All-Volunteer Force Quotes

Our all-volunteer force continues to prove itself with a great level of professionalism, personal commitment and a technical competence that is quite remarkable.

Since we replaced the compulsory military draft with an all-volunteer force in 1973, our nation has been making decisions about wars without worry over who fights them. I sincerely believe that reinstating the draft would compel the American public to have a stake in the wars we fight as a nation.

The all-volunteer army works. It works particularly when we pay our troops well.

I'm against the draft. I believe we should have a professional military; it might be smaller, but it would be more effective.

America owed its military renaissance in the 1980s and 1990s to Vietnam. Veterans like Norman Schwartzkopf, Colin Powell, Alfred Grey, Charles Krulak, and Wesley Clark returned home angry and ashamed at their defeat and rebuilt all-volunteer, professional armed forces from the ground up.

The transition after the Vietnam War to an all-volunteer force created the world's finest professional military. But it also reinforced geographic and cultural divisions that reveal themselves in our voting.

Because conscription appeals to essentially no one, the United States has lived with the All-Volunteer Force since the end of the Vietnam War.

The bottom line is that we have a more representative sample of middle America in the volunteer force in 1990 than can be achieved in any draft.