Of Intergenerational Conflict and Military Recruitment

The resurgence of great power conflict over this past decade has brought with it a certain amount of rethinking of the ways in which the Western world has organized its armed forces. The 1990s saw them shift away from emphasizing large-scale conventional conflict to the execution of missions that were smaller in scale but placed a higher premium on rapid-reaction--a reorientation which seemed the safer because of a very high confidence in the capacity of high technology to replace "boots on the ground" in what was essentially a translation of "information age"-type thinking into a "Revolution in Military Affairs". Since then some have been quicker about it than others--but the mainstream of the dialogue seems to have reoriented itself back toward the prospect of older-style, larger-scale conflict.

Amid all that there has naturally been a good deal of talk about expanded military forces, and how they will come up with the required extra personnel, with proponents of such expansion taking yet another chance to sneer at much-maligned "Generation Z" and its supposed lack of the virtues of earlier generations (not least, "the Greatest"). To his, and the journal's, credit, Brian McAllister Linn published a historically grounded piece in the Autumn 2023 Parameters debunking the myth-making, reminding the professional youth-bashers that "since the beginning of the twentieth century the peacetime volunteer Army" (before which the peacetime volunteer Army was a relatively small entity with limited needs) "has been in a crisis more often than not" with respect to its ability to attract recruits, and that "[t]empting as it is to blame 'wokeness,' slacker mentality, Generation Z, or some other nebulous reason," their predecessors as much as they were prone to " join the service for individual reasons, most based on expectations of personal benefit" rather than greater possession of some "warrior" or "citizen-soldier" quality. Alas, lucidly written as Linn's article is, relatively few of the commentariat these days would even seem to possess the required reading level to understand the text at the most elementary level--let alone use it to enlighten a dialogue as depressingly mired as ever in cultural and intergenerational warfare.