RECENTLY, the US Army reported that its recruitment rate was declining. There just aren’t enough people joining the different branches of the US military, causing some analysts to even consider returning the draft.
This development is not surprising. The only reason it has maintained a healthy demographic relative to other developed countries is because of immigration, and I doubt many migrants want to go to the US just to join its army, and fight its wars.
America’s demographics is partly the reason why recruitment has declined. Historically, military service functioned to absorb an excess male population. When the population doesn’t have that surplus, it runs out of soldiers.
It’s not just the US, however. China and Russia, two other countries with relatively strong armies, have population age demographics that are also aging rapidly. So they, too, are unlikely to have the population to have large-scale wars. Europe also has this problem as well as many other countries with powerful militaries like Japan and South Korea.
So what does this mean?
It means that large-scale war is not likely to happen in the near future. There may be small-scale wars or wars that last for a few of weeks or even wars that are basically large police actions, but we are not likely to encounter large-scale attrition, multi-country warfare like those seen in the 20th century, because we don’t have enough men to send into the meat grinder.
Further, given the effects of demographic decline, we are likely to encounter a lot of small-scale wars, the kinds that go along with a declining centralized power, where small, corporate and local powers try to fill vacuums left behind by state or global authority.
And since demographic decline is a phenomenon that affects every country in the world, this holds true for everybody./PN
