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I haven’t always had the nicest things to say about Secretary of Defense Robert Gates—especially when it comes to managing the defense budget (see my article “The Big Squeeze”). That said, yesterday at Duke University, Secretary Gates gave an extraordinary speech in which he talked about “the state of America’s all-volunteer force, reflecting on its achievements” but also raising a number of troubling issues.

First things first, Gates was not calling for a return to conscription. As he noted, the all-volunteer force has given the country “the best educated, the most capable force this country has ever sent into battle.” And, indeed, it is hard to imagine, he notes, that the country would have been able to undertake the “complex, protracted missions” it has in Iraq and Afghanistan “without the dedication of seasoned professionals who chose to serve—and keep on serving … Going back to compulsory service, in addition to being politically impossible, is highly impracticable given the kinds of technical skills, experience, and attributes needed to be successful on the battlefield in the 21st century.”

Yet, as with any organizational choice, there will be associated costs. In the case of the all-volunteer force, there are costs that are obvious and some that are not. Gates speaks to both.

In the first instance, there is the tremendous stress repeated deployments have put on the families of the men and women of the military. Part of the implied “contract” the country has with the members of the all-volunteer force is that in exchange for serving one’s country and, if necessary, putting one’s life on the line, we will provide them with some “semblance of a normal life.” But given the limited size of America’s ground forces (a point Gates does not raise) and the character of the conflicts we’ve been engaged in and will likely remain engaged in for some years to come, that semblance of normality has largely gone by the wayside. As Gates notes, the consequences “include more anxiety and disruption inflicted on children, increased domestic strife, and a corresponding rising divorce rate, which in the case of the Army enlisted has nearly doubled since the wars began.” In addition, as the force grows older and the nation seeks to keep reenlistment rates high, the all-volunteer force grows increasingly costly. Over the past decade, “the amount of money the military spends on personnel and benefits has nearly doubled.” No one of course would begrudge the benefits service men and women receive but, the reality is, a first-rate all-volunteer force is not cheap.

If Secretary Gates had ended with just those points the speech would have been interesting but not especially noteworthy. What was noteworthy was his willingness to dive into the more subtle, but no less important issue of “the relationship between those in uniform and the wider society they have sworn to protect.” To start, Gates suggests that “for most Americans the wars remain an abstraction.” The fact is, today, less than 1 percent of Americans serve either in the active duty forces or the reserves. Moreover, as he also remarks, fewer and fewer Americans have ties to those who have served in the military. “In 1988 about 40 percent of 18-year-olds had a veteran parent. By 2000 the share had dropped to 18 percent, and is projected to fall below 10 percent in the future.” The familial ties that bind the military to the country are simply growing weaker.

So too the geographical and social ties. As Gates notes, the services focus their recruiting efforts where they are most likely to have success and that, in turn, means fishing in the waters where young men and women are familiar with the military. In turn, that typically means recruiting in areas where there are existing military bases, that is, where someone is likely to have a friend, a former classmate, a father or mother, who is serving or has served in the military. But precisely because of the last two decades worth of base consolidation, this has meant a smaller and smaller footprint from which the military is drawing recruits. For the Army in particular, Gates remarks, this has resulted in its bases largely concentrated in the states of Georgia, Kentucky, Texas, Washington, and North Carolina, leaving large swaths of the country “void,” in Gates words, “of relationships and understanding of the armed forces.”

Similarly, the “national” character of the ROTC program—the principal source for the recruitment of military officers—has also shrunk. In touching on this issue, Gates picks up many of the themes that I and my AEI colleague Cheryl Miller recently wrote about in a Wall Street Journal op-ed (“The Military Should Mirror the Nation”). Not only have elite colleges and universities kept ROTC programs off their campuses—ignoring their own pre-Vietnam War tradition of providing the military with class after class of military officers—so too has the military virtually dropped out of many major metropolitan areas to the detriment of its ability to recruit from a diverse and talented segment of America’s youth.  As Gates points out, “the state of Alabama, with a population of less than 5 million, has 10 Army ROTC host programs … the Chicago metro area, population 9 million, has 3.” Left unstated, but certainly true, is that this is the military’s self-inflicted wound. If not addressed, over time, this is bound to have a less than salutary impact on the relationship of the military with the larger American society.

If I have any bone to pick with Gates it’s that he could have been more forward-leaning in saying what he might do to fix the problems. He is the Secretary of Defense, after all. It is well within his power to fix the ROTC’s geographic problem, to argue for an increase in America’s ground forces to relieve the pressures of rotation on service men and women and their families, and to use his good reputation to increase public pressure on the faculties and administrations of the nation’s elite schools to let ROTC back on campus. Gates has raised a number of serious issues; what we need now are serious efforts to address them.

Renny McPherson, a former Marine officer now at Harvard Business School, considers an important challenge for the military in this weekend’s Boston Globe: Why are there so few David Petraeuses?

This isn’t an academic question. As McPherson notes, the demand for innovative and adaptive leadership is greater than ever before (a need also recognized by the 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review) thanks to a shift in war-fighting strategy and tactics:

Over the course of the 20th century, the United States became the dominant world power by advancing the technology of warfare. Now the information revolution, recent conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, and global counter-terrorism have shown that an expanded set of skills is required of our top officers. Today we need military leaders who can process the ever-larger amounts of information coming at them and who can communicate more dexterously up, down, and across; they also must be adept at dealing with nonmilitary institutions and quick to learn foreign cultures.

How do we get more officers with the necessary skill sets to succeed? McPherson interviewed “37 top military leaders” to learn what experiences best equipped them for the battlefields of tomorrow.

What’s interesting is that all the queried leaders emphasized experiences that got them outside the military “comfort zone,” whether it be civilian graduate school, study abroad programs, or serving with NATO or at the United Nations. The key here, McPherson writes, is regular interaction “with others who have different values. This does not simply mean fellow service members with dissimilar political views but repeated, regular contact with an array of leaders and everyday citizens from different cultures.”

All these experiences are no doubt valuable, but might there be a cheaper, more readily available alternative closer to home? That’s right—it’s the ROTC. McPherson describes a heightened need for officers with cultural competency, regional knowledge, expertise in conflict resolution, and language and computer skills. Fortunately, America’s universities offer excellent programs in all those areas. And given the diversity of those campuses, ROTC cadets are very used to working with people who hold values different from their own.

The military needs to rethink how it develops future leaders. But in its quest for innovation, it shouldn’t overlook older programs, like the ROTC, that can get the job done.

Cheryl Miller is manager of AEI’s Program on American Citizenship.

Image by Aaron McDowell.