The Unreal Liberal Argument for Conscription

I’ll always have a warm spot in my heart for the liberal/progressive mindset because I grew up in the immediate aftermath of the 1960’s. The era brought lots of changes for the better — the free speech movement, the expansion of civil rights, Miranda and Gideon — but the one that most vividly affected me at the time was the abolition of the draft. I was only 8 years old — too young to have any understanding of war or dying — but just the idea that I could be forced to leave my friends and family to spend years in the army was frightening enough.

Conscription ended in 1973, but the government required young men to continue registering for the draft until the selective service system was shut down in 1976. That period of respect for freedom lasted all of four years, until the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1980, and President Carter re-instituted selective service registration to show the Soviets that we were really seriously angry at them. (The fact that the Soviets have since been driven out of Afghanistan and we invaded it ourselves a few years ago would seem to imply that selective service registration is no longer necessary, but nobody listens to me.)

Since then, the United States has become the single preeminent superpower in the world. No other nation comes close. We basically won the war for global domination. And yet there are still those calling for a return to conscription.

Surprisingly to me, these calls come not from war-mongers on the political right, but from the ideological descendants of the same political liberals who so effectively opposed conscription in the ’60’s and ’70’s. I just noticed an example of this from David Sirota at In These Times in an article titled “The Military’s 40-Year Experiment”:

In operations across the globe, the all-volunteer military has been employed by policymakers to birth what Gen. George Casey recently called the “era of persistent conflict.” Four decades later, we therefore have an obligation to ask: How much of the public’s complicity in that epochal shift is a result of the end of the draft?

This is the beginning of a common bring-back-the-draft argument: That the reason we live in a time of seemingly continuous war is that not enough Americans care enough to oppose it, and they don’t oppose it because they know that it would mostly be fought by other people’s children. Bringing back the draft would mean no one was safe from the consequences of war, which would make us think more carefully as a nation before going to war.

(The idea of making things worse to raise public opposition to make them better is not unusual among those seeking social change. The movie Amistad portrays some abolitionists as wanting the Africans to lose in court because it would help build support for abolition, terrorists often hope to incite reprisals from their targets that will serve to send more people into their arms, and both white and black racial separatists in America have tried to foment racial war, each thinking it would rally their race to their side.)

Sirota supports his argument by looking back to the Nixon administration’s thinking about how to end the draft:

[A] look back at some lost history shows that today’s public acquiescence to militarism was exactly what the government wanted when it ended the draft.

That loaded term—“militarism”—was, in fact, a prominent part of the 1970 report by President Nixon’s Commission on an All-Volunteer Force. In its findings, the panel worried about “a cycle of anti-militarism” in a nation then questioning America’s increasingly martial posture.

Noting that “the draft is a major source of antagonism” toward the growing military-industrial complex, the report praised the fact that “an all-volunteer force offers an obvious opportunity to curb the growth of anti-militaristic sentiment.”

Nixon’s commission did devote some empty rhetoric to downplaying “the fear of increased military aggressiveness or reduced civilian concern” about military actions in the event of an all-volunteer force. But the report’s political conclusions were clear: By disconnecting most Americans from the blood-and-guts consequences of war, the end of the draft would “decrease dissent stemming from conscription” and “close one of the channels” of anti-war organizing.

It’s fascinating that people in the Nixon administration thought this, but both theory and history demonstrate that they (and David Sirota) were missing a big part of the picture. Sirota is also proceeding from a false assumption about our history of warfare.

Today, such conclusions read like prophecy. Though polls showed that many Americans opposed the Iraq War, that invasion and occupation was historically unprecedented in length and yet never generated the kind of mass protest that earlier shorter wars evoked.

So Sirota’s evidence of how bloodthirsty we are is that the Iraq War was “unprecedented in length”? This is disingenuous. As I write this, the Iraq war is only a little longer than the Vietnam War (and maybe shorter, depending on when you want to say Vietnam started) and the U.S. death toll is just under 4500. By comparison, the U.S. death toll in Vietnam was more than that in every year from 1966 to 1970. In 1968 alone, almost 17000 American soldiers lost their lives.

Same thing for the Afghanistan War. Same thing for all the forward deployments to far-flung bases and one-off missions.

David Sirota is writing as if we’re living through a time that suffers unprecedented levels of war, but he’s mistaken in that premise. The last dozen years are more violent than the dozen years that preceded them, but we’re still living in a time of relative peace, and the wars we’re fighting are producing relatively few American casualties.

Let’s consider the numbers: The gigantic death toll of World War II would skew the numbers in a way that’s hard to think about, so for the sake of argument let’s set aside those 400,000 dead soldiers and consider the period from the end of World War II to the end of conscription in 1973. In that 29-year period, we had the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and a number of small deployments that lead to the combat deaths of almost 95,000 American soldiers, for an average of a little over 3200 deaths per year.

After conscription ended in 1973, no American solders died in war for the next 6 years. Things got only a little more violent over the next two decades, with about 400 more combat deaths in the ’80’s (mostly Beirut) and the ’90’s (mostly the first Gulf War). Even with the explosion of violence from the War on Terror (6700 U.S. soldiers dead and still counting) the average annual combat death rate for the post-conscription era is only about 200 per year, or 1/16th the rate during conscription.

Even if we accept Sirota’s implied hypothesis that the War on Terror since the 2003 invasion of Iraq represents the new normal, that’s an average death rate of about 670 per year, or about 20% of the rate during conscription. In the worst year of the War on Terror, 2007, we had 1021 combat deaths, still less than one third of the average during conscription. (By comparison, drivers on Illinois highways have become familiar with electronic signs proclaiming that 957 people died in traffic accidents in this state in 2012.)

Yet Sirota is clearly right about Americans being less engaged with the war:

The pattern suggests that in the absence of conscription, dissent—if it exists at all—becomes a low-grade affair (an email, a petition, etc.) but not the kind of serious movement required to compel military policy changes. Why? Because as former Defense Secretary Robert Gates put it, without a draft “wars remain an abstraction—a distant and unpleasant series of news items that does not affect (most people) personally.”

And yet despite this apparent apathy, the statistics show that war casualties are far lower in the post-conscription era. That doesn’t keep Sirota from reaching an idiotic conclusion:

Well-meaning people can certainly disagree about whether a modern-day draft is a good idea or not (and it may not be). But forty years into the all-volunteer experiment, it is clear that ending conscription was as much about giving citizens the liberty to abstain from as about quashing popular opposition to martial decisions. By design, it weakened our democratic connection to the armed forces—a connection that is the only proven safeguard against unbridled militarism.

Ending conscription may have “weakened our democratic connection to the armed forces” as Sirota believes, but judging by the stunning decline in the death toll, there must be something that caused the U.S. to become far less militant.

An economist wouldn’t have a hard time identifying a likely cause. (And conservative economist Milton Friedman was one of the key figures arguing for an all-volunteer military force.) Fewer Americans may have a personal connection to the costs of warfare now that they and their friends and family can’t be drafted, but ending conscription vastly increased the influence of those Americans who care the most about the human cost of our wars: The soldiers themselves.

In market terms, under conscription the price of a soldier’s labor was held artificially low because draftees had no right to refuse the deal and therefore they had no bargaining power. But since the end of conscription, no solder has joined the military against their will. Every single soldier must consent to the risks of combat. And that consent now comes at a much higher price.

A big part of that price has been paid not in salary and benefits but in a reduction in the rate at which soldiers are sacrificed to combat. Just as corporations facing high labor costs will switch to more capital-intensive operations, the increased bargaining power of American solders has forced the U.S. military to invest heavily in equipment and training to make soldiers more effective with less risk.

An all volunteer army isn’t going to put up with shoddy equipment and poor support. They want reliable guns, working radios, GPS guidance, body armor that can stop an enemy bullet, vehicles that can take a rocket hit or an IED, good battlefield intelligence, air support, decent food, medical care, and internet service. There’s a reason it costs over $800,000 per year to put a soldier in Afghanistan, and it isn’t the soldier’s pay.

Note that all this doesn’t mean that the end of conscription increased the cost of warfare. The difference is that under conscription the cost of warfare was unfairly borne by the soldiers, whose labor, safety, and lives were confiscated for the public good. Now that those soldiers’ services have to be purchased at market rates, the cost is more properly borne by the American people on whose behalf they are fighting.

I suppose you could argue that it’s unfair to compare the present low-intensity wars against the major land conflicts in Korea and Vietnam, but I think that just proves my point: The folks who choose our wars are a lot more careful when when they have to pay the full market price for warfighters.

I’m not arguing that the War on Terror is insignificant, but it is a huge improvement on the horrors of the past. And keep in mind that having wars which are “an abstraction—a distant and unpleasant series of news items that does not affect (most people) personally” is a good thing. The alternative is a much higher human cost.