Suppose They Held a War and Nobody Came: Systemic Approaches to Shared Military Personnel Challenges

Suppose They Held a War and Nobody Came: Systemic Approaches to Shared Military Personnel Challenges

Published by: Rand

By: Paul Cormarie, Stephen Dalzell, Naoko Aoki, Omar Danaf, Jan K. Gleiman (Editor-in-Chief of SWJ)

Download the report here.

Summary

Allies and partners of the United States in Europe and East Asia are having widespread, significant, systemic, and strategically relevant problems in developing military personnel. None of these countries are immune from the personnel challenges caused by demographic decline, social factors, and economic conditions, at a time when some are seeking to expand their forces. Not all U.S. allies and partners have given enough attention to the similar problems that they face. Their shortages in personnel have direct, indirect, and strategic effects for collective defense in Europe and potential combined defense operations in East Asia, ultimately affecting U.S. interests abroad; these effects deserve further study.

In this report, we propose that critical gaps in partner troop levels may not be inevitable but could be mitigated by moving away from an outdated personnel paradigm detached from modern societies. Variations in personnel patterns are more frequent than popularly believed; they often change over periods shaped by different strategic environments. As we have entered an era of multipolar, great power competition combined with emerging and disruptive threats, the new strategic landscape calls for a fresh approach to military staffing that differs from that of the post–Cold War era.

In this report, we find the following challenges for foreign militaries:

• There is growing demand for personnel in Europe because of national and multinational plans to expand forces.
• There is a decreasing supply of personnel. This trend is systemic in East Asia and Europe and risks making existing force objectives in Europe unsustainable.
• Government responses tend to be similar, systematic across regions, and unsuccessful in shifting personnel trends.

These challenges can lead directly to a hollower and less capable force. Lower capacity can lead to lower readiness, lower flexibility, and a more expensive force that cannot take more of the burden in collective defense and potential combined defense operations. Overall, such impacts can ultimately lead to decreased deterrence, less effective responses to threats, and further tensions within U.S. alliances.

If these problems cannot be solved by simply recruiting more of the same kinds of people for the same kinds of services, the logical solution is for these countries to consider recruiting from different parts of their populations to serve in new ways or under new terms. By assessing the existing military personnel paradigm, we propose several solutions to refit patterns of military recruitment broadly across country lines. Although some foreign governments have experimented with some of these solutions already, these options present opportunities for a dramatic departure from the way we perceive military recruitment abroad and a career in the armed forces.

We explored the following possibilities:

• strategic conscription focused on converting conscripts into careerists

• a fuller continuum of service to improve retention

• eliminating the officer corps as a distinct status and increasing career options

• adapting fitness standards to national conditions

• modifying the time, place, or conditions of service

• recruiting foreigners with a path to citizenship

• privatizing mission components, including the lifting of some military constraints

• deviating from standard pay scales and offering more–market-based compensation

All these changes would represent a dramatic departure from existing models of military recruitment and personnel management. Not all of them would be appropriate for every country experiencing the problem. We recommend that the United States and its allies and partners collectively consider promoting dialogue on military personnel, building recruiting and retention centers of excellence, and applying machine learning and artificial intelligence to personnel management.1

1 This sentence was updated in October 2025 to clarify our recommendations.