Buying Our Way Out of Conscription
In a Washington Post compendium in which ten writers were each invited to name something “we’d be better off without,” Thomas Ricks—one of the more perceptive observers of civil-military relations and the impact of war on American society—nominates “the all-volunteer military.” Ricks says the all-volunteer force has made it too easy for the United States to go to war and to give insufficient attention to the consequences. “One percent of the nation has carried almost all the burden of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan,” he says, “while the rest of us essentially went shopping.”
Ricks’s basic point about how the absence of a draft reduces the public pain of wars, and thus increases the likelihood or duration of them, is valid. I have told my students who listen politely to panel discussions and other exchanges on campus about the nation’s ongoing wars that if we had conscription, many of them would instead be armed with signs and bullhorns, demonstrating outside. In other words, it would be more like the college campuses I remember from the 1960s, as the Vietnam War was escalating and draftees were being sent to fight there. Besides concentrating public attention on the consequences of wars, mandatory national service might have other societal benefits. Many other questions would have to be carefully considered before conscription were reintroduced, not least of all exactly how a draft would be structured and administered to make it fair. But the issue should not be considered dead.