Military Stats

Many posts have discussed the US military.

Jenn Hatfield at Pew:

As of the end of March, the U.S. military had 1.32 million active-duty members, according to DMDC figures. This is an increase of 1.5% over the year prior, when there were about 1.30 million. (Active-duty military are those who work for the military full time. They do not include personnel in the Reserve or National Guard.)

Nearly 450,000 active-duty military members serve in the Army, the most of any military branch. The Navy has the second-largest number of active-duty members (about 334,000), followed by the Air Force and Marine Corps. The Coast Guard and Space Force are much smaller, with fewer than 50,000 active-duty members each.

All branches of the military have gained active-duty members in the past year. The Navy has gained the most in overall numbers (about 7,300). The Space Force and the Coast Guard have grown the most in percentage terms (6.1% and 3.4%, respectively).

Active-duty military members are assigned to work in every state and internationally, according to DMDC data. A large majority (86%) are stationed domestically, while 14% are stationed internationally.

The number of active-duty military working in each state varies greatly, based partly on the locations of military bases. California has the most active-duty military, with about 157,500. Virginia and Texas also have more than 100,000.

Six states have fewer than 1,000 active-duty military, and Vermont has the fewest of all with 128.

Some branches of the military have an especially large footprint in certain states:Texas has about 65,400 active-duty Army members, about 16,000 more than any other state. There are five Army bases there, the second-most of any state after Virginia.

Virginia (73,500) and California (72,500) have by far the most active-duty Navy members. No other state has even half that many, even though states like Florida, Maryland and Washington have roughly similar numbers of naval bases.

Colorado has about 4,300 active-duty Space Force members, nearly three times more than any other state. Three of the nation’s six Space Force bases are in Colorado

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Military Demographics

From the Department of Defense:

The total number of military personnel is almost 3.5 million strong, including DoD Active Duty military personnel (1,304,418); DHS’s Active Duty Coast Guard members (41,132); DoD Ready Reserve and DHS Coast Guard Reserve members (1,039,398); members of the Retired Reserve (208,032) and Standby Reserve (11,391); and DoD Appropriated and Non-Appropriated Funds civilian personnel (883,398). DoD’s Active Duty and DHS’s Coast Guard Active Duty members comprise the largest portion of the military force (38.6%), followed by Ready Reserve members (29.8%) and DoD civilian personnel (25.3%).

Active Duty Member Highlights

• Service Branches. The Army has the largest number of Active Duty members (471,990) followed by the Navy (325,395), the Air Force (321,618), and the Marine Corps (185,415). At a total of 1,304,418 DoD Active Duty members, the military force of 2018 is 4.8 percent smaller than it was in 2000, when there were 1,370,678 Active Duty members. From 2000 to 2018, the Army (-1.5%), Air Force (-8.5%), and Navy (-11.4%) all experienced a decrease in the number of members while the Marine Corps experienced an increase (+7.2%).

• Ratio of Ranks. The DoD Active Duty force is composed of 82.3 percent enlisted personnel (1,073,394) and 17.7 percent officers (231,024). Overall, the Active Duty force has 4.6 enlisted personnel for every one officer. In comparison, the Army and the Air Force have one officer for every 4.1 enlisted personnel, the Navy has one officer for every 4.9 enlisted personnel, and the Marine Corps has one officer for every 7.7 enlisted personnel.

• Gender. Women, who number 215,834, comprise 16.5 percent of the DoD Active Duty force, while 1,088,584 men comprise 83.5 percent of the DoD Active Duty force. Compared to 2000, the percentage of both Active Duty enlisted members and officers who are women has increased (from 14.7% and 14.4%, respectively, in 2000 to 16.2% and 18.0%, respectively, in 2018). Overall, the number and ratio of female enlisted members (174,331) to female officers (41,503) is 4.2 female enlisted members for every one female officer, while the number and ratio of male enlisted members (899,063) to male officers (189,521) is 4.7 male enlisted members for every one male officer.

• Race/Ethnicity. Nearly one-third (31.0%) or 404,851 of Active Duty members identify themselves as a racial minority (i.e., Black or African American, Asian, American Indian or Alaska Native, Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander, Multi-racial, or Other/Unknown). As compared to 2010, the percentage of Active Duty members who identify themselves as a racial minority is higher in 2018 (31.4% of enlisted members and 22.7% of officers in 2010, to 32.7% of enlisted members and 23.5% of officers in 2018). The overall ratio of racial minority enlisted personnel (350,495) to racial minority officers (54,356) is 6.4 racial minority enlisted personnel for every one racial minority officer. To conform to the latest Office of Management and Budget (OMB) directives, Hispanic is not considered a minority race designation and only Active Duty members’ race was used to determine racial minority status. Regarding ethnicity, 16.1 percent of Active Duty members identify themselves as being of Hispanic or Latino ethnicity.

• Geographic Location. While the Active Duty population is located throughout the world, the three primary areas in which Active Duty members are assigned are the United States and its territories (87.3%), East Asia (6.4%), and Europe (5.0%). The ten states with the highest Active Duty military populations are California (153,505), Virginia (122,314), Texas (117,844), North Carolina (99,193), Georgia (65,371), Florida (60,251), Washington (58,115), Hawaii (41,803), South Carolina (39,237), and Colorado (35,012). Active Duty members in these ten states comprise 70.0 percent of the Active Duty personnel stationed in the United States.

• Age. Over half (52.3%) of Active Duty enlisted personnel are 25 years of age or younger, with the next largest age group being 26 to 30 years (20.7%), followed by 31 to 35 years (13.5%), 36 to 40 years (8.9%), and those 41 years or older (4.6%). Almost one-quarter (23.7%) of Active Duty officers are 41 years of age or older, with the next largest age group being 26 to 30 years (22.9%), followed by 31 to 35 years (21.1%), 36 to 40 years (17.7%), and those 25 years or younger (14.5%). Overall, the average age of the Active Duty force is 28.2 years. The average age for Active Duty enlisted personnel is 26.9 years, and the average age for Active Duty officers is 34.4 years.

• Education Level. Most enlisted members (80.5%) have a high school diploma and/or some college experience, while fewer have an Associate’s degree (10.5%) or a Bachelor’s degree or higher (8.4%). Most officers have a Bachelor’s degree or higher (84.8%). Compared to 2010, the percentage of total Active Duty members who have a Bachelor’s and/or an advanced degree increased for enlisted personnel (from 4.8% in 2010 to 8.4% in 2018) and officers (from 82.7% in 2010, to 84.8% in 2018).

• Marital Status. Just over half (51.5%) of Active Duty military members are married, which is lower than the percentage that were married in 2000 (53.1%). In 2018, almost half (48.0%) of enlisted members and a majority (67.5%) of officers report themselves as married. Over half (52.8%) of Active Duty males and nearly half (44.8%) of Active Duty females are married. In addition, 6.7 percent of DoD’s Active Duty members are in dual-military marriages.2 In 2018, 3.4 percent of enlisted personnel and 1.5 percent of officers are estimated to have divorced.

Why There Was Pressure to End the Shutdown Yesterday

A letter to POTUS and Congress from five former DHS secretaries (Tom Ridge, Michael Chertoff, Janet Napolitano, Jeh Johnson and John Kelly

While we are heartened to learn that communities, businesses and religious organizations around the country are providing assistance to DHS employees, this cannot and should not be the answer. One of the unfortunate consequences of this shutdown is the need for some DHS employees to seek either unemployment or find another employer. It is important to note that as unattractive as these alternatives may be, like other members of the military services, members of the USCG by law, cannot quit nor can they seek full-time outside employment. DHS employees who protect the traveling public, investigate and counter terrorism, and protect critical infrastructure should not have to rely on the charitable generosity of others for assistance in feeding their families and paying their bills while they steadfastly focus on the mission at hand. This is unconscionable.

As the shutdown drags on, the Department also risks talented people leaving their posts to pursue employment in the private sector. High-tech skills – such as information technology and cybersecurity –and law enforcement and security experience are in great demand in the private sector and the Department is facing a real crisis in retaining this workforce week after week.

We are awed by the sacrifices that the men and women of DHS and their families make every day and their extraordinary service to our nation. We call on our elected leaders to restore the funding necessary to ensure our homeland remains safe and that the Department’s critical national security functions continue without compromise.

A statement from the National Air Traffic Controllers Association (NATCA) President Paul Rinaldi, Air Line Pilots Association (ALPA) President Joe DePete, and Association of Flight Attendants-CWA (AFA) President Sara Nelson:

“We have a growing concern for the safety and security of our members, our airlines, and the traveling public due to the government shutdown. This is already the longest government shutdown in the history of the United States and there is no end in sight. In our risk averse industry, we cannot even calculate the level of risk currently at play, nor predict the point at which the entire system will break. It is unprecedented.

“Due to the shutdown, air traffic controllers, transportation security officers, safety inspectors, air marshals, federal law enforcement officers, FBI agents, and many other critical workers have been working without pay for over a month. Staffing in our air traffic control facilities is already at a 30-year low and controllers are only able to maintain the system’s efficiency and capacity by working overtime, including 10-hour days and 6-day workweeks at many of our nation’s busiest facilities. Due to the shutdown, the FAA has frozen hiring and shuttered its training academy, so there is no plan in effect to fill the FAA’s critical staffing need. Even if the FAA were hiring, it takes two to four years to become fully facility certified and achieve Certified Professional Controller (CPC) status. Almost 20% of CPCs are eligible to retire today. There are no options to keep these professionals at work without a paycheck when they can no longer afford to support their families. When they elect to retire, the National Airspace System (NAS) will be crippled.

“The situation is changing at a rapid pace. Major airports are already seeing security checkpoint closures, with many more potentially to follow. Safety inspectors and federal cyber security staff are not back on the job at pre-shutdown levels, and those not on furlough are working without pay. Last Saturday, TSA management announced that a growing number of officers cannot come to work due to the financial toll of the shutdown. In addition, we are not confident that system-wide analyses of safety reporting data, which is used to identify and implement corrective actions in order to reduce risks and prevent accidents is 100 percent operational due to reduced FAA resources.

Cost of the Shutdown: FBI and Coast Guard

From the FBI Agents Association:

If the FBI and Department of Justice ("DOJ") are not funded, the Agents will continue to face challenges in carrying out our mission to protect the nation. Some of the specific ways the shutdown affects our Agents and operations were highlighted in the FIBAA’s petition:

1. FBI Special Agents are subject to high security standards that include rigorous and routine financial background checks.… Missing payments on debts could create delays in securing or renewing security clearances, and could even disqualify Agents from continuing to serve in some cases.

2. The operations of the FBI require funding. As the shutdown continues, Special Agents remain at work for the American people without being paid, and FBI leadership is doing all it can to fund FBI operations with increasingly limited resources—this situation is not sustainable.

3. Pay uncertainty undermines the FBI’s ability to recruit and retain high-caliber professionals....The ongoing financial insecurity caused by the failure to fund the FBI could lead some FBIAgents to consider career options that provide more stability for their families.

Quotations from field agents:.

Two days ago, our financial office advised that the division has exhausted [Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force ('OCDETF')] operational funding.… We are in the middle of a critical OCDETF investigation targeting kilo-quantity trafficking of  methamphetamine and heroin by street gang members…. Without money to pay sources and conduct controlled narcotics purchases, our task force is unable to continue these critical investigations. This task force is the only task force in this region specifically targeting interstate street gang criminal activities.
...
I have been working a long term MS-13 investigation for over three years. We have indicted 23 MS-13 gang members for racketeering, murder in aid of racketeering,  extortion, money laundering and weapons offenses.… Since the shutdown, I have not had a Spanish speaker in the Division. We have several Spanish speaking informants. We are only able to communicate using a three way call with a linguist in another division.

Your Coast Guard leadership team & the American people stand in awe of your continued dedication to duty, resilience, & that of your families. I find it unacceptable that @USCG members must rely on food pantries & donations to get through day-to-day life. #uscg pic.twitter.com/TZ9ppUidyO

— Admiral Karl Schultz (@ComdtUSCG) January 23, 2019

The Coast Guard and the Shutdown

Our textbook discusses the Coast Guard.  which has moved over the years from Treasury (where it started in 1790 under Alexander Hamilton) to Transportation to DHS (with stops at the old War Department in between):

Patricia Kime at Military.com:

The Coast Guard's 41,000 active-duty members will not be paid on their next payday, scheduled for Jan. 15, due to lack of appropriations in the ongoing government shutdown, the service's vice commandant said Thursday.

Active-duty Coast Guardsmen received a paycheck Dec. 28 as the result of a workaround by the Department of Homeland Security, Coast Guard, and Office of Management and Budget, which ruled that the service had the authority to issue all pay and allowances for December.

But in an all-hands message dated Jan. 10, Adm. Charles Ray said no reprieve will occur Jan. 15: The service is unable to cover its payroll.

Dan Lamothe at WP:

Employees of the U.S. Coast Guard who are facing a long U.S. government shutdown just received a suggestion: To get by without pay, consider holding a garage sale, babysitting, dog-walking or serving as a “mystery shopper.”

The suggestions were part of a five-page tip sheet published by the Coast Guard Support Program, an employee-assistance arm of the service often known as CG SUPRT. It is designated to offer Coast Guard members help with mental-health issues or other concerns about their lives, including financial wellness.

“Bankruptcy is a last option,” the document said.

The Coast Guard receives funding from the Department of Homeland Security and is subjected to the shuttering of parts of the government along with DHS’s other agencies. That stands in contrast to other military services, which are part of the Defense Department and have funding.

The tip sheet, titled “Managing your finances during a furlough,” applies to the Coast Guard’s 8,500-person civilian workforce. About 6,400 of them are on indefinite furlough, while 2,100 are working without pay after being identified as essential workers, said Lt. Cmdr. Scott McBride, a service spokesman. They were last paid for the two-week period ended Dec. 22.

...

The Coast Guard removed the tip sheet from the support program’s website late Wednesday morning after The Washington Post inquired about it.

Coast Guard civilian employee Geoff Anderson writes at The Times of San Diego:

Politicians do not value the Coast Guard as much as the other military services. They are funded while the Coast Guard is not. The Department of Homeland Security lumps the Coast Guard in with 13 other “operational and support components,” when in fact it is nothing like them. It is military, it is global, and no other DHS organization can approach the scope and reach of its mission.

Arguments about whether DHS should be the parent agency for Coast Guard aside, politicians and the general public mistakenly equate “military” with “Department of Defense,” to the detriment of the Coast Guard. One can imagine the public outrage if other military branches were required to work without pay for this long.

In summary, most of the general public and politicians in Washington don’t understand the Coast Guard and take it for granted. That statement probably also applies to every federal worker affected by this shutdown, regardless of organization.

Trump Needs to Take Public Administration 101

At the Los Angeles Times, Doyle McManus writes of Trump's "skinny budget" this week:

The proposal would shrink the budgets of the Coast Guard, which protects ports, and the Transportation Safety Administration, which protects air travel, to pay for the wall, which almost nobody thinks would do much to stop terrorists or drug smugglers. It would also make the State Department and the Environmental Protection Agency less able to do their jobs, but no more efficient.

“It’s about as precise as civil war battlefield surgery,” said Paul C. Light, a government management expert at New York University. “If there’s a wound, you just amputate the whole leg.”

Even Republicans in Congress said they didn’t like it much. One GOP senator said the State Department cuts were “dead on arrival,” suggesting that, even more than other presidents’ budgets, this one is likely to be remembered only as a wish list — an unrealistic opening bid from a man who considers himself a wily negotiator. Congress, not the president, makes the real decisions on budgets and spending, and all of the programs Trump wants to slash are sacred to somebody on Capitol Hill.

But Trump took a second big action last week, even before releasing his budget plan: He signed an executive order calling for a major reorganizing of the federal bureaucracy. He asked agencies and the public to suggest programs that could be eliminated, slimmed down or combined. And he gave Mulvaney one year to produce a comprehensive plan.
If that sounds vague, it’s because it is. “It was basically a punt,” Light said.

The first problem with Trump’s order, Light said, is that federal agencies are unlikely to come up with creative plans to reorganize or downsize themselves. “The agencies have very little capacity to analyze themselves,” he said.

That’s why earlier efforts at reorganization often started with a president assembling an outside commission (Ronald Reagan did that in 1981) or a White House task force (Bill Clinton, in 1993). Trump hasn’t done that. And there doesn’t seem to be anyone on his staff who’s a natural reinventor, even though the president has appointed plenty of people from the private sector. Mulvaney is a former congressman with a fearsome reputation as a budget cutter, but not as a reformer. “You’ve got a bunch of real estate developers, investment bankers and members of Congress,” Light said. “They may be very smart people, but they are all from very flat organizations” — unlike the very un-flat bureaucracy

Birthdays

Today is President Obama's 50th birthday. It is also the Coast Guard's 221st birthday. Our chapter on bureaucracy and the administrative state explains that it has changed departmental homes several times, from Treasury to War (during wartime) to Transportation and now to Homeland Security. Its official blog notes:

On August 4, 1790, President George Washington put pen to paper and created the Revenue Cutter Service. That service of “a few armed vessels, judiciously stationed at the entrances of our ports, might at a small expense be made useful sentinels of the laws” has grown into America’s maritime first responder. For 221 years, the United States Coast Guard has protected Americans on the sea, protected America from threats delivered by sea and protected the sea itself.

As the only military service with the ability to enforce laws within our borders and the only law enforcement agency authorized to enforce them outside our borders, the Coast Guard has evolved from its early beginnings but perhaps never so much as it has over the past decade. As America prepares to recognize the 10th anniversary of the September 11 attacks, Coast Guard men and women are deployed throughout the world sharing their expertise in border protection, drug interdiction and counter-terrorism with our allies while their Shipmates stand a taut watch protecting the homeland.

Drug interdiction is one of its many duties. A story from CNN shows its role in a recent cocaine bust. The story also points out that multiple agencies took part in the operation, which included up to 1,000 personnel: