Beth Bailey

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Beth Bailey | The Army in the Marketplace: Recruiting an All-Volunteer Force | The Journal of American History, 94.1 | The History Cooperative

The Army in the Marketplace: Recruiting an All-Volunteer Force

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In mid-March 2003, as American military forces moved toward Baghdad, the U.S. Army replaced its "An Army of One" television recruiting ads with commercials evoking a tradition of heroism and sacrifice. Sepia-toned close-ups of soldiers' faces fill the screen in "Victors." In "Creed," army unit crests proclaim "Not for Ourselves Alone" and "Ducit Amor Patriae," as elegiac music reminiscent of the soundtrack from Band of Brothers, an acclaimed tv miniseries about World War II, creates a powerful historical connection. Those commercials were light-years from the upbeat message of the recently retired recruiting jingle "Be All You Can Be," or the grittier but slightly perplexing "An Army of One" campaign that had replaced it in 2001. The language of service and sacrifice, duty and honor, had been almost completely absent from army advertising since the beginning of America's all-volunteer force. For the past three decades, the (primarily) peacetime army had recruited with promises of individual opportunity: money for college, marketable skills, achievement, adventure, personal transformation. In the first moments of a controversial war, many of those promises sounded inappropriate, if not absurd.¹	1
The army would soon enough return to its usual recruiting campaign—and as Operation Iraqi Freedom became an extended conflict, struggle to meet its recruiting goals. And the American public and its congressional representatives would debate the implications of fighting a war with an all-volunteer force instead of one based, at least in theory, on the notion that military service is an obligation of all citizens. The army's shift in advertising strategies as the United States invaded Iraq, however brief, captures some of the historical tensions that underlie a larger, continuing debate about American military service. The move from a draft-dependent to an all-volunteer military was a shift from an admittedly troubled system based on the obligations of (male) citizenship to a system that relied on the logic of the market. This system functions as a labor market, driven by complex forces of supply and demand. But it is also fundamentally shaped by notions of consumer desire, framed by sophisticated and expensive military advertising campaigns, and built on the results of intensive market research. Making sense of the issues at stake in debates over America's volunteer force and its implications requires a historical understanding not only of the practical transformation of the military but also of the intellectual and cultural logic that moved American armed forces—in this case, the army—into the world of government-sponsored mass-market advertising.	2
In 1973, soon after the last American troops left Vietnam, the United States abandoned the draft and transformed its military into an all-volunteer force. The Vietnam War–era draft had provoked widespread protest. As its opponents came from the entire political spectrum, by the late 1960s ending the draft seemed politically astute, if practically difficult. However, despite the claim of the chair of the House Armed Services Committee that the only way the nation could get a volunteer military was to draft one, an all-volunteer force was not unprecedented. For most of the nation's history, the draft had been a wartime exception rather than a peacetime rule—though the pre–World War II peacetime military was minuscule compared to its post–World War II Cold War version. But public consciousness of that history had largely disappeared. In the early 1970s the military relied heavily upon the draft and upon draft-induced volunteering, and not just because of the immediate pressure of the Vietnam War.² There had been a draft in place, with only a short exception, since 1940—as the United States asserted its military power in World War II, as it claimed superpower status in the Cold War, and, critically important, as it fought in Korea and in Vietnam. The 1973 shift to an all-volunteer force was, from the military's perspective, sudden, rapid, a turn on a dime. It was not welcome.³ And it was especially difficult because it took place amid the chaos and division and struggle of America in that tumultuous era.	. . .

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