I've seen frequent written commentary in recent years to the effect that our current wars impact us very little, as a society, as so few Americans are actually in the service. Sometimes the authors go a bit further and suggest that only certain demographics are in the service.
Getting outfitted with Leggins, World War Two.
Perhaps I just live in or near one of those demographics, as I certainly know people who are currently in the service, or only recently out of it, and that would include people I'm related to. For that reason, such commentary always takes me a bit off guard.
A lot of times, fwiw, commentary of that type suggests a titanic shift in American society, but taking the long view (as we often do here) I'm not so sure that's correct. Assuming those commenting are correct, what we would find long term is that there are historically big swells of veterans, such as after the Civil War, after World War One, and after World War Two, but that the historic norm is for that swell to be just that. The US had traditionally had very small armed forces, and its traditionally relied very heavily on the militia/National Guard to fill the ranks, at least initially, in times of disaster. For example, as much as we read about them, how many veterans of the Indian Wars was a person likely to run into, say in 1903? Not many, really. There weren't many.
Looked at that way, the real anomaly was the big population of veterans starting with 1918, and running up until fairly recently. The number of men conscripted and enlisted for World War One was huge. Many of those men, probably almost all of them, were still relatively young when World War Two arrived, and indeed quite a few served in both wars. World War Two was enormous, and so were the Armed Forces, so the resulting veterans' population likewise was enormous. Indeed, World War Two gave us, for the first time, a significant number of female veterans (there were female veterans from World War One, however, as well).
The historic norm would have been for the service to decline in size following World War Two, and at first it did, but soon it was evident that the US was engaged in a Cold War. That Cold War was nearly a hot war on occasion, and indeed, I'd argue it became a hot war with the Korean War and the Vietnam War, for us (and other examples could be added for other Western nations), with those wars being properly regarded as campaigns in the larger war. Not too surprisingly therefore, but unusually for the US, we kept a big peacetime Service, although again that peace was not a normal peace. Anyhow, that again gave us a big population of veterans. If you graduated high school between 1946 and 1990, your chances of serving in some branch of the military were pretty good, whether that be active or reserve.
Not so much now, apparently. Or at least the commentators claim that to be the case.
If so, that's probably a return to the historic norm, if a departure from the way things have been since December 7, 1941.
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This post has an accompanying poll.
4 comments:
In light of my thesis about my great-grandfather's experience in the army during the Punitive Expedition and WWI, I find this post quite interesting. I would agree that there were large swells in numbers of veterans immediately following the wars mentioned. Would you consider the recent "war on terror" and the campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan (and other places) to also cause a large swell in veterans? Just curious about your view.
Interesting question.
My guess would be a qualified "no." That is, I don't think it will have a swelling effect like the larger wars in U.S. history, but rather will be more analogous to the Indian Wars, or perhaps the Spanish American War and the Philippine Insurrection.
The reason that I think that is that the recent wars have not seen an increase in the size of the service, but rather have relied on the traditional (as looked at over the very long term) American military pattern of having the wars fought with a professional volunteer military supplemented by musters of the Guard. Indeed, the pattern is quite similar to that we saw in the 19th Century, outside of the Civil War, in that the professional military is relatively small and fairly strongly reflects more disadvantaged recent immigrant communities in the enlisted ranks than the general population does.
While the service today is very large compared to the pre World War Two service, it's still at a low since World War Two and continues to decline is size. The recent wars have been very long, but fighting them has required redeploying servicemen who have seen service in them, quite often, before. So, all in all, we're using a relatively small number of troops to fight them, and will accordingly have a relatively small number of veterans.
Indeed, the wars themselves are quite small by recent historical standards, which doesn't mean that they aren't real wars or that if you are in them they aren't horrific. But when we consider that the Vietnam War saw the U.S. deploy 500,000 troops in country at one time, and even the ROK had 50,000 men in Vietnam in the early 1970s. Our commitment to our current wars is so much smaller that it actually is shocking to look back and see how big the Vietnam War, and Korean War, really were.
Which might make it tough for returning veterans. They're admired, but they're a relatively small part of the population and most Americans won't really grasp what they've gone through.
Thanks for such a well-thought out and written answer to the question. The redeployment of the troops is an interesting point regarding the numbers of veterans as a result of these campaigns. Also, using the National Guard to supplement the regular service personnel is also an interesting point, as that came up over and over again during my research about the US military during the Punitive Expedition into Mexico during which National Guard units were deployed as border patrol, as was my great-grandfather's regular Army unit. For a long time, we believed he was a National Guardsman serving as the border patrol, because that was the information we had seen in various places, but it actually happened that he had enlisted in the regular Army and was part of those regular Army soldiers that did not go into Mexico to chase Pancho Villa, but rather served as border patrol alongside those National Guardsmen.
As you know, people sometimes forget that a lot more troops were stationed on the border than crossed it. Pershing's mission was fairly limited really, and his troops were pretty much limited to the most mobile ones. . . nearly all cavalry, with some motorized transport and the First Aero Squadron.
That border service was dangerous. There were quite a few small scraps associated with it, and the Regular Army actually crossed into Mexico on a short term basis for years doing that. Guardsmen were prohibited from entering Mexico, on the other hand, as the Attorney General of the US was of the opinion that the Guard couldn't be committed outside of the United States.
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