I have thoughts on this topic forthcoming in two different places, but broadly I think this is correct. American civ-mil has real problems and we need to course correct. I increasingly think the AVF itself is not the right force for the road ahead, but also issues at home.https://twitter.com/RadioFreeTom/status/1383805599154991121 …
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The introduction of the AVF, though, came in the late Cold War - much closer to the latter case. That historical transition is the part that's really interesting to me - was that the desire for small wars without a public opinion hit outweighing the USSR peer threat?
Yes, the AVF was a pretty clear response to draft resistance - just like the Roman shift to volunteers in the back third of the second century BC, though there is complexity here.
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But part of what the Gates Commission did was assure everyone that an American AVF could be rapidly scaled up. It presented a 'have your cake and eat it too' rationale for the shift everyone already wanted to make (Nixon had already been elected on eliminating the draft).
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I have a public-facing piece coming up which essentially spends 5,500 words calling BS on the Gates Commission's optimistic appraisal and suggesting a sober reading of, inter alia, Roman history, ought to have suggested some of the problems they explained away were real.
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I find that really interesting comparing to the Israeli case, where a similarly unpopular intervention in Lebanon did not cause the same transition, despite to disappearance of a real conventional threat from Egypt.
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Part of that was the continuing Syrian/Iraqi threat; but the faster response to public opposition by scaling back the mission was IMO also important.
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