MANNING THE AMERICAN MILITARY: DEMOGRAPHICS AND NATIONAL SECURITY

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MANNING THE AMERICAN MILITARY: DEMOGRAPHICS AND NATIONAL SECURITY
An NPG Forum Paper
by Martin Binkin
May 1990

This is the sixth in a series of NPG FORUM papers exploring the idea of the optimum population—what would be a desirable population size for the United States? Without any consensus even as to whether the population should be larger or smaller, the country presently creates its demographic future by inadvertence as it makes decisions on other issues that influence population change.

The approach we have adopted is the ‘foresight” process. We have asked specialists in various fields to examine the connection between alternative population futures and national or social objectives in their fields of interest. In this issue of the FORUM, Martin Binkin explores the connections between demographics and national security. Mr. Binkin is a senior fellow in the Foreign Policy Studies program at the Brookings Institution, currently on sabbatical, serving as the Secretary of the Navy Fellow in the Economics Department, United States Naval Academy. He has written extensively on defense manpower issues.

It is said that Josef Stalin, once cautioned against offending the Vatican, asked his advisers how many divisions the Pope could field. Traditionally a nation’s standing in the world has been determined by its military power and, for most of history, military power has been expressed in terms of division flags or the number of men under arms. By the middle decades of the 20th century, however, mass armies had become an anachronism, first because of the introduction of thermonuclear weapons and later with the spawning of sophisticated military technologies that became substitutes for raw manpower. Even small nations, like Israel, were able to prevail in military confrontations with much more populated enemies. More recently, the Japanese have demonstrated that economic power may be at least as important as military power in contemporary global relationships. Despite these trends, however, much of the conventional wisdom still holds that large armed forces are the sine qua non of national power. Thus the prospect that the population of the United States may not continue to grow into the 21st century—and, depending on national policy choices, could decline markedly—has aroused some concern. These fears, however, are unwarranted.

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