Why aren’t the rich and the famous in uniform?

Frank and Kathy
In 2001, we were attacked. In 2005, for the first time in a decade, the Army fell far short of their recruiting goals, though by the end of that year the numbers were better than in the spring.[1] While the Marine Corps missed some targets for the initial sign-up of recruits, they continued to overperform on the measure that is more critical to them: the number of recruits who actually ship to boot camp.  The Army was seriously underperforming both on original sign-ups and shipping-out rates, even after adjusting down their recruiting goals.

Yet President Bush did not use his bully pulpit to urge anyone, much less students at our elite schools, to volunteer. Surely he, as commander-in-chief, might properly have made such a call.   

After 9/11 the New York Times endorsed the invasion of Afghanistan as a “just war.” They said that our troops were going into battle carrying the hopes and prayers of the Times’ editors with them. But they did not ask anyone to share in the responsibility to fight this new war against Islamic jihadists, called the war on terror. Perhaps they did not want the awesome responsibility of suggesting a person actually go to war. Perhaps, although they believed the war was theoretically just, the idea of someone actually fighting it just made them too uncomfortable.

The President did not make a call. And to our knowledge no major newspaper did. No one in a leadership position made such a call. Maybe the President, the editors of the Times, and other national leaders refrained from a call to arms because they didn’t want their own military-aged children to serve.   

These days some members of our upper classes are so hostile to the idea of service that they have all but banned military recruiters from our best private high schools and college campuses, lest anyone even suggest to their young people that military service is an honorable interruption of the rush into elite colleges and socially acceptable jobs and lots of money. The privileged learn that war is bad, and believe that those who find themselves in the military – while we “support them” — are likely to be underprivileged, certainly somewhat suspect, possibly over-avid gun collectors or victims of unscrupulous recruiters. So why would someone with good options possibly choose service?

From our own experiences we have learned that service can be about what America aspires to be. It can be the melting pot, a meritocracy and a level playing field. It can be about what it means to be free and American and responsible for your neighbor. For young people it can be about building self-confidence and being given amazing responsibilities at an age when many young people think it is a big deal to operate a fax machine at an unpaid internship or that life is “unfair” because they don’t like their college roommate. Last but not least military service is also a realistic, often necessary and democratic response to aggression and chaos.

Undoubtedly there will be readers who object — what about the torturing of prisoners, the raping of Air Force Academy women, the post-traumatic stress suffered by returning veterans?  It’s true — the military is not exempt from crime or tragedy or bad behavior, even institutional bad behavior. The military, like every other institution, is located on planet earth and filled with frail human beings.

There are about one and a half million men and women in the armed forces, more if you count everyone in the reserves, let alone their dependents. Out of a city of several million souls one would expect some very bad apples. We need to police our institutions, military or civil, scrutinize power structures, and prosecute bad actors.  We need the media to tell the truth, even when it embarrasses us. But we need to remember that the failures of military people, and their occasional crimes, aren’t an indictment of the military as a whole any more than a congressional bribery scandal should lead people to no longer want to vote — or run for office.

Others will counter that service can be tedious, unpleasant, even fatal. We are not suggesting that everyone will have a wonderful, Outward Bound-type “growth experience” in the military.  As a famous Marine Corps recruiting poster of the 1970s said, “We never promised you a rose garden.” Any number of people, no doubt, can complain at length about the bad time they had in the armed services. Novels like Catch-22 draw their inspiration from reality, after all.  But the point is exactly as the poster put it — this isn’t about choosing a vacation destination. It’s about service. And having lived both sides of the civil-military divide, we are struck by how little understood service is, especially by the upper classes.

It was not always this way. Our museums are filled with portraits of the scions of leading families who led fateful charges, sometimes were harmed, sometimes returned to fame and fortune, all of whom did their part. A lot has changed since our political, business and academic leaders encouraged, even expected, their children to serve as part of the growing up process and as something that many American males just did, with the full support of their loved ones.  

Today, the number of congressmen and congresswomen who are also veterans is about only one-third what it was a generation ago, in 1969, and the percentage is falling fast.

Donald N. Zillman, “Where Have All the Soldiers Gone II: Military Veterans in Congress and the State of Civil-Military Relations,” Maine Law Review (2006) (publication forthcoming).  Seventy percent of Congress were veterans in 1969.  Twenty-five percent were veterans in the Congress of 2004.[2] Only slightly more than one percent of members of Congress have a child serving.

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