There is no doubt that there is a serious problem in manning the American military. The problem is not the military’s. The problem belongs to the American people and Congress.

In 1973, the soon-to-be most disgraced president of the United States implemented the all-volunteer force (AVF) and did away with conscription — a political and social act to atone for the sins of the most unpopular war in our country’s history and an unfair military draft. So, today, 330 million Americans lay claim to rights, liberties, and privileges that not one of them is obligated to protect and defend. So, this task falls to a small portion of Americans, largely from the third and fourth socio-economic quintiles, to discharge on behalf of a nation of limited-liability patriots.

Maj. Gen. Malcom Frost, the former commander of the Army’s Initial Military Training Command, said that “the next existential threat we have…is the inability to man our military.”

Recruiting problems historically are most acute in the Army; it is the canary in the coal mine. Last year, the Army’s initial recruiting goal was 80,000 enlistees. Early in the year, that was reduced to 76,500. The Army ultimately enlisted 70,000, a shortfall of 7,600. Of the 70,000 recruited, 10 to 12 percent required waivers of existing “standards” and 1.9 percent were Category IV (CAT IV) recruits who scored between the 10th and 31st percentile on the Army’s aptitude test. A 2005 Rand Corp. study identified that CAT IV soldiers perform between 20.4 and 30.0 percent less effectively than higher scoring recruits. Thus, the Army had a quantity and a quality failure, despite offering unprecedented enlistment “bonuses” that are disproportionately attractive to the lower socio-economic classes. The other services are experiencing problems in specific functional areas: pilots, cyber warriors and special ops, as examples.

Over the past 18 years of “endless war,” the Pentagon has adopted numerous measures to prop up the AVF. These measures included: repeat deployments that violated long-standing dwell time policies; stop-loss, a “back door draft”; unprecedented enlistment and reenlistment bonuses; lowered enlistment standards; and the use of prescription psychotropic drugs to deal with service members’ emotional and psychological stress. We had too much war and not enough warriors, but the American people and Congress declined to consider conscription, leaving the problems to the Pentagon and the 1 percent of the population willing to serve in the military.