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In 2020, the US Army piloted a new personnel management system for its more than four hundred thousand active-duty enlisted personnel. The Assignment Satisfaction Key-Enlisted Marketplace imagined its soldiers as individual actors in the “marketplace” of military occupational specialties, geographic posts, and commands. It asked soldiers to enter information about their “talents,” “interests,” and “preferences” into a database that the army said would sort and match them to their next billets not by using a traditional military method of command and control but via a marketplace. A leading architect and overseer of this system was the assistant secretary of the army for manpower and reserve affairs, Casey Wardynski. A retired army officer who had worked previously as an economics instructor at the US Military Academy, Wardynski was also a creator of the America’s Army first-person shooter video game, released by the army in 2002 as a recruiting tool. From his positive experience in marketing military service through the lucrative world of online gaming, Wardynski developed a regard for the greater use of markets as a key to successful personnel reform. As he and his coauthors argued in a 2010 essay outlining the personnel policies he would implement a decade later, the military needed to ditch its command-oriented “feudal employment culture,” which overemphasized “fairness,” in favor of adopting “controlled market mechanisms.” This change would generate “far more efficient and productive outcomes” like those seen in the private sector, where, Wardynski assumed, individual choice and maximized utility produced better results. In 2020, as Wardynski and his team launched the new personnel system, they saw the need for adopting market mechanisms throughout the US military in order to provide the United States with a global strategic advantage. Wardynski wrote that one of the greatest strengths of the US military, in comparison to its peers abroad, was its willingness to solve problems with markets. Here Wardynski was likely thinking of growing US strategic rivalry with China, along with its ongoing contest with traditional competitors, such as Russia. “In terms of national security, I think it gives us a huge edge. I don’t think other armies . . . are going to take this approach. That’s not in their culture.”1 Wardynski was hardly alone in his assessment of the need for close intermeshing of the US military and capitalist markets. By the early twenty-first century, it had become difficult to find any leaders in the military or the Department of Defense who do not believe the future success of the armed forces depends on its ability to engage private commercial markets and apply market-oriented solutions across the defense sector and the military. In their words and actions, military leaders and organizations suggest that in order to achieve greater efficiencies, innovation, and military effectiveness, the armed forces must do more to make use of markets and for-profit firms. By the time of the army’s debut of the enlisted soldiers’ marketplace personnel system, this sensibility had already penetrated deeply into military culture, informing well-known recent developments in military history ranging from the dramatic jump in the US government’s employment of security and logistics contractors overseas, to the privatization of the Veterans Administration’s health care, to the proliferation of “other transaction authority” contracts, designed to allow the military to purchase goods and services more easily in commercial markets.