Rethinking Our Warrior Class

The all-volunteer military is showing its exposed flanks.

We of a certain generation can remember how ecstatic we felt when it was announced that the U.S. was dropping the military draft that had been in place since 1940. Although the draft lasted another 33 years, World War II, America’s last arguably just war — a war it had to fight because of a real foreign threat — ended in 1945. After 1973, no one was forced to take up arms to carry out a president’s foreign policy whims.

The last conscript retired from military service in 2014, and the roughly 2.5 million active-duty personnel are there because they want to be. Talk to most anyone who volunteers and they will tell you they enlisted because they wanted to serve the country, defend its ideals, and keep it safe. Also, allowing the military branches to choose which potential recruits they let in, based on critera including educational attainment, made for a better-educated and, arguably, a better-inspired fighting force.

But it also led to the creation of a warrior class — one which worries many observers, especially in the wake of the New Year’s Day domestic terrorism, one of which involved an Army veteran, the other an active-duty serviceman.

According to the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START), at the University of Maryland, nearly 500 individuals who are or were connected to the military were charged with extremism or terrorism from 2017–2023. Almost half of those involved plots to commit violence, START said, adding that the percentage of those service members involved in such plots is increasing.

The latest occurred on New Year’s Day. Special Forces Sgt. Matthew Livelsberger was accused of blowing up himself and a Tesla truck outside a Trump hotel in Las Vegas. Army veteran Shamsud-Din Jabbar, discharged as a staff sergeant in 2020, was charged with ramming a truck into a New Orleans crowd, killing 15 and injuring twice that number.

“The Pentagon and Department of Veterans Affairs have yet to find a way to consistently foresee the collapse of the fragile balance of many who served — carrying seen and unseen scars of war and longing for a community similar to the military,” Vera Bergengruen, Nancy A. Youssef, and Tawnell D. Hobbs wrote in The Wall Street Journal published January 5. “The lure of conspiracies or extremist ideologies can appeal to troops and veterans who miss a sense of purpose,” they added.

The U.S. Army more or less confirmed this in a report it released in 2023 but had little media distribution. Survey respondents, who included 417 enlisted soldiers and officers, told researchers they couldn’t always identify extremist behavior by military personnel and didn’t know where to report it. “This occurred because the Army didn’t clearly define extremist behavior or activity,” the report stated.

Of course, this is not to say we should fear all people in uniform being hair-trigger-potential domestic terrorists. “The rate of extremism is around the same within the military as outside of the military, according to research that's been done,” Heidi Beirich, who founded the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism (GPAHE), told PBS on January 2. But, she added: “The problem is that somebody who has military training who gets radicalized can be far more deadly. And we know that mass attacks that are perpetrated by active-duty military or veterans are more lethal than those that aren't. That's really what the problem is. And that's what needs to be focused on.

“We don't want to unleash people with military skills who then are radicalized or have already been radicalized on the American public.”

Terrorism tracker Michael Jensen was blunter. Radicalized current or former military “are more likely to attempt and successfully commit mass casualty attacks, defined as four or more victims, than extremists without similar military training or expertise,” he told The Wall Street Journal.

In other words, when you build a warrior class, the “collateral damage,” to use the military’s cynical term for unintended injury, death, an destruction, you build a class of people who are better trained to kill and maim people than the rest of us.

Lately, recruitment commercials are reinforcing the appeal of unleashing violence, for the good of the nation. The latest Marine Corps commercial, which you may have seen on NFL and college football telecasts, shows uniformed men and women in combat doing what uniformed men and women in combat do: blow up things. The Wall Street Journal journalists quoted Desmond Cook, who, they said, retired from the Marines in 2008, as feeling in limbo. “What do I do? I only knew how to do one thing. I knew how to blow stuff up, and I knew how to kill people,” he told the newspaper.

Is it cynical to propose that many who signed up did it because they wanted to shoot very powerful firearms, or handle explosives, or jump out of helicopters, or do other macho things? Are those who become radicalized during or after service trying to retain or regain a sense of the military’s “band of brothers”?

Many Americans have disapproved of most of America’s military involvements since the end of World War II, and the perception of veterans cratered during the Vietnam era, when incidents such as the My Lai massacre were widely reported. Which is why politicians abandoned the draft for a volunteer force: Because when you build a warrior class, you don’t have to face a skeptical public to justify the wars you want to fight, and the ugliness that results. You only have to recruit individuals who espouse unconditional patriotism and are open to be trained to follow their commanders’ orders.

Again — and this needs to be repeatedly emphasized — the vast majority of those who serve in uniform are not going to drive trucks into celebrating crowds, or shoot down their colleagues on an army base, the way Maj. Nidal Hassan murdered 13 people and wounded 30 others at Fort Hood, Texas in 2009. But if the Pentagon is not going to amp up its efforts to keep its troops away from radicalizing elements — which many experts agree has not been done — then it may be time to rethink the existence of the warrior class.

I don’t want anyone’s children or grandchildren plucked from civilian existence into a world where they must blindly follow the orders of those whose only credentials may be stripes on their sleeves or metal on their collars. But neither do I want a warrior class that exposes willing participants to radicalization, whether from home or abroad. Or that gives an adventuring president, who may never have served and understand what war is all about, the license to send them wherever, never to return.

No one wants to go to war. But it’s easier to justify if you have a cadre trained, ready, and often eager to march off to it. However they perceive it.