Posting #3: The story of the dropping birthrate, recruiting, and “Be All You Can Be”

There is great hand-wringing in the United States about what is called the “demographic cliff.”  Since the sharp drop in the US birth rate starting in 1976, a further decline after the 2007 Great Recession, and another significant drop in the pandemic years, the number of young Americans has declined precipitously.  There are any number of theories about why this drop has happened, from a deliberate attempt to reduce the number of humans inhabiting the planet, to women’s options to prevent or stop pregnancies and therefore bear fewer or no children, to the incapacities of many men and boys in school, employment, fertility, and family life.  But the fact is that there has been a long, slow drop in the American birth rate. ( See here, here, and here.)

While some of this change is positive, multiple American institutions are adversely affected by the decline. Conspiratorial thinking along the lines of the Great Replacement theory says this reduction is a deliberate attempt to replace whites with people of color.  Still, jobs go unfilled, good-paying working-class jobs disappear, Social Security taxes and state revenues go uncollected, and schools are closed for lack of students.    

In higher education, a world that I know pretty well, the drop means that competition among the 4000-or-so degree-granting institutions has heated up, as the colleges and universities must all recruit from a diminishing pool of potential students—and the students’ dollars that make the higher ed businesses viable.  At the same time, while the cost of college has risen exponentially and students have taken on debt at unprecedented rates, rates that rarely are rewarded with high-paying jobs making it possible to dig out very soon from the burden of those loans, young people have become discouraged about the value of and need for a college degree in today’s work world. The combination of the lowering birth rate and growing reluctance to attend college means fraught times for higher education.  

Because of the effects of the demographic cliff in higher ed, one might think that joining the volunteer military would be a viable option to going to college.  According to recruiting ads, not only can volunteers develop salable skills in the military, they also can earn college tuition benefits from the GI Bill.  The ads tout being part of a team, becoming one’s best self, and enacting what I have called elsewhere “warrior patriotism,” or militaristic gestures of love for country.  Subsidized housing, clothing, healthcare, alcohol, and food are provided as part of the job; income and other allowances can be tax-exempt; a pension, rare now in the United States, is available after 20 years of service; and one can be a “hero” in the public eye.  Anecdotal evidence cites young people acquiring the discipline and a work ethic they didn’t have before joining the military.  Travel is a very real prospect.  Who wouldn’t want to join this community?

But the US military also shows signs of being impacted by the demographic cliff.  For instance, nearly all American male citizens and male immigrants between the ages of 18 and 25 are still mandated to register for the Selective Service (i.e. “draft”), and can be charged with a felony if they don’t.  But since 1973 and the institution of the All-Volunteer Force (AVF), filling the active-duty and Reserve ranks has meant utter reliance on young women and men offering their service to the nation.  Annually, millions upon millions upon millions of taxpayer dollars are spent in trying to make service attractive to these young people, something I have discussed in my previous post about “stories.”  Moreover, the Department of Defense’s (DoD) direct recruiting efforts—with advertisements, and support of filmmakers, and recruiting stations—are  compounded and enhanced by the war stories endemic to American culture.  Appearing by way of camouflage as a fashion statement, as Jeep and Hummer vehicles on our roadways, as weapons of war openly carried by civilians and police forces in our public spaces, these war stories normalize militarism and its violent baggage.  Under these narrative conditions, one can imagine young people clamoring to join any one of the four services: the Navy, Air Force, Marines, or the Army.

Still, since at least 2018, these immense recruiting expenditures have not proven successful in meeting the military’s quotas.  Even though women and people who identify as LGBTQI+ have been permitted to volunteer during the All-Volunteer Force era, although women have been permitted to apply for appointments to the service academies since 1976, and although the quotas and the forces themselves have been nearly halved since the AVF’s institution, the US military has been challenged to meet initial recruitment quotas and to retain those already in service.

Not only are there fewer potential recruits because of the demographic cliff, but also less than 25 percent of those potentials are even eligible to enlist. Obstructions to eligibility include obesity, no high school diploma, disqualifying criminal records and health conditions like diabetes, some mental illnesses, learning disorders like ADHD, and PTSD.  Additionally, the numbers of young people who would even consider joining the services was at 13 per cent before the pandemic and now, in 2023, stands at 9 per cent. Some who balk at volunteering think the military is too “woke,” too concerned about being an institution for social good and equity, while others think it’s not inclusive and equitable enough, especially for women and people of color.  Even generous cash signing bonuses—up to $50K—and increased pay is not enough of a lure. Moreover, the paucity of potential recruits for all these reasons—the demographic cliff, eligibility requirements, and propensity to volunteer—does not even account for the current taut job market, where civilian jobs are ample and don’t incur an obligation to go to war.  

The largest of the services, the Army, especially has been most adversely affected by the dearth of potential recruits, missing its most recent annual quota by 25%, or 15,000 people. Military critics David Barno and Nora Bensahel are alarmed by this “crisis,” saying in a March 10, 2023, War on the Rocks opinion piece that “the U.S. military is shrinking, not because of any strategic choices, but simply because there aren’t enough qualified volunteers — and that may have enormous implications for the U.S. strategic position in an increasingly uncertain and dangerous world.” Three active-duty officers serving as fellows at the Brookings Institution claim in a January 19, 2023, commentary that there are only two options to addressing the “crisis”: compulsory service or making it easier for people to join and stay in the services.  “With little intervention,” they assert, “numbers will decrease even more due to the lack of qualified candidates willing to volunteer for military service.”    

It's this crisis situation that makes it is so extraordinary to see the Army returning to “Be All You Can Be,” a recruiting slogan that was born forty years ago, in 1980 when I was on active-duty, and hasn’t been used since 2001.  Its birth was in the immediate post-Vietnam War era, a time when the US military was trying simultaneously to rehabilitate its reputation following its ignominious performance during the war and also was challenged to populate the services with willing volunteers, not coerced draftees.  Apparently, no recruiting slogan has been more expensive nor more effective. Previous slogans included “Today’s Army Wants to Join You,” “Join the People Who’ve Joined the Army” and “This is the Army.”  Subsequent slogans—“An Army of One,” “Army Strong,” and “What’s Your Warrior?”—have apparently not met the bar set by “Be All You Can Be.” (Note, too, that “Be All You Can Be” is the only slogan not to reference the military.)

But, emerging as “Be All You Can Be” did during the “Reagan Revolution’s” emphasis on neoliberal self-sufficiency, it was effective by patently urging personal acquisition above all else, tantamount even to the welfare of the institution in which this individual, personal self can “be.”  That is, it sold individualism over collectivism, an oddity for what is by definition an army: a conglomeration of people organized and trained and uniformed to act as a singular unit.  I certainly wanted to believe in the late-70s and early 80s that I had earned a 4-year Army ROTC scholarship because of my uniquely personal achievements, not because, as the child of a career Army officer, I was privileged when it came to winning a scholarship, that the forces were keen to recruit anyone qualified, and that I was a female when females were sought to fill the ranks of the Regular Army.

At the same time that it sold individualism over collectivism, opportunity over obligation, whether intended or not, “Be All You Can Be” also deflected attention away from the deadliness of soldiering and its failure in the Vietnam War, trying to cleanse the anti-military sentiment prevalent among potential recruits. Despite the simultaneous erection of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and its call to mourn the deaths of 58,000 American combatants, the cleansing deflection of “Be All You Can Be” altered the military’s image from a patriotic killing machine to a benign opportunity to maximize one’s own self.  Not coincidentally, the cleanse revised the story of the American war in Viet Nam, too, so that it could be recast as what presidential-candidate Ronald Reagan called a “noble cause.”  I would assert that this framing of the war is what has persisted in the popular imagination, so much so that thinking the United States nobly stuck by the South Vietnamese until Spring 1975, when the North Vietnamese overran the South, is preferable to acknowledging the United States’ “Peace with honor” withdrawal of all combat forces two years earlier, in the Spring of 1973.

So one might wonder for what purpose and to what affect “Be All You Can Be” is being revived now.  Certainly, today’s declining birth rate poses recruiting problems similar to those during the advent of the All-Volunteer Force.  But another echo from the post-Vietnam War era is the current US military’s need to rehabilitate its reputation following an ignominious performance in the “Forever Wars,” in Iraq, from 2003-2011, and Afghanistan, from 2001-2021.  While there are plenty of parallels among these three wars, what stands out most in this instance is that, like Vietnam, in neither case of the most recent, undeclared, and contentious wars can the US military claim victory.  This current situation, then, echoes the past’s, not only in the US military’s need to find a solution to missing its recruitment quotas but equally importantly, the need to rehabilitate its reputation, tarnished by an unsuccessful performance at war.

Rehabilitation might, after all, be a main driver for the revival of “Be All You Can Be.”  Still, in their March 2023 introduction of the old-but-new slogan, the Army’s three senior leaders—Secretary of the Army Christine Wormuth, Army Chief of Staff General James McConville, and Sergeant Major of the Army Michael Grinston—could only explain that investing $117 million in a revival of “Be All You Can Be” was warranted by its positive reception by Americans across generations. They could not—or would not—explain how the slogan would impact the Army, whether it would be actualized in the service, and to what extent it would increase the propensity to enlist among the dwindling number of potential recruits.  It seems the objective of the ad is to entice 17-and-18-year-olds and their parents with alluring images of self-actualization, not to make the Army an actual site for self-actualization.

There is evidence to suggest that the original ad was misleading about the Army’s purpose.  Ten years and midway through the first iteration of “Be All You Can Be,” two social scientists conducted a study of the ad’s impact on already-enlisted service people.  The study found that cynicism about the ad prevailed, ruining morale and dissuading many of the enlistees from reenlisting.  The scholars note that “[N]egative responses to the ‘Be All You Can Be’ campaign appear to be attributable to perceived dissonance between promise and performance associated with the instrumental rewards offered in the messages but not available in reality, and not to general dissatisfaction with the Army.” To the enlisted people, the ad promised choice in what they could be.  Interestingly, it is the transactional nature of what is promised by the ad that is so unsettling to the service people interviewed: you can be whatever you want and, in the meantime, you will happen to be serving  your country.  Having invested a few years in the Army, they would rather have been overtly asked for patriotic sacrifice than be made promises of personal opportunity that hadn’t been and couldn’t be fulfilled.       

I suspect that, because of the declining birth rate, this military recruiting problem is not going to go away, even with the revival of “Be All You Can Be” and a reduced-size military force. Private Military Contractors—whose members made up the majority of fatalities in Iraq and Afghanistan and who cost the United States half of its annual defense budget—cannot and should not be relied on to provide our national security, given their bottom-line motivations.  As he left office in 1961, President Eisenhower warned Americans of these corporations, what he termed the “Military-Industrial Complex,” but this is a complex that has only grown in strength and power. Yet the United States’ smaller military with larger responsibilities almost demands that private corporations fight our wars.  That, or Artificial Intelligence drones and Lethal Autonomous Weapons do our dirty work.  

More importantly, more and more American women of childbearing age are making the choice to have fewer or no children. There are any number of reasons for their choices: the hazards of the climate crisis; unsuitable male partners; mistrust in federal institutions (including, for instance, Social Security, the Supreme Court, and reproductive healthcare); the exorbitant mental, physical, and financial costs of raising children; a continued patriarchal expectation that women do the preponderance of this raising; deep skepticism about the “family values” mantra that does not guarantee or provide actual supports for mothers and their children; the perils of pregnancy to their physical and mental health; and a determination to enhance their personal freedom and bodily autonomy by being child-free.  Moreover, some women do not make the choice to be child-free but also cannot afford the high financial and emotional costs of In-Vitro Fertilization (IVF), a procedure under threat with the overturning of Roe v. Wade.  And, of course, there are women who never have a choice—those who are raped, whether by known or unknown assailants.  

It seems to me that as long as women have the choice to be child-free or to limit the number of children they bear, the birth rate will simply plateau or continue to decline and the US military and higher education—among other institutions—will continue to feel the effects. To be clear: I think women should be able to choose whether and under what conditions they will have children.  Thus, I can’t help wondering whether fear about the declining birth rate is partly behind the work of other institutions: the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade and the subsequent criminalization by states, the banning of drugs to induce early-term abortion, and the threat to de-legalize contraception. These actions indicate the presumption that female bodies ought to reproduce and that women are not authentic women when they are child-free, by choice or not.  Not only does this presumption produce moral outrage when women defy their socially-prescribed role, I don’t think it's hyperbole to say that these actions indicate that women must be forced to reproduce and must not have choice.

“Be All You Can Be” suggests there are no limits on what a person may opt to become.  That might mean choosing to be child-free, the very thing that, at base, poses a risk to the Army’s welfare.  Perhaps the fear about the declining birth rate and its impact on American society is why the threat of forced pregnancy, à la Gilead from The Handmaid’s Tale, resonates so deeply with young American women.