Posting # 15. The Story of Free Will in the US Military

The story:  In addition to telling ourselves that people join the US military out of patriotism, the story also says that in joining one can learn valuable skills and a trade, become more mature, and have an exciting adventure that includes travel to foreign destinations.  While enlisted people, the story goes, join to have this short-term set of experiences and imagine themselves moving on to other employment after an enlistment period or two, people who join as commissioned or warrant officers may imagine a lifelong career for themselves.  “Be All You Can Be,” exhorts the Army’s most recent ad campaign.  What’s to lose, the story asks?

My take on the story: Certainly, some servicepeople have this happy experience, and they get a great benefits package to boot. Having lived my entire life under the military umbrella, though, I can understand why some people, after experiencing military life, would want to leave.  After all, though all indications were that I had a promising military career ahead of me, I was one of the vast majority who fulfill their obligation but depart the military before they are eligible for retirement at twenty years.  According to the US Army, currently only “30 percent of officers and ten percent of enlisted Soldiers retire.”  That so few do this—when the retirement benefits are extraordinary, as I outlined in Posting #12—is remarkable.  What is it about working in the military that prevents most enlistees and officers from making a career of the profession of arms?

Two recent surveys offer some reasons.  In the annual 2021 Department of the Army Career Engagement Survey of currently enlisted and officers, for instance, most report they would consider leaving the Army for “family concerns,” things like the “Effects of deployments on my family/personal relationships,” the “Impact of Army life on my significant other’s career plans/goals,” the “Impact of Army life on family plans for children,” “The degree of stability/predictability of Army life,” and the “Impact of military service on my family’s well-being.” These “family concerns” certainly impacted my childhood as an “Army brat” and as an active-duty officer.  Frequent moves especially characterized my young life and my father’s “significant other”—my mother—had no evident career goals or plans to put on hold.  As an officer’s wife, she was expected and seemed willing to support his career, run the household (on a strict budget determined by my father), and accept without complaint the instability of military life.  “Family concerns,” too, influenced my staying in the Army.  It was difficult for me to follow a career in the Army with a husband who was not in the military and whose professional aspirations had to be delayed as long as we lived together.

Another recent survey, one of junior officers who were planning to or already had left the military, also cited “family concerns.” Notably, however, more than “family concerns,” the officers underscored professional reasons for leaving: “lack of autonomy/control over my present and future,” “better job prospects outside the Army,” “lack of fulfillment,” and “poor leadership.”  These “professional concerns” most definitely impacted my young adulthood as an ROTC cadet and active-duty Army officer. My job as an intelligence analyst was fulfilling, I didn’t perceive my leaders as lacking, and it wasn’t evident that I would have better job prospects in the civilian world.  But it was lack of free will, of choice, of autonomy—allegedly the most treasured of American values—that primarily led me to exit the Army, and the promise of autonomy led me to become a professor of American war culture. 

Here's my experience of having no autonomy:

Frequent Moves. My childhood as an “Army brat” was most characterized by frequent moves, some after only a matter of months.  Two of the moves were because my father was leaving for or returning from the war in Viet Nam.  By the time I left home for college at 18, my family had moved to thirteen different locations and I had attended ten different schools (including three high schools).  As I understood it, the Army paid for each of our moves, not a measly amount, given the large size of my family and all of our belongings.  Frequent moves were my family’s normal, so I grew up learning how to be the new kid in school, how to acclimate to a new neighborhood, and how to make new friends.  What I didn’t learn was how to stay in one place or how to sustain friendships.  In the nearly fifty years since leaving my original family home at 18, I have moved an additional 19 times and with each move, I have left behind friends.

Making a career: Up or out.  What I didn’t know as a child about those many, many moves was that they were essential to my father’s career prospects in the Army, as the military had (and has) an “up or out” promotion system in place.  One either was promoted to a higher rank or one was forced out of the military.  (This is currently a function of the 1980 law, the Defense Officer Personnel Management Act.)  Not only were men (yes, only males until 2016) in combat-arms like Infantry and Armor and Field Artillery and Combat Aviation favored for promotion (as opposed to non-combat-arms specialties like Logistics and Military Intelligence), they also were expected to have been trained for and occupied command positions. So men went wherever they were commanded to go because it would improve their career prospects.  Families were just along for the ride. 

Once my combat-arms father cleared the hurdle of being promoted to Major (O4), he was sent to the Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, where our family spent a year and he studied how to be a commander.  After he subsequently had been a commander in Viet Nam and had been promoted to Lieutenant Colonel (O5), he was sent to the Army War College in Carlisle, where our family spent a year while he completed a master’s degree in strategic studies.  Subsequently, he was stationed at the Pentagon and ultimately promoted to Colonel (O6).  He was never promoted to Brigadier General (07), something he told me privately was “political,” and he retired well before the required age of 64 but more than the twenty required for a pension.  (I never learned what politics prevented his promotion since he died before I could ask, but it’s not unheard of.  Currently, a whistleblower about the Pentagon’s response to the January 6, 2021 insurrection is claiming he was not promoted to Brigadier General as a political decision.)

Following four years of ROTC in college, my assignment to Military Intelligence, and training in Fort Huachuca, Arizona, I was on active-duty and stationed in what was then West Germany.  During that period, I was what seemed promoted automatically from Second Lieutenant to First Lieutenant and then to Captain. In that short time of 4 years, I held two positions, neither of which I asked for or were command positions, nor was I in the combat arms as a Military Intelligence officer.  The first position was one designated for a junior officer, so I was appropriately trained and experienced for being an All-Source intelligence analyst.  I spent most of my work hours in a vault studying highly classified intelligence reports about East Germans and Soviet forces, trying to make sense of how the various pieces of information fit together to create a narrative about their operations.  Still, I was just beginning to understand my work and develop some expertise after a year and a half when I was told by my commander that I had to move to another position in another locale.  Despite my protestations, I had no choice: the other position was empty and needed to be filled.  Though the position meant more intelligence analysis, it was intended for a far more experienced Major (O4), not the relatively inexperienced First Lieutenant (O2) that I was, so I immediately felt out of my depth and out of control.    

What I have learned since then is that during my active-duty time, the US Army was declining in size but the number of positions hadn’t been proportionately reduced.  That explains to me why I was commanded to fill a position for which I was not ready.  Promotions now are harder to come by, because the military is much smaller, the United States is not at war and so there are fewer command positions needing to be filled by officers, and positions have been reduced in number.  Still, if you are not promoted after a specific Time in Grade—like three years—you will be ordered to leave, whether you are an officer or an enlisted person. It’s likely that their being pushed out can partly explain why 70% of officers and 90% of enlisted people leave the Army before retirement.         

Frequent Deployments to War. During the 1960s and early 1970s, command positions were most available in the Vietnam War, so my father was ordered to spend two 12-month tours in Viet Nam.  His first was in 1966-1967 and his second was in 1969-1970.  The first deployment was when I was 9, so I didn’t have much sense of the perilous journey he was about to be forced to go on.  All I knew was that he was gone, which wasn’t too much of a change, that my mother was having another baby (the eighth of us), and that we were living in my mother’s hometown, where her mother, her sister, and my cousins lived.

For my father’s second deployment, I was 12 and much more aware of what his going to war meant.  More importantly, we lived in a military community, so many of my friends’ fathers were taking part in the Vietnam War, and one father, who was an Air Force fighter pilot, had been shot down and was missing.  (His name is on the Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial Wall in DC as MIA.) When I learned my father had been ordered to war again, I broke down in tears several times, certain that he as a combat helicopter pilot would be killed. Only much later did I learn that during the Vietnam War my father had been shot down and was on the ground and under fire for about nine hours before being rescued. The family also learned much later, after he had died of a brain tumor, that he had transported, sat on barrels of, and flown his helicopter through clouds of Agent Orange.  The war had killed him after all.  

Technically, I was not deployed to war, unless you consider the Cold War’s immense US military presence in Western Europe “war.” Certainly, many Europeans objected to the Americanization of so many locales, with nearly half a million American servicepeople and their families living in West Germany.  Since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, however, the number of American troops deployed to Europe hovers at around 70K.  Even the unit I belonged to, the 3d Armored Division, was inactivated as a consequence of the fall, suggesting, then, that a war had ended.

But since 9/11/01 and the beginnings of US wars, first in Afghanistan (October 7, 2001) and then in Iraq (March 20, 2003), a smaller US military has found its few members being ordered to war repeatedly. This probably accounts for why so few officers and enlisted persons want to remain professional warriors.  A 2019 Pew Research Center study—and so, 8 years after the Iraq War’s conclusion but 2 years before the Afghanistan War ended—found the following about those who had left the military: 

·      Post-9/11 veterans are much more likely to have been deployed than those who served in earlier eras.

·      Roughly half of post-9/11 veterans (49%) have had combat experience, compared with 24% of veterans who served only before 9/11.

·      Veterans who served as noncommissioned officers (NCOs) (74%) are more likely than those who were commissioned officers (58%) or enlisted servicemembers (54%) to have been deployed at least once. 

·      Fully 68% of post-9/11 veterans with combat experience say their deployments helped them financially, compared with 30% of pre-9/11 combat veterans. But they are also more likely to say their deployments negatively impacted their mental health. 

·      About six-in-ten commissioned officers (61%) and noncommissioned officers (57%) say their deployments positively impacted their chances of advancement in the military, compared with 46% of enlisted servicemembers.    

·      Post-9/11 veterans are also more likely than pre-9/11 veterans to say they have suffered from PTS (36% vs 14%). 

·      Fully 56% of combat veterans say their experiences in combat changed their priorities about what is important in their lives. (emphasis added)

These data confirm what my father experienced: that being ordered to war advantages one both financially and professionally.  A price is paid, though, by the mental damage of combat, let alone the cost to the family of its unstable life. 

Spousal employment.  The 2021 Department of the Army Career Engagement Survey cited above concludes that it is “family concerns” that would motivate enlisted and officer members to leave the military.  “Impact of Army life on my significant other’s career plans/goals” is one of those primary concerns. From my “Army brat” viewpoint before women were part of the Regular Forces, the primary role of officers’ wives was to unquestioningly support their husbands’ careers (despite the instability of constant moves), to raise disciplined children who would obey all rules without hesitation, and to instruct children to answer the one landline in the house with, for instance, “Boyle residence, Brenda speaking.”

My parents were of a generation that condoned this guidance for Army wives from Nancy Shea’s The Army Wife, where she instructs them:

that homemaking was a full-time job, that caring for children was the job for which each wife was designed, and that the wife should not work outside the home if this would interfere with her home responsibilities. Officers’ wives, in particular, were exhorted to join clubs with other officers’ wives and host frequent, formal and informal social functions such as coffee, tea, and brunch, each with its own specific dress code, invitation style, and seating arrangement. Perhaps most important, they were enjoined to raise children befitting an officer, who would “stand when adults enter the room” and “say ‘Yes sir’ and ‘No sir’, to their fathers, and other men.”…Army wives were also encouraged to support their husbands—and the army—more directly. By creating a sense of community and boosting morale, military officials claimed, wives would themselves “contribute to military goals” and aid “in national defense and assistance to allies [by volunteering their services].” …In the late 1970s and early 1980s, army wives launched a grassroots movement, insisting that the military better provide for their families—and, crucially, without mandating their unpaid labor.

My mother, who did not go to college, did not work outside of the home until just before I left for college.  Then, it was part-time.  She dutifully raised all nine of us, usually as a single parent practicing unpaid labor, and served her role as an Army wife well.

But I was of the generation that demanded women be treated differently and that there be more professional parity in heterosexual marriages.  Thus, as an active-duty officer whose new spouse was not in the military, I had to consider his professional aspirations in addition to my own. With a master’s degree, he had gainful employment, both as a Government Service worker and as a teacher in the American-sponsored college programs in Germany.  It is hard to know whether the graduate degree made those opportunities possible, but they certainly were not guaranteed as a function of my being in the military. His real hope, though, was to complete a PhD, and when he was accepted into a PhD program at Oxford University, it seemed a no-brainer that I leave the Army.  I had fulfilled my obligations and had become increasingly dissatisfied with the lack of choice/autonomy/free will that working in the military meant, so it was not a hard decision to make.

In the intervening decades, it has become accepted—and maybe assumed—that both partners in a marriage work for pay.  According to a 2020 Bureau of Labor Statistics analysis of 2015-2017 data, about 58% of American households have dual incomes.  As I point out in Posting #6, the current administration has recognized the need to consider the professional desires of military spouses as a way to recruit and retain servicemembers.  Through Executive Order, the Biden Administration has attempted to “advance economic opportunity to military spouses,” with changes such as the Military Spouse Licensing Relief Act, preferring military spouses over other candidates for federal jobs, spouses being recruited by corporations via the Military Spouse Employment Partnership, and spouses being able to compete for fellowships at companies via the Military Spouse Career Accelerator Pilot.  While these changes don’t guarantee employment for military spouses, at least they acknowledge some of the societal changes that impact the “family concerns” that might lead to servicemembers leaving the military. (But they apparently require a marriage certificate.)

Better employment outside of the military.  According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, except for the huge spike in unemployment during 2020, the first year of the Covid-19 Pandemic, the unemployment rate has been steadily decreasing since 2010.  This situation makes it even harder for the US military to recruit and retain its members when potential recruits and current servicepeople can find civilian employment without having to endure the inherent instability and lack of autonomy of military life.

For enlisted people, top jobs for those without a college degree are positions like security guard, truck driver, vehicle mechanic, or construction.  Other civilian employment options include firefighter, law enforcement, emergency medical technicians, or information technology jobs. 

If pay is a bigger concern than distaste for military life, for enlisted people the lure of working for a Private Military Contractor, which I discussed in Posting #10, is probably irresistible.  Though it might be exaggerating, the “European Bodyguard and Security Service Association” website claims that “private military companies rehire retired military personnel to do the exact jobs the military trained them to do, but for $400,000 a year. Their military billet is eliminated and replaced with a civilian one. The same guy sits in the same seat doing mostly the same job.”

Officers, who already have college degrees and management experience, are primed to become Information Technology Chief Information Officers or Capture Managers who oversee company bids for government funding.  A talent agency that promotes itself as operated by former military officers touts a starting salary of $138K for junior officers and 29% more if the junior officer graduated from a service academy. (The maximum annual pay for an O3, or Captain, is $95K.  Don’t forget, though, all the tax-free benefits enumerated in Posting #12.)  As I pointed out in Posting #12, West Point promotes the advantage that having been a USMA cadet and junior officer brings: “After their time serving in the Army, officers are often considered prime candidates for management roles and executive positions for top companies such as JP Morgan Chase & Co., Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and many more.”

Apparently, despite the benefits I enumerated in Posting #12, there still aren’t enough financial reasons for officers to stay in the military, especially those who graduated from the three main US service academies.  In fact, in a 2019 Senate Armed Services Committee report, it was found that “Recent studies suggest service academy graduates have lower junior officer retention rates than other officer commissioning sources.” Despite the increasingly hefty cost to taxpayers of paying for cadets to attend the academies, according to the report the service obligation of academy graduates has not changed since 1996: 5 years on active-duty, 3 years on Inactive Reserve. (My obligation for a four-year Army ROTC scholarship, which did not cover room and board, was 4 years on active-duty and 2 years on Inactive Reserve.)  Moreover, in an echo of my reason for leaving the military—little choice/free will/autonomy—West Point cadets reported in 2016 that they were discouraged by the “rigid military career tracks” that the “up or out” system forces on them.  No wonder they leave.

So what?

The story of free will in the military asks Americans, what have you got to lose? One might immediately answer, my life, even though mortality rates have dropped precipitously since World War II.  Still, it doesn’t surprise me that servicepeople resist thinking of themselves as a number, a potential combat casualty statistic.  As John Kerry testified to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in April 1971, “how do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam?”

As I’ve pointed out in my most recent posts (#12 and #13), although patriotism doesn’t appear to be a dominant motivator for joining or staying, financial and social advantages would seem to be: tax-free benefits, college paid for in many cases, healthcare, a pension after twenty years of service, and perhaps most valuable and prestigious of all, the social honorific of “troop” or “veteran.” 

But the stresses on personal autonomy that I’ve outlined in this post—frequent moves, an “up or out” promotion system, repeated deployments to war, the insecurity of spousal employment and career-building, and the prospect of civilian employment that offers more free will/choice/autonomy (or at least their semblance)—suggest there is, in fact, more to lose than just one’s life.  These stresses I’ve enumerated are only compounded by the highest divorce rate of any American career field, rising rates of suicide, the increasing risk of sexual assault and sexual harassment by fellow servicepeople, and the disproportionately high rates of prostate and breast cancers among service members, potentially related to “cumulative military exposures to risk factors such as ionizing radiation, polychlorinated biphenyls, burn pits, dust storms, metals, other chemicals, as well as alcohol and tobacco use.”

Knowing what I know now, I think I could have gone far in the Army—to Colonel and maybe General.  I was highly capable at the analytical work, the fitness regime, and understanding the culture.  But I am very, very happy with my decision to leave because I gained much more autonomy in my professional and personal life by doing so; I had much more choice over the shape of my life.  I might, in fact, be a perfect example of why people leave: though I was stewed in military culture from birth and primed to succeed, it was not worth having to endure a lack of choice/free will/autonomy.

What’s to lose?  A lot.