Who Will Serve

In 2007 the United States recorded more births than in any year before or since. Eighteen years later, that record-sized class reached enlistment age, and the classes behind it are smaller, year after year, because the country's fertility rate has fallen and never recovered. Who Will Serve traces the arithmetic behind America's recruiting crisis: the demographic wave that carried the armed forces through the 2010s and 2020s, and the shrinking pool of eligible, willing young people that will define military recruiting for the rest of the century. Drawing on Pentagon data, Census figures, and reporting on allied nations further down the same demographic curve, this book shows why the Army's stunning 2022 shortfall was never just a pandemic-era blip, and why the recovery since has not touched the deeper problem underneath. From the bargain that ended the draft in 1973 to the robots, noncitizen recruits, and quietly rebuilt registration systems being tested today, Who Will Serve lays out, without taking sides, the choices a volunteer military faces when the population it depends on stops growing. It is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand what a smaller America means for its ability to defend itself.