Manning & financing the twenty-first-century all-volunteer force

Daedalus

Volumn 140, Issue 3, 2011, Pages 75-87

  Korb, Lawrence J ^a   Segal, David R ^b  

^a GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY   (United States)

^b UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 79960539329     PISSN: 00115266     EISSN: 15486192     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1162/DAED_a_00099     Document Type: Article

References (27)

1. For an excellent analysis on this topic, see Beth Bailey, America's Army: Making the All-Volunteer Force (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009).
2. David R. Segal and Mady W. Segal, America's Military Population, Population Bulletin 59 (2004): 1-40.
3. David R. Segal, Recruiting for Uncle Sam: Citizenship and Military Manpower Policy (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1989), 36-38.
4. Mady W. Segal, Meridith Hill Thanner, and David R. Segal, Hispanics and African Americans in the U.S. Military: Trends in Representation, Race, Gender & Class 14 (3-4) (2007): 48-64.
5. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2007.
6. Mady W. Segal, Women's Military Roles Cross-Nationally: Past, Present, and Future, Gender & Society 9 (6) (1995): 757-775.
7. Michelle Sandhoff, Mady W. Segal, and David R. Segal, Gender Issues in the Transformation of an All-Volunteer Force: A Transnational Perspective, in The Decline of Citizen Armies in Democratic States, ed. Stuart Cohen (New York: Routledge, 2010), 111-131.
8. Bailey, America's Army, 227.
9. Deborah D. Avant, Selling Security: Post-Cold War Security Services in Historical Perspective, paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, San Francisco, 2001.
10. Deborah D. Avant, From Mercenary to Citizen Armies: Explaining Change in the Practice of War, International Organization 54 (2000): 41-72.
11. Tricare is the current health care program of the dod military health care system. It was formerly known as champus (Civilian Health and Medical Program of the Uniformed Services), which was established in 1966 as part of the legislation that established Medicare.
12. Lawrence J. Korb, Peter Rundlet, Max Bergmann, Sean Duggan, and Peter Juul, Beyond the Call of Duty: Report Reviews Army's Overuse (Washington, D.C.: Center for American Progress, 2007).
13. Lawrence J. Korb, Peter Juul, Laura Conley, Myles Caggins, and Sean Duggan, Building a Military for the 21st Century: New Realities, New Priorities (Washington, D.C.: Center for American Progress, 2008).
14. The National Guard consists of units that evolved from state militias and that therefore have responsibilities to state governments. Guardsmen in peacetime generally train for one weekend each month and two weeks during the summer and can be mobilized by the governors of their states in the event of natural disasters or civil unrest. They also are members of the armed forces mobilization base and can be activated and called to federal service by the president. Members of the federal reserve forces, by contrast, have no state responsibilities.
15. Lawrence J. Korb and Sean Duggan, Caught Off Guard: The Link Between Our National Security and Our National Guard (Washington, D.C.: Center for American Progress, 2007).
16. Thomas J. Burns, David R. Segal, Michael P. Silver, William W. Falk, and Bam Dev Sharda, The All-Volunteer Force in the 1970s, Social Science Quarterly 79 (1998): 390-411.
17. Jerald G. Bachman, David R. Segal, Peter Freedman-Doan, and Patrick O'Malley, Who Chooses Military Service? Correlates of Propensity and Enlistment in the United States Armed Forces, Military Psychology 12 (1998): 1-30.
18. Cf. Robert L. Goldich, American Military Culture from Colony to Empire, in this issue. Drawing on data reported by the Heritage Foundation, which uses census tract data where available to estimate the socioeconomic status of volunteers, Goldich suggests that the highest strata of society are overrepresented in the American military. However, while census tracts exist for the most part in urban or high-population-density areas, the military recruits primarily in rural or low-density areas. Only six states and the District of Columbia are fully tracted. Existing tracts range from about 2,500 to 8,000 people, and while they are initially designed to be relatively homogeneous demographically, there is still considerable internal variance. Moreover, there has been great resistance to changing tract boundaries, which would eliminate the ability to make comparisons across decennial censuses. Thus, the homogeneity of tracts might well decrease with increasing population diversity.
19. Methodologists refer to imputing geographical measures to estimate individual characteristics as the ecological fallacy. The Heritage Foundation reports that recruits who cannot be located in a census tract are randomly assigned to one based on zip code data. Other survey- based research agrees that recruits from the bottom of the socioeconomic scale are underrepresented because of the military's education-based selectivity, but it disagrees with the interpretation at the top of the scale. Census-tract estimates of individual status require an assumption that recruits' income is at the mean for their tract or is randomly distributed around that mean. We 1/2nd these assumptions problematic.
20. See Shanea J. Watkins and James Sherk, Who Serves in the U.S. Military? Demographic Characteristics of Enlisted Troops and Of1/2- cers (Washington, D.C.: Heritage Foundation Center for Data Analysis, August 21, 2008).
21. Korb, Juul, Conley, Caggins, and Duggan, Building a Military for the 21st Century.
22. Ibid.
23. See Karin K. De Angelis and David R. Segal, Building and Maintaining a Post-9/11 All-Volunteer Military Force, in The Impact of 9/11 on Politics and War: The Day that Changed Everything, ed. Matthew J. Morgan (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 43-60.
24. Korb, Juul, Conley, Caggins, and Duggan, Building a Military for the 21st Century.
25. Ibid.
26. Korb, Rundlet, Bergmann, Duggan, and Juul, Beyond the Call of Duty.
27. Elisabeth Bumiller and Thom Shanker, Gates Seeking to Contain Military Health Costs, The New York Times, November 28, 2010.