Senior soldiers: The thin gray line

Abstract

The confluence of deep cultural, social, and demographic trends with technological change can create conditions to which fundamental aspects of military organization and structure must rapidly adjust. Nomadic steppe warriors with composite bows and stirrups changed balances of power from China to Western Europe and throughout the Middle East; corned gunpowder and naval cannon technology, combined with powerful commercial, religious, and imperialistic forces, made the world a European realm for centuries; nuclear weapons have made civilization-level wars unthinkable (if not, unfortunately, impossible). Today a similar adjustment becomes necessary, as demographic shifts change the worker pools that the military will need to draw on, and technology increasingly removes the warrior from direct combat, changing fundamentally the types of skills that the military will need to cultivate, from the aggression, emotion, and physical stamina of youth to the judgment, wisdom, and patience of older age.

Then it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ “Tommy,’ow’s yer soul?” But it’s “Thin red line of ’eroes” when the drums begin to roll, The drums begin to roll, my boys, the drums begin to roll, O it’s “Thin red line of ’eroes” when the drums begin to roll. (Kipling, 1899)

Fans of space opera, and perhaps researchers in the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency looking for ideas about enhanced warriors, will be familiar with John Scalzi’s 2005 sci-fi novel, Old Man’s War. Elderly recruits form the bulk of humanity’s off-planet forces—but only, of course, after they are provided with youthful, enhanced bodies, thereby demonstrating that even if you start with seniors rather than adolescents, warfare is a young person’s game. And indeed, throughout history militaries have generally been dominated by younger, fitter men and, more recently, women, even if their officers and commanders have tended to be older and more experienced. There are, of course, obvious reasons for this: War is hard, dirty, challenging work, and if you march to combat carrying 80 to 100 pounds of equipment, you have to be in shape. Moreover, adolescents have other advantages that militaries have learned to capitalize on. They tend to be emotional and romantic, which enables them to be motivated via a valuable esprit de corps that emerges at the unit level; the French Napoleonic citizen army that stood off European armies wielded by the reactionary forces of conservatism is one historical example. They often combine aggressiveness with a tendency to defer to elders, making them effective but still relatively easy to regiment. And in many cases they have not yet coupled into society through families and employment, meaning that service is minimally disruptive to existing responsibilities and social roles. In short, there are really good reasons why military service is almost completely aimed at young people, with a professional cadre that stays on after initial service.

But fundamental demographic trends and technological evolution may challenge this virtually automatic presumption in favor of youth. A young army assumes a demographic surplus in the younger cohorts; today in most developed countries, the trend is increasingly the opposite: The demographic surplus will be among seniors. A young military assumes that it is young people who will have the time and energy to serve, as the young are not yet raising families or doing sophisticated jobs requiring years of experience and skill development. Today, it is equally likely that older cohorts, having raised their children and retired from their primary occupations, will have the freedom to take on new commitments—and the opportunity costs to society of losing them, as opposed to younger cohorts, from the potential civilian employment pool are arguably less. (For purposes of this discussion, one might assume a relevant senior recruitment pool would include those between the ages of 55 and 75, although there is nothing necessarily fixed about those numbers.) Additionally, the challenges of modern conflict, frequently mixing combat, policing, counterinsurgency, and antiterrorism missions, are more complex than has been generally true historically, putting more of an emphasis on balance, wisdom, and life experience than on simple aggression, physical stamina, and strength.

But those are not the only fundamental trends at play. One of the key economic shifts since the Industrial Revolution has been the substitution of capital for labor; this is reflected not just on the manufacturing floor, now often dominated by robots as opposed to human labor, but in subtle ways. Discovery searches in legal cases, for example, have migrated from human to computer. While modern militaries have responded to these technological changes, which in their domain can have significant implications, they have perhaps not realized that this shift provides a flexibility that enables—indeed, requires—rethinking the labor side of military activities in other, equally profound ways. For example, devices such as exoskeletons and wide-spectrum surveillance devices can be tweaked relatively easily to both compensate for less agile and weaker older soldiers and enhance them technologically to whatever standard is desired. Just as the Industrial Revolution learned to do without child labor in part by enhancing the efficiency of machines that would now be tended by adult workers, so can militaries design their capital not just to substitute for labor, but to shift the type of labor involved. Such capability arises because the human and technological systems are jointly designed and fielded; an army adapted to changing demographics will not be simply an unplanned by-product of ongoing technological evolution.

The loss in reaction time, perceptual acuity, and cognitive capability that tends to accompany older age can already be mitigated with augmented cognition (“augcog”) and other technologies. Just as cars are being designed to drive themselves, in part to compensate for their driver’s loss of cognitive capability (whether through age or, in adolescent populations, texting and other multitasking), and to enhance safe driving practices (e.g., maintaining specified distances from surrounding vehicles), so can military technologies be devised that compensate for the shifts in cognitive capability that accompany aging. Many combat situations are already so fast-moving and complex that human response time and cognitive capabilities are inadequate; in the military sphere, cognition increasingly emerges from integrated techno-human networks, rather than simply from individuals. (See, for example, DARPA’s XDATA program, ¹ which supports research in scalable, integrated techno-human systems capable of processing the increasing streams of data characterizing modern battlefields.)

But it is not just that technological evolution enables a different workforce; it requires a different workforce. Emerging military and security technologies increasingly perform the active roles in military conflict, in part because humans, no matter how young and fit, can no longer keep up with the complexity and speeds of the combat environment. In conflicts with strategies of “unrestricted warfare,” where all aspects of a country’s activities, from financial activities to infrastructure to traditional military targets, may be engaged, physical prowess is useless. The experience, wisdom, and patience of older warriors integrates well with the emerging visions of future wars and the technologies that are and will be deployed to fight them.

Obviously, implementation of such a fundamental shift in military systems must be made carefully, without jeopardizing existing capabilities. Undoubtedly, there will be a learning curve. Tweaking technology and institutions such as service medical support, so a different cohort of soldier with different characteristics provides the desired functionality, will not be a trivial or cost-free process. Undoubtedly there will be some areas—cyber warfare, perhaps, given the rapid evolution of the relevant technologies—in which younger soldiers have an advantage that, at least today, argues against such a demographic change. And some activities, such as special operations, will continue to demand young, highly trained, physically competent soldiers. But if shifting from a younger to older military makes sense, then the country that makes the shift first may well be able to claim an important strategic advantage.

Demographic realities

The United States today is the third most populous country in the world, with a population of approximately 320 million. While the US birth rate of 1.88 per woman is currently less than the replacement rate of 2.1 and less than that of some other developed countries, the population of the United States is growing at a level of slightly under 1 percent a year because of immigration. Projections for 2050 put the anticipated US population above 400 million, but more significant for our purposes is the shift in the “dependency ratio,” or the ratio between the working-age population and the very young and the elderly. The Pew Research Center (Passel and Cohn, 2008) notes that in 2005 that ratio was 59 young and elderly supported by 100 workers, but by 2050 the ratio would be somewhere between 69 and 75 dependents per 100 workers. Numerically, the number of over-65 s is anticipated to rise from 37 million in 2005 to 81 million in 2050.

While for simplicity’s sake this discussion will generally focus on the United States, it is worth noting that similar trend lines characterize most developed countries as well as many of those that are rapidly developing, such as China. Underdeveloped countries, especially in the Middle East and Africa, show a different pattern, with pronounced youth bulges that in some cases may continue through 2050.

Some relevant subtleties are buried in the numbers for aging countries in the developed world. As The Economist has noted, ² skilled, better-educated old people are working longer than their unskilled compatriots, and they are being paid more for doing so, increasing inequality within society not just among generations but within the older cohorts. This has geopolitical implications: Not only might increasing inequality contribute to political instability generally, it may make continued economic growth through productivity difficult for a country like China, where the aging population is far less educated, than for countries such as the United States where more aging workers are highly educated and highly productive. Superficially, this may seem an argument against recruiting seniors—if they are an important source of productivity then enlisting them in the military might have a high social opportunity cost—but in reality, absent a “senior draft,” one would expect those who are prematurely retired or have fewer civilian options would choose the military option. By reducing inequality in the senior cohorts, the senior military option might in fact be generating a degree of social stability.

While human demographics are complex and challenging, the main implications of the continuing shift toward an older population are apparent. There will be fewer potential young soldiers in future, in part because absolute numbers may fall, but certainly because the competition for young people among the military and civilian employers will become intense. As a corollary, if there is a lack of young workers, and the military does succeed in continuing to obtain soldiers from that cohort, the result will be inadequate labor to support economic growth. This gets at a fundamental reality: A military must be maintained with minimal impact on economic strength, because both a strong military and a strong economy are required to maintain great-power status.

An associated issue involves the opportunity cost to society of providing warriors. Relying on young recruits generally involves several years lost between schooling and entering the workforce, so society loses the services of a relatively inexperienced individual for a short period of time. ³ But as young people become relatively more scarce in developing economies, the opportunity cost of such a gap in their experience and economic contribution to society becomes larger. Moreover, despite valid civilian benefits arising from military leadership and technical training, it is generally the case that military experience transfers unevenly to civilian applications, especially in the case of combat skills. If an elderly recruit has retired from her or his civilian employment, on the other hand, the opportunity cost to society of relying on that individual for military service is relatively low; in most cases such an individual would not be working anyway. Similarly, it is relatively costless to society if seniors are trained in military-specific skills that don’t transfer easily to civilian applications, since they have already contributed the benefits of their working life to their society.

But the economic domain is not the only one that generates opportunity costs. Young people who enter the military create societal benefits because they are usually at a point in their lives where they are leaving their birth families and in many cases have not yet started families of their own. In many cases, however, older people who join the military may be in a similar position in that they have already raised their families; it may well be the case that many, because of divorce or the death of their spouses, do not have any immediate family at that point in their lives.

The demographic argument is thus compelling and very simple: In the United States, as in many developed countries, the population is aging. This means that continuing to rely on young people to fill the military ranks will be increasingly costly, in part because of more competition for young people and in part because the young people who do become part of the military carry a higher opportunity cost given the increasing scarcity of workers in the civilian economy. Responsible adjustments to these demographic realities cannot be made quickly. A demographic watershed a decade or two in the future requires that militaries begin planning now.

This analysis does, of course, depend to some extent on the historical link between availability of labor and continued economic growth. While this has been true historically, some economists and social observers argue that current conditions—marked by the rapid mechanization of many jobs performed by humans, including tasks such as medical diagnosis and legal analysis that were thought to be relatively safe from such a substitution effect—are fundamentally different, and that the middle class will shrink in a post-industrial economy. At this early stage, there is no way to determine whether this argument—which has been made previously and proved to be incorrect or at least premature then—is correct now. And yet this is a critical question, for depending on how it falls out, military policy may point in diametrically opposite directions.

If it is true that middle-class jobs, especially for the young, really are trending down in a relatively permanent way, then the military, rather than evolving towards a more senior demographic structure, should double down on youth; doing so will provide a social safety valve while cultures, societies, institutions, and economies adjust to new, employment-lite conditions. If, however, automation does not greatly and permanently restrict employment, then the military should indeed evolve toward a more senior demographic.

This fundamental conundrum cannot be resolved except in real time, as events and employment trends unfold. The dilemma therefore suggests an appropriate policy path. It is one that enables the military to experiment and practice with older volunteer cohorts, without prematurely committing military technologies and institutions to either a “youth strategy” or a “senior strategy.”

Implementation realities

Years ago, I was responsible for developing and implementing a telework/virtual office strategy for a major American telecommunications company. This appeared to be a relatively trivial incremental change in the working environment; after all, a number of employees, especially in research and development, already worked at home one or even two days a week, almost everyone took work home with them in the evenings, and most offices functioned reasonably well during snow days because people had learned how to telework. So we began an aggressive virtual office campaign, supported by a need to cut costs. Only as it unfolded did we realize that we were, without intending to, changing fundamental characteristics of the firm.

Office buildings could be closed as employees shifted to virtual arrangements, but only if the information and communication networks and data systems could be upgraded to support those employees. The firm began to shift subtly from being defined primarily by its workplace locations, to being increasingly defined by its networks. Managers panicked; regardless of the sophistication of the human resources employee evaluation tools they used, most had implicitly relied on the old and reliable metric of TOD—“time at desk”—and the shift to virtual meant they had to try to figure out what their employees actually did. Human resources got itchy; developing practices and corporate guidelines that applied when workers shifted from the informal occasional work-at-home day to full virtual was terra incognita. (Should regular work hours apply? If not … well, then, what should?) Security became a much bigger issue, because material that could be controlled relatively easily in an office environment suddenly spilled out into public networks and venues, and the shift to virtual, which culturally mixed “work” and “home/play” space, also mixed work and personal on home computers.

Lawyers struggled to integrate applicable tax law, which is location-based, with virtual employment patterns, which are production- but not place-based. If an employee was listed in a New Jersey location, but worked in New York, except when they were working in Vermont and Canada, where was the employee’s income taxed? And suppose an accident occurred in an employee’s home when he or she was working, but not in the employee’s home office per se; was it covered under occupational health law? In short, what sounded like a reasonably easy and incremental change led, in fact, to fundamental and permanent change for employees, managers, firm infrastructure, and almost all of the firm’s institutional domains, from law to human resources to performance metrics.

Shifting to a more senior structure raises a similar challenge for the military. It is not that there aren’t some trends in this direction already. A recent Rand Corporation study notes that over the past 20 years, the proportion of Army recruits over age 22 has risen from about 17 percent to around 35 percent (Rostker et al., 2014). Older enlistees are generally in their 20 s, but it is worth observing that, in 2009, six percent of enlistees in all branches of the US military were between the ages of 29 and 42. Older enlistees are different: They score higher on the enlistment qualification tests and are more likely to be married. Moreover, although they are slightly more likely to leave during basic training than enlistees directly out of high school, older enlistees are more likely to reenlist, and they are promoted faster than the high school enlistee cohorts. On the other hand, they also appeared to be doing less well in the job market than their civilian peers, suggesting that military service is giving them a second chance.

As with the virtual office example, however, the fact that recruitment classes are trending older is an incremental change, while deliberately shifting to a senior military, drawing from a 55 to 75 year-old cohort, would represent a disruptive change. Accepting recruits regardless of race, sex, or sexual orientation is one thing. But, to note the obvious, older bodies and older brains create different challenges. These can be relatively trivial: Should, for example, menus change if one has a number of cholesterol-challenged troops, and if so how? But they can also be foundational. Medical standards and practice, for example, could change dramatically, because seniors suffer from complications and ailments that younger people seldom do, and their physiologies are fundamentally different. Bones may be weaker; pharmaceuticals may be required to maintain standard functional performance (e.g., statins to control cholesterol). Training would need to be redesigned. Physically, seniors would need a different, and no doubt less strenuous, regime to keep them in shape; mentally, it would be important to assure that training was designed to be effective for seniors as well as for younger recruits. Operationally, not only would the different physical capabilities of seniors need to be considered as military systems were designed and fielded, but it would be necessary to ensure that soldiers’ cognitive functions remained adequate for the assignment. Retirement and medical benefits post-service could also be complicated; Veterans Affairs hospitals, for example, could see a significant shift in the sorts of medical services they have to provide (from prosthetics to hip replacements, perhaps). It is not that some of this isn’t a concern today; it is that the change to a more senior structure at some point involves differences in kind, not just in degree.

More subtle, perhaps, an influx of true seniors would potentially raise interesting organizational challenges. What would be the dynamics, for example, of young officers ordering senior privates into harm’s way, or, for that matter, having to adjust their expectations to the obvious differences that seniors would bring to their performance? More broadly, might a gray military actually be more conservative, as younger service members become a minority and their new ideas and experience with technology perhaps appear less obviously beneficial to the military as a whole?

And then there is the very basic observation that, throughout history, the image of the warrior has been one of personal strength, and of youth. It has certainly not been one of older men and women. There are significant if unquantifiable implications to changing this image, and the virtually universal military culture within which it is embedded: They should not be underestimated. A lot may depend on whether the soldier on “the tip of the spear”—the one who actually does the fighting in combat—changes. Regardless, however, change is coming: Similar image considerations arise when robots begin to replace soldiers and unpiloted aerial vehicles replace piloted platforms. The reality may well be that, regardless of demographics, the traditional warrior archetype is already obsolete; a recruiting poster with an unpiloted Predator on it is only slightly less radical than one with a heroic oldster with a slight paunch and a quizzical expression. And both may already be the new face of force projection.

Many of these questions cannot be answered a priori, and indeed it is no doubt the case that some of them will not be issues at all, and the really important questions cannot be framed yet. Change that appears daunting is, in fact, often quite manageable once adaptation begins, especially if enough lead time is allowed for the inevitable adjustments and application of lessons learned. But responsible management suggests that the time to begin considering options and implications is when potentially significant change is on the horizon, rather than allowing oneself to be overwhelmed in the event.

Some guidelines for implementing a demographic shift in military forces

The US military is not inexperienced at implementing difficult cultural and demographic change, sometimes well before civilian society makes the effort. For example, it was a complicated and not uncontroversial process, but in the 10 years after World War II the US military desegregated its ranks, in part reflecting the reality of that war, during which more than 900,000 black soldiers served their country. More recently, the repeal of the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy effectively eliminated discrimination based on sexual orientation. A shift to an elder military, however, is different in meaningful ways. A few basic guidelines could help smooth the shift.

Most important, the mission and effectiveness of the military must come first. The raison d’être of moving toward a senior military is essentially demographic necessity, combined with an increasing opportunity cost of relying predominantly on younger recruits, combined with technological evolution that is changing the skills that characterize the warrior. It would be not just ironic, but foolish, if the effort to construct a stronger military for the future undesirably and unnecessarily weakened the current structure.

Experience strongly suggests that a period of experimentation is helpful, because the implications of change, especially when they involve strong and complex institutions such as the military, are inherently unpredictable. It would be highly desirable if the military could avoid premature lock-in of suboptimal conditions and maintain a high level of self-conscious learning while the process unfolds. Constant exploration of alternatives and options through, e.g., appropriately structured war games is an obvious way to try to build a resilient and viable path forward. Certainly for now, special operations troops would seem a candidate for young recruits in prime mental and physical shape; but effective operation of a complex logistics system might call for different capabilities. Older recruits might be able to operate remote robotic systems such as Predators with less stress. A main caveat here is that the recognized need for caution not become a sub rosa mechanism for preventing progress.

The evolution toward a grayer military should not be oversimplified into a process of simply dropping elders into existing slots. Seniors are different from the young people that militaries are used to and have been designed for. They may in some cases require technological augmentation to perform the functions required of them; in other cases their life experience and wisdom may be critical to mission success. Much complexity arises because, as in the case of the virtual office implementation discussed above, a shift to older soldiers, sailors, and airmen will undoubtedly cause unpredictable changes throughout the system, and those changes must be perceived, understood, and supported if the shift is to achieve the desired outcome: a strong military that is synergistic with, and reflects and aligns with, the society and culture that it is sworn to protect. The cultural and institutional change associated with increased reliance on older warriors is difficult to predict but will likely be profound and require careful learning and real-time management.

In a similar vein, the evolution of a grayer military should not be understood as simply a demographic shift. Military and security technology is in a period of rapid evolution, and currently it is being designed for the younger people who are the mainstay of the military. That’s why, for example, video-game controllers are the model for military robot control systems; Young soldiers are often very familiar with such technology, and can adopt it easily. In those areas and jobs in which elder recruits are first utilized, the technology should be shaped to augment their skills, compensate for their weaknesses, and take advantage of their strengths—shaped, for example, to take advantage of the wisdom and balance, rather than aggression and audacity, that older soldiers might display. After all, the clear trend in military technology is to vest in each soldier increasing responsibility for more destructive power, while the means to exercise it increasingly requires less strength, a trend generally playing to the skills of the older soldier.

Ideally, of course, the military of the future will be designed to optimize use of younger and senior recruits, with each assigned to areas of specialty in which technology, context, and mission requirements suit their skills and capabilities.

Moving up a learning curve as complex and fundamental as the one that will accompany a graying of military personnel will be hard, but such a learning process cannot be avoided when change is forced by fundamental trends such as demographics and technological advance. Moreover, the military that starts its demographic transition first may well gain significant competitive advantage, as well as lowering the opportunity costs of military service for the country it serves. Smart management argues that even if a shift to older demographics is eventually limited, the strong possibility that it will be necessary argues for being prepared to make the shift. Accordingly, it is not too early to begin developing the capability to build and deploy a senior-based military organization.

It may be that the United States never develops a thin gray line, but the possibility that it will be necessary does mean that the country should be prepared for an older military force.