What I set forth below comes primarily from an article by Richard A. Gabriel, Associate Professor of Politics, St. Anselm's College, Manchester, New Hampshire, author of CRISIS IN COMMAND. I lack personal experience with Army conditions today but what Dr. Gabriel says about them matches what I have heard from other sources and what I have read (I belong to all three associations - Army, Navy, Air Force - plus the Naval Institute and the Retired Officers Association; I get much data secondhand but no longer see it with my own eyes, hear it with my own ears).
Readers with personal experience in Korea, Viet Nam, and in the Services anywhere since the end of the Viet Nam debacle, I urge to write and tell me what you know that I don't, especially on points in which I am seriously mistaken.
Summarized from "The Slow Dying of the Amen - can Army," Dr. Richard A. Gabriel in Gallery magazine, June 1979, p.41 et seq.:
Concerning the All Volunteer Force (AVF): Early this year the Pentagon admitted that all services had failed to meet quotas.
30% of all Army volunteers are discharged for offenses during first enlistment. Of the 70 per 100 left, 26 do not reenlist. The desertion rates are the highest in history... and this fact is partly covered up by using administrative discharges ( - i.e., "You're fired!") rather than courts martial and punishment - if the deserter turns up. But no effort is made to find him.
According to Dr. Gabriel, citing General George S. Blanchard and others, hard - drug use (heroin, cocaine, angel dust - not marijuana) is greater than ever, especially in Europe, with estimates from a low of 10% to a high of 64%. Marijuana is ignored - but let me add that a man stoned out of his mind on grass is not one I want on my flank in combat.
Category 3B and 4 (ranging down from dull to mentally retarded) make up 59% of Army volunteers.. . in a day when privates handle very complex and sophisticated weapons and machinery. Add to this that the mix is changing so that a typical private might be Chicano or Puerto Rican, the typical sergeant a Black, the typical officer "Anglo." And that officers are transferred with great frequency and enlisted men with considerable frequency and you have a situation in which esprit de corps cannot be developed (an outfit without esprit de corps is not an army unit; it is an armed mob - R.A.H.).
Today we have more general officers than we did in World War Two. Our ratio of officers to enlisted men is more than twice as high as that of successful armies in the past. But an officer is not with his troops long enough to be "the Old Man" - he is a "manager," not a leader of men.
Dr. Gabriel concludes: "The most basic aspect is the need to reinstate the draft."
I disagree.
My disagreement is not on moral grounds. Forget that I ever voiced opposition to slave soldiers; think of me as Old Blood - and - Guts willing to use any means whatever to win.
Reinstating the draft would not get us out of trouble, even with the changes Dr. Gabriel suggests to make the draft "fair."
As everyone knows, we were in the frying pan; shifting to AVF, instead of producing an efficient professional army, put us into the fire. Dr. Gabriel urges that we climb back into the frying pan - but with improvements: a national lottery with no deferments whatever for any reason.
I can't disagree with the even - steven rule... but my reason for thinking that Dr. Gabriel's solution will not work is this:
A lottery, even meticulously fair, cannot make a man willing to charge a machine - gun nest in the face of almost certain death. That sort of drive comes from emotional sources. Esprit de corps and patriotism cannot be drawn in a lottery.
Conscription works (among free men) only when it is not needed. I have seen two world wars; we used the draft in each.. . but in each case it was a means of straightening out the manpower situation; it was not needed to make men fight. Both wars were popular.
Since then we have had two non - Wars - Korea and Nam - in "peacetime" and using conscript troops.
And each non - War was a scandalous disaster.
I don't have a neat solution to offer. If the American people have lost their willingness to fight and die for their country, the defect cannot be cured by conscription. Unless this emotional condition changes (and I do not know how to change it), we are whipped no matter what weapons we build. It could be overnight, or it could continue to be a long slow slide downhill over many years - ten, twenty, thirty. But the outcome is the same. Unless something renews the spirit this country once had, we are in the terminal stages of decay; history is ending for us.
Our foreign masters might graciously let us keep our flag, even our national name. But "the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave" will be dead.
Time Span - Inflation
The Winter of '23 - '24 I paid a street vendor 5 for a five billion mark German note and I paid too much; 5,000,000,000 DM was worth a trifle over 1. A bit later it was worth nothing.
In 1955 at the foot of the Acropolis I bought a small marble replica of the Venus of Melos for 10,000 drachma. I wasn't cheated; that was 35$ USA.
There are the British pound, the Turkish lira, the Italian lira, the Mexican peso, and several others; all mean one pound of silver. Look up "exchange" and "commodities" in your newspaper; grab your pocket calculator and see how much each is inflated.
When I was a child of four or five my brothers and I used great stacks of hundred - dollar bills as play money. Confederate - After two centuries, "Not worth a continental," still means "worthless." Memory is long for the damage done by inflation.
Before paper "money" was invented, inflation was accomplished by adding base metal to silver and/or gold while retaining the name of the coin. By this means the Roman denarius was devalued to zero during the first three centuries A.D. But inflation did not start with Caesar Augustus. In the early days of the Republic before the Punic Wars the cash unit was the Libra (Libra = lb. - pound = 273 grams, or about 60% of our pound avoirdupois, 454 grams). That's too large a unit for daily retail use; it was divided into 12 unciae (ounces).
A "lb." of silver was called an "as." 1/12 of that, struck as coinage, made efficient currency. Now comes war and inflation -
Eventually the "as" - once a pound of silver - was so debased that it amounted to a penny, more or less. Augustus, by decree, went back on a silver/gold standard and created the denanius, 3.87 grams of fine silver. He made 25 denarii equal in value to one aureus (7.74 grams of gold), or a ratio of 12.5 to one. ("Free and unlimited coinage of silver at a ratio of sixteen to one!" The Great Commoner and the august Emperor had similar notions about hard currency.)
One Augustan denarius equalled in gold at today's London fix ($385/troy ounce) a nominal $3.83, or about 3 of a gram of gold. This tells us nothing about purchasing power; it simply says that the Augustan denanius was a solid silver coin almost the size and weight of the solid silver quarter we used to have before the government foisted on us those sandwich things. How much olive oil or meal that would buy in Rome around 1 A.D. can be estimated from surviving records - but all the gold in Rome could not buy an aspirin tablet or a paper of matches. No way to compare. And hard money was not supplemented by printed money, bank checks, and transactions that take place entirely inside computers - but I can't go into how those phenomena affect purchasing power without writing a book twice as long as this one on fiscal theory (which I am quite willing to do but nobody would buy it).