Rather than mandating that women register, just terminate that useless practice.
As the National Commission on Military, National, and Public Service continues its work, I need to repost an updated version of an essay I wrote a few years ago for the Atlantic Council. I had thought that the commission was effectively bereft of military arguments for its work, when I saw that its webpage now talks about "Strengthening American Democracy Through Service.” That sounds like a solution in search of a problem. The commission’s own interim report notes that “young Americans' interest in service is evident given their appetite to volunteer: over 28 percent of Millennials report volunteering in 2017, performing roughly 1.5 billion hours of community service.” The cited source is a survey by the feds’ own Corporation for National and Community Service, which runs “AmeriCorps, Senior Corps, the Social Innovation Fund, the Volunteer Generation Fund, and more.” So what again is the problem? It’s clearly not a military one—the armed forces were almost always meeting their recruiting goals during the most intense period of the highly questionable War in Iraq. But for some reason, perhaps of social engineering, perhaps of some enthusiasm for future wars, the military argument keeps rearing its ugly and confused head.
The current mess started back in 2016, with the notion that women should be required to register for a potential draft too. After Defense Secretary Ashton Carter administratively removed the exclusion of women from all combat jobs, the Army chief of staff, the Marine Corps commandant, and Senator McCaskill of Missouri all declared that they wanted all women registered. Carter himself admitted that was up to the Congress, but Senator Ernst of Iowa at least urged the Obama Administration to take a stand on the issue. Congressmen Hunter of California and Zinke of Montana then introduced the appropriately-named Draft Our Daughters Act, but only to instigate debate. Hunter was particularly unimpressed with the idea of drafting women and then randomly assigning them to the infantry—as we could expect the bureaucrats would do.
Carter’s legal interpretation notwithstanding, Senator Lee of Utah introduced legislation to ban the government from requiring women to register, saying that he couldn't “trust this president or the courts” to get it right. Indeed. Leave the courts aside for the moment. We are in the midst of a slew of untrustworthy American presidents, at least in regards to their abuse of their authority to command the armed forces, effectively declaring war without congressional authorization. So here’s another idea: don’t register anyone. That’s because, as David Henderson and Chad W. Seagren of the Naval Postgraduate School wrote back in 2016 in an essay for the Hoover Institution, “draft registration is a good idea only if a draft is a good idea. And the draft is a very bad idea.” They first object on the grounds of fairness, questioning how a draft can in any way comply with the thirteenth amendment to the federal constitution. Admittedly, the same folks who passed that had drafted Americans into the war to effect it, but that doesn’t remove the contradiction inherent in what involuntary servitudeactually means.
To wit, recall the exchange when the fairly infamous General William Westmoreland testified before 1970 President's Commission on an All-Volunteer Force, saying that he did not want to command “an army of mercenaries.” Commissioner Milton Friedman—yes, that Milton Friedman—immediately shot back with the question “General, would you rather command an army of slaves?” (I thank my George Mason colleague Don Boudreaux for making that point in his 2012 essay on the centenary of Friedman’s birth.) That’s the reason that Friedman is occasionally called the “Father of the All-Volunteer Force.” He had joined a commission packed with supporters of the draft, and along the way, convinced them to produce an unanimous recommendation for ending the whole thing. Well, almost—we still have in this country that pernicious registration. For Friedman encompassed his normative argument with a positive one. Whatever the moralizing, conscription is just stupid on the economics. That is because conscription drafts the wrong soldiers, and also because conscription drafts too many soldiers.
Let us pause a moment to admit that the comparison to slavery seems breathless, and a touch morally suspect. The involuntary impressment, after all, is designed to produce the public good of security, and not the private “good” of ill-gotten personal profit. The comparison is useful on two points, however. First, the public good of security is sometimes not so public, and resident mostly in the eye of the beholder. Everyone who thought that fighting in Vietnam was so important might first have volunteered to have gone himself. Second, the comparison conveys the reality that people threatened with prison if they decline jobs they otherwise wouldn’t choose don’t make the best workers in the specific role. Even Friedman’s faculty colleague the late Robert Fogel (who taught me demographics back in 1996) would probably agree with that.
It’s not that draftees make universally bad soldiers. John Sloan Brown argued in his book Draftee Division (University Press of Kentucky, 1986) that the all-conscript 88th Infantry Division performed well in the Second World War, at least in contrast to similar formations with volunteers. In the Vietnam War, though, the draft was a disaster, sending unmotivated soldiers into combat in an unpopular war. Thus the late Senator McCain of Arizona, the volunteer veteran and incidental prisoner of that war, who chaired the Senate Armed Services Committee, saw “no scenario” that would bring back a draft, because “conscription didn’t work.” So, back in 2016, Congressmen Coffman (Colorado), Polis (Colorado), DeFazio (Oregon), and Rohrabacher (California) introduced a bill to abolish the registration system and shut down the agency. DeFazio called the system "mean-spirited,” but Coffman said that the whole business “simply makes no sense,” noting that the Pentagon has never seriously considered asking for another call-up since the draft ended in 1973.
A draft would make even less sense now than it did in the 1970s. Consider Alan and Heidi Toffler’s 1993 dictum that nations make war the way they make wealth (see their War and Anti-War, Little Brown & Company). At least governments should make consider making war that way, as it’s probably more cost-effective. Despite some “sloppy generalizations,” as Eliot Cohen put it, their overall message about the future of war was prescient: “some serious change [was] afoot.” And since the precision revolution of the 1990s, the balance of combat power has shifted towards airpower. (This may not always be the case, but it is for the present; more on that another time.) Ground troops are sometimes a vital input for lasting political change (see Anthony M. Schinella’s Bombs Without Boots, Brookings Institution Press, 2019), but American ground troops are expensive, and so should be committed sparingly. The review of the Tofflers’ work in Publishers Weeklyextolled a future “knowledge strategy” that relied on robots, drones, surveillance satellites, and commandos—basically the Obama and Trump Administrations’ ongoing strategy for defeating Daesh, Al Qaeda, and the rest of the barbarians. And in case no one has noticed, this whole Third Offset business extols no American advantage in bayonet fighting.
But this is not just a matter of roboterkrieg. Frederick the Great said that he favored hiring mercenaries because each one was like three soldiers. The first was a mercenary serving in the Prussian Army, the second was a mercenary thus not serving in his enemies’ armies, and the third was a Prussian civilian working a job, paying taxes, and thereby economically supporting his Army. The point is not that the Pentagon should rehire Blackwater (or whatever it’s called these days) for kinetic activities. It’s that Americans are very valuable economically, and that the opportunity cost of not allowing them to work productively is far greater than it is for the subjects of any of America’s potential enemies. As Henderson and Seagran hint, consider how much more Elvis Presley would have contributed to national security just by paying exorbitant taxes on his very impressive income, had he not been drafted into the Army four years into his singing career. For two years, Elvis actually made a fine soldier, but making him a soldier was putting The Wrong Man in Uniform, as Bruce Chapman’s 1967 book against the draft was titled.
So much for the wrong soldiers. The further problem is that a draft and even draft registration encourages military planners to seek what they security (or what they consider security) through too many soldiers. As Horowitz, Simpson, and Stam wrote in 2011, there is a reason that historically “volunteer democratic armies suffer especially few casualties”—governments either avoid hazarding voter-soldiers wantonly, or equip them robustly for battle (see “Domestic Institutions and Wartime Casualties,” International Studies Quarterly, vol. 55, no. 4, December 2011, p. 909.) Their conclusion? “Conscription, like other non-market-based property takings, [is] a wasteful means of mobilizing military manpower.”
Think for a moment about the alternative. Any American war is probably a questionable idea if the government can’t find enough volunteers to wage it the right way. I note that the chiefs of the Navy and the Air Force have expressed no such enthusiasm for dragooned labor, but are always asking for more capital. They do occasionally request some authorized headroom for expanding the headcount, but only with volunteers. Guaranteeing the Army and Marine Corps generals a slush fund of manpower in wartime is another way of slewing war plans towards labor-intensive solutions, and that would be a great way of getting a lot of Americans killed for questionable political purposes. Consider this the obverse of Vizzini’s Rule: starting a land war in Asia is stupidly costly, but you might think about land wars in Asia if the stupidly costly is made available to you.
In short, McCain was right. There is no plausible reason for a draft. I can only suppose that he helped establish this commission as a way of discrediting the idea. On a blog for the Wall Street Journal back in 2016, Felicia Schwartz acknowledged that draft registration doesn’t cost much—according to the agency itself, $21.5 million that year—but a total waste is still a total waste. That money will produce zero soldiers, but would buy a thousand JDAMs annually. The Air Force is always complaining that sequestration or just some remote degree of fiscal responsibility has cut into its precision weapons budget, and that stocks are dwindling after years of bombing in Iraq and Syria. Well, don’t worry, generals. I just found your money.
James Hasík is a senior fellow in the Scowcroft Center on Security and Strategy at the Atlantic Council, and a senior fellow in the Center for Government Contracting at George Mason University. An earlier version of this essay appeared on The Defense Industrialist in February 2016.
Comments