Volunteer Army Quotes

When the state does go to war ... so too should the nation.

I do not want to lead an army of mercenaries.

I was honestly willing to accept compulsory military service, provided that the voluntary system had first been tried out, and had failed to supply the men needed and who could still be spared from industry, and were numerically worth troubling about.

Would you rather lead an army of slaves?

... deployed on the sands of Saudi Arabia and facing possible extinction, are young men and women drawn, in the main, from the poorer families of our republic.

The only way to have a volunteer army is to draft them.

The absence of shared sacrifice in this country shames us.

Every man here is a soldier. The troops are well clothed, well paid and well commanded. They have about fifty thousand men under pay, and a still greater number of volunteers who wish no pay.

42% of today’s army enlistees are ethnic or racial minorities. In the general population in the 18 to 24 year old age cohort, nearly 50% of the people…have had some exposure to college education. In that same age cohort in the U.S. military today…the percentage of people who’ve had some kind of exposure to college education is 6.5%. So the vast majority of our society…has, in effect, hired some of the least disadvantaged of their fellow citizens to conduct some of our most dangerous business. I think that is an unstable situation, and one that does threaten, in the long run, the health of our democracy.

I do believe that by virtue of having a volunteer army, you are going to have men and women who decide to serve and others who decide to pursue different careers.

... when you have a draft you're more likely to go to war than if you have to pay for a volunteer army. A draft lowers the cost for the wealthy because the people who are important don't have their children going off and they're also not paying as much in taxes.

An army which cannot be regularly recruited is a doomed army.

Nobody wants to go to war, but the burden of service cannot fall only on volunteers who, are attracted to the military for financial reasons.

Pentagon records show that at least 8,000 members of the all-volunteer U.S. Army have deserted since the Iraq war began. Hey, at least somebody has an exit strategy.

When the citizens of a nation will no longer volunteer to defend it, then it is probably not worth saving. No nation has the right to survive with conscript troops, and in the long run, no nation ever has.

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

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

Richard Nixon was a very intelligent and able man. And he had the right ideas. But he did not have the adherence to principles that [Ronald] Reagan had. He did some very good things. We owe to Richard Nixon the volunteer army - he got rid of the draft. And that was a major increase in freedom.

An all-volunteer army is best suited to fight the new wars of the 21st century.

We’re a democracy and we’re defended by volunteers.

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.

But I think what we're coming to grips with is the fact that we actually have a mercenary Army, and it doesn't have a nice ring to it. We call it 'volunteers', but we're basically paying people to serve their country. And if you're going to pay people and have a mercenary Army, you're going to have to pay the market rate. And so the bounties are going up—more money for tuition, higher enlistment bonuses—and I think it's appropriate.

The security of the army is very appealing to non-establishment Americans.

There should be a 5% tax break for people who served in the military…. We are developing a class divide in military, service. Very few people who have brought us this war have served in the military and very view of their children have served.

Our ideas of the life and business of a soldier were drawn chiefly from the adventures of Ivanhoe and Charles O'Malley, two worthies with whose personal history almost every man in the army was familiar. The men who volunteered went to war of their own accord, and were wholly unaccustomed to acting on any other than their own motion…. Their officers were of themselves, chosen by election, and subject, by custom, to enforced resignation upon petition of the men…. There was one sort of rank, however, which was both maintained and respected from the first, namely, that of social life. The line of demarkation between gentry and common people … rests … upon an indeterminate something or other, known as family. To come of a good family is a patent of nobility, and there is no other way whatever by which any man or any woman can find a passage into the charmed circle.