shortage was submitted to the Selective Service system to be filled.

MINORITY PROBLEMS

Nunn: We will have a real problem, if we go to war, with the combat fatalities that inevitably are going to occur disproportionately in some groups. We are going to have a massive social problem be cause while the armed forces are viewed as a good job opportunity in peacetime, in wartime that becomes an opportunity for death on the battlefield. You are going to have an understandable cry from minorities as well as those who don't believe that people lower on the economic ladder should bear a disproportionate amount of wartime deaths and casualties. I share this concern.

Janowitz: A free and democratic society has to have a representative military. That's been our tradition. Black politicians agree with me privately, though they can't say it publicly. They would like to see the military be representative of society as a whole, but they don't know how to get such an Army.

Pirie: It is a matter of concern that the color-blind way that we manage induction into the armed forces, when coupled with the pressures of unemployment and various other factors, lead to disproportionate minority representation in some of our units--essentially combat units. But a draft would not fix that. What kind of draft would be needed? One which would result in bringing white, middle-class people into the armed forces, who do not want to be there, while at the same time turning away blacks from the inner city who want and can do jobs in the military?

Nunn: The question is not really who is overrepresented in the military but rather who is not serving in the military. I think that the middle class and upper middle class of America also have a duty to defend this country. When you depend more and more on lower economic groups to enlist in the services, you are setting the stage for a gradual deterioration of patriotism.

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