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This article will attempt to project current demographic trends in the United States and abroad, along with several related determinants, a substantial distance into the future, so as to explore some possibly surprising implications for the recruitment of armed forces. The most important of these demographic factors will be the "graying" of the population, in America and all the advanced industrialized countries, as lower birthrates and longer lifespans project that a larger proportion of the total population will be above what was viewed, until recently, as the normal age for retirement.1 In many of the advanced countries, the total of younger people will actually decline as an absolute number. In the United States and in several other advanced countries, this total will not absolutely decrease, but it will certainly decline as a percentage of the overall population. Other important demographic trends will include the worldwide shift of population to urban areas, and the continued high birthrates in many underdeveloped countries, with a bias in some areas toward preventing the birth or survival of female children.
The Burden of Skepticism about Demography
The American public and their elected representatives are often inclined to underrate the importance of predictions made by demographers. Demography is normally regarded as one of the "social sciences," typically housed in the sociology department of most universities, and occasionally in an economics or political science department, and it suffers therefore by being lumped in with the uneven predictive accuracy of these disciplines. When a demographer offers a prediction on whether there will be a need for additional school-buildings in the local school district, or on whether there might be a problem in military recruitment under the All-Volunteer Force system within the next several decades, the prediction is received with all the normal official deference (and actual skepticism) accorded to predictions about the likely recovery of the economy from a recession, or the likely winner of the next election.
The important point is that this is extremely unfair to demography, because the predictions that can be offered on population trends are very much more reliable than any that can be made by economists or political scientists. For example, if one wishes to know how many ten-year-olds will be coming to school eight years from...