Bret Devereaux

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 …

Out of curiosity about that last point - what do you think has changed to make a volunteer force no longer suitable?

Uh, short version: rising internal political tensions, weaknesses in civ-mil relationship, shift back to near-peer deterrence and need for future capacity over present capabilities. Long version...uh, to appear soonish, I hope?

I was more interested in the non-internal-political reasons, given that you and Tom had discussed that fairly thoroughly already. Do you think the AVF had any benefits aside from bypassing Vietnam fatigue at its late-Cold-War adoption?

(I am very interested in the issue, coming from both Israeli and American backgrounds.)

An AVF opens up strategic options for longer military involvement far-away at lower 'will' cost. It is not clear to me that is always a good thing. But near-peer conflicts tend to demand mass conscript armies and rapidly converting from an AVF to a mass conscript army is hard.

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.