The open-ended War on Terror is leading many young Army officers to leave. By asking too much of too few today, are we endangering our security tomorrow?

“We aren’t ‘the greatest generation.’ We were raised on reality television; the military lifestyle simply can’t compete.”
“There are by far more junior officers leaving than staying in.”
“Many of the ones who are staying are mediocre.”
“I am 27. How can I start a family if I am repeatedly deploying? It would not be fair to my wife or kids.”
hese are the voices of young Army captains, speaking anonymously to avoid blowback from the military bureaucracy that still impacts them even after they have left active service. Captains are the backbone of America’s force on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as the Army’s future leaders. And they are increasingly showing the strains of the first seven years of the War on Terror.

Many are resigning at their first opportunity. Many more have been killed, injured or bear the mental health scars of fighting a counter-insurgency war without end.
After 9/11, President Bush decided to fight the War on Terror without mobilizing the nation or significantly enlarging an Army that had been downsized after the end of the Cold War. Since then, a volunteer, peacetime Army has engaged in two wars, while maintaining all of the nation’s other global commitments.

To find enough officers and men to fight in both Afghanistan and Iraq, the Army has required them to serve 15-month tours, followed by as little as 12 months to recover and retrain (compared to the normal 12-month deployment, 12-month recovery and 12-month retraining). Then they go back to war.
The result is that the Army—and especially the officer corps that it counts on for leadership—is hurting. Officer resignation rates have risen. And many are still thinking about whether or not they should stay in a career they typically chose when they were only in their teens.

One-third of West Point’s classes of 2000–2002 resigned from the Army when their five-year obligation expired, compared to the 25 percent average of the four classes that immediately preceded them. Fifty percent of the class of 2001 left by their sixth year, which is among the highest resignation rates in recent history.

West Pointers, who form the Army’s elite, have been leaving at accelerated rates for many reasons.

Young captains are typically 26 or 27 when their initial commitment ends. Many are as restless as their counterparts who did not choose the military when they were 18 and instead headed to college.

Staying in one place for ten or 20 years (the point when officers can retire with full benefits) is not for the millennial generation. Nor is a life of sacrifice defined by constant deployments.

Leonard Wong, research professor of military strategy at the U.S. Army War College’s Strategic Studies Institute and a retired Army officer, points out that young officers are caught between two worlds: the Army and their families. “This was manageable when you deployed one year out of every three. But not under today’s circumstances.”
Watch Rep. Solomon Ortiz, Admiral Eric Olson and Michele Flournoy as they tell Congress why the best and brightest are leaving their posts in the ArmyFrom wanting to start a family to paying the price for a peacetime Army during a war, our interactive graphic outlines the main reasons why young Captains are quitting their Army jobs.Capt. Jaron Wharton, a 2001 West Point graduate who is currently a military fellow at the Center for a New American Security in Washington, D.C., recently surveyed more than 100 junior officers about the issues that would affect whether they left the Army.
Their top three concerns are the high tempo of deployments over the span of a 20-year career, the desire to start a family and frustration at being unable to control their careers.

The most interesting response was that two-thirds feel the Army’s best and brightest captains are leaving active service. Wharton insists that their feelings are not factually accurate, but perception could become reality. Who wants to stay if you think the best are leaving?

The problem of a thinning officer corps has been complicated by President Bush’s recent decision to increase the size of the Army. More troops mean more officers.
Today, the active duty Army is short between 2,000 and 3,000 captains, majors and colonels, and will need at least 4,500 more captains and majors within the next two years and more in the years beyond. Where will they come from?

The military doesn’t bring in new leaders at mid- or late-career levels. That leaves only two ways to close the officer gap: entice more young people to the military and promote existing officers faster.

The first is a challenge in a world where “professional military” is not among the top career choices of the typical 18 year old. When values like “need work / life balance” and “not intimidated by authority” define young Americans’ outlook on life, the task of recruiting officers who will stay in the military is pushing the odds.
“We can find enough good candidates to be platoon leaders,” claims Wong. “The problem is finding enough young officers who have the qualities to grow beyond executing simply what they are told to do, and to cope with the complexity of strategic problems.”

An easier but more artificial solution is to promote faster. The usual rate of promotion from captain to major is 80 percent; recently, it has approached 100 percent. The normal chance of being promoted from major to lieutenant colonel is 70 percent; recently, it has been around 90 percent.

Since lieutenant colonels tend to stay in the service at least another decade, this means that many leaders who would otherwise have been forced out will shape the Army for years to come.

Which is why one ex-captain remarked, “I didn’t want to be a battalion commander some day and have to worry about whether the guy on my flank is qualified to protect it.”

Take the test: when Foreign Policy Magazine surveyed 3,437 active and retired officers about the strength of the military, the results were astounding. Answer the same four short questions to see how your and other readers’ answers compare to theirs.Watch two interviews with Lawrence Korb, senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, and Greg Newbold, a retired lieutenant general of the Marine Corps, as they speak about dealing with the loss of leaders.Just as Vietnam shaped the Army of the 1980s and the post-Cold War “peace dividend” formed today’s Army, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will have an impact far into the future.

The good news is that the conflicts of the past seven years have produced a battle-tested, experienced combat ground force which has learned to fight a different kind of war than the one for which it had been prepared. The consensus seems to be that the young and mid-level officers have generally performed well.

But will there be enough high-quality officers to lead the kind of Army the country will need in an increasingly complicated global environment? And if there aren’t, will that limit the options future presidents have to respond to national security crises?
Experts increasingly fear the answer to the first question might be “No,” which would make the answer to the second, “Yes.”

For Larry Korb, the timeline is part of the problem: “after you get out of Iraq—whenever that might be—it will take you a decade to get the Army up to the standards you had when you went into Iraq, in terms of the experience level, the qualifications of both officers and NCOs, as well as new recruits.”

Greg Newbold believes the solution is “quality, not quantity.” “The military needs its share of the country’s best and brightest,” and that will require creating and sustaining a culture of honesty, integrity, openness and high performance. What worked in the past, he believes, can be made to work again.

There is an emerging Washington consensus that something needs to be done—and that part of the solution is to enlarge the Army. There isn’t much difference in rhetoric or numbers between Senators John McCain and Barack Obama. McCain has advocated an increase of 80,000 soldiers, while Obama wants 65,000. Either proposal would require thousands of more officers.

But others think that would only be a drop in the bucket. Two prominent Washington think-tankers, Thomas Donnelly and Fred Kagan, recently proposed an 800,000 man Army, costing $240 billion and requiring a 50 percent increase in the officer corps.
They called their study Ground Truth and wrote that the failure to expand the military after 9/11 was the single biggest mistake the Bush administration made. That has already sharply constrained policy choices: “we went to war with the army we had, and now we must accept the size, shape and costs of the land forces we need.”
That might be more truth, or at least a different truth, than most Americans want to hear.