Army Manpower

Spotted this little article: After years of drawdowns, Army needs 80,000 new soldiers to meet 2018 growth targets

To summarize:

  1. In December 2016, the Army was on a draw-down from 565,000 to 450,000 than back to 476,000.
  2. For 2017 they had to find 68,500 more recruits.
  3. For 2018 they have to find 80,000 more recruits.
  4. This is “….owing most to congressional budget decisions that first prompted it to shed soldiers as quickly as possible, then to suddenly pivot back into growth mode.

Now…..this is not that unusual. Instead of slowly shrinking the force and systematically increasing the force….we “Yo-yo” the force (we = the American people and the elected representatives that they vote into office). This does nothing to help the quality of the recruits, unit cohesion, morale, etc. Nothing new here, we seem to go through the same cycle every decade or so. Without getting into the “guns or butter” debate, it would probably help if defense budgets incrementally decreased and increased vice suddenly decreasing and increasing.

Source (and larger, readable version): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_States#/media/File:Defense_spending.png

 

A few other interesting stats in the article:

  1. Only three in 10 Americans of enlistment age meet the military’s basic qualifications to serve.
  2. They recruit 11-12% more enlistees than they need as that is the number of soldiers who won’t make it through basic training and advanced individual training.
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Christopher A. Lawrence
Christopher A. Lawrence

Christopher A. Lawrence is a professional historian and military analyst. He is the Executive Director and President of The Dupuy Institute, an organization dedicated to scholarly research and objective analysis of historical data related to armed conflict and the resolution of armed conflict. The Dupuy Institute provides independent, historically-based analyses of lessons learned from modern military experience.
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Mr. Lawrence was the program manager for the Ardennes Campaign Simulation Data Base, the Kursk Data Base, the Modern Insurgency Spread Sheets and for a number of other smaller combat data bases. He has participated in casualty estimation studies (including estimates for Bosnia and Iraq) and studies of air campaign modeling, enemy prisoner of war capture rates, medium weight armor, urban warfare, situational awareness, counterinsurgency and other subjects for the U.S. Army, the Defense Department, the Joint Staff and the U.S. Air Force. He has also directed a number of studies related to the military impact of banning antipersonnel mines for the Joint Staff, Los Alamos National Laboratories and the Vietnam Veterans of American Foundation.
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His published works include papers and monographs for the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment and the Vietnam Veterans of American Foundation, in addition to over 40 articles written for limited-distribution newsletters and over 60 analytical reports prepared for the Defense Department. He is the author of Kursk: The Battle of Prokhorovka (Aberdeen Books, Sheridan, CO., 2015), America’s Modern Wars: Understanding Iraq, Afghanistan and Vietnam (Casemate Publishers, Philadelphia & Oxford, 2015), War by Numbers: Understanding Conventional Combat (Potomac Books, Lincoln, NE., 2017) , The Battle of Prokhorovka (Stackpole Books, Guilford, CT., 2019), The Battle for Kyiv (Frontline Books, Yorkshire, UK, 2023), Aces at Kursk (Air World, Yorkshire, UK, 2024), Hunting Falcon: The Story of WWI German Ace Hans-Joachim Buddecke (Air World, Yorkshire, UK, 2024) and The Siege of Mariupol (Frontline Books, Yorkshire, UK, 2024).
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Mr. Lawrence lives in northern Virginia, near Washington, D.C., with his wife and son.

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