November 25, 2006
Revisiting the Draft II Posted by Fredric Smoler at 02:55 PM EST Josh Zietz posted a few days ago on “Revisiting the Draft,” commenting on Rep. Charles Rangel’s suggestion that we bring it back. Rangel was eerily confident that a draft would significantly diminished the chances of a bellicose foreign policy: “There’s no question in my mind that this President and this administration would never have invaded Iraq, especially on the flimsy evidence that was presented to the Congress, if indeed we had a draft and members of Congress and the administration thought that their kids from their communities would be placed in harm’s way.” Maybe, but there is another way to look at it. Take as the model of a conscript force the most celebrated one we ever raised, and the one Josh concludes by suggesting we revive. At its maximum size during the Second World War, the Army numbered around 8.3 million, and there were another 4 million in the other armed services. This was less than a tenth of the population, most women did not serve, and it is worth remembering that by comparison to the other belligerents, the United States maintained extremely high physical standards for military service over the whole of the war. Scaling that number up for the current U.S. population, maintaining high physical standards, and assuming that in a feminist age women are also conscripted, you’d get a military force of more than 60 million (while at war, we could replace World War II–style female labor in the domestic economy with immigrant guest workers). The American standing army wouldn’t be that large—although it would be by all historical standards enormous—but with the trained reserves available under conscription, it could expand to that size very quickly, probably in a couple of weeks; after all, major European states could that rapidly expand their conscript forces a century ago. Assume that Americans someday again buy what Rep. Rangel calls flimsy evidence—after all, we bought some in 2003—and are as committed to military victory as we were during the Second World War, and as uninhibited about inflicting collateral damage. That still means we’d be more inhibited than the British were during the Second World War. And a decrease in inhibition seems likely: When everyone’s husbands and sons are serving, and thus at risk—in this case, their wives and daughters, too—the electorate usually becomes less chary about inflicting collateral damage on enemy civilians. My guess is that if we someday fight what now seem the likeliest future antagonists, their use of suicide bombers of all ages and sexes, along with other systematic breaches of the laws of war, could easily make us at least as savage as we were in World War II. With that much force and those attitudes, my guess is that we would eventually be tempted to conquer and pacify a fair swath of the Islamic world, let alone Iraq. With that much force, the threat of post-conquest counterinsurgency campaigns would not necessarily put us off. After all, successful guerrilla wars are actually pretty rare, and losing a truly savage conventional war usually makes the defeated unwilling to protract the conflict with guerrilla methods (neither the astonishingly determined Germans nor the even more obdurate Japanese gave that possibility much of a thought). And my hunch is that if you give the government that much military power, you will probably eventually elect one that will decide to use it. So I think Rep. Rangel should be wary of spreading the losses of war over a wider and more representative section of the population; we have some evidence of what happens under those circumstances. There is an interesting theory holding, on the basis of significant evidence extending back to the ancient republics, that democracies are the among the most bellicose of regimes. Some of the theorists, seeking to explain that outcome, suggest the democracies are bellicose because their legitimacy is relatively great, which makes it easier for them to raise overwhelming forces, and hence much less likely to lose wars. If the theory is correct, a mass citizen army is not going to make the United States less likely to steer clear of war, especially in the face of some gross provocations like the 1979 seizure of our embassy in Tehran, or terrorists attacks on American soldiers and civilians by Syrian or Iranian surrogate forces, or even the murder of our government’s civilian employees by Palestinian Authority–backed Palestinian militias in Gaza, which happened a couple of years ago. If you consider the provocations we have ignored, it becomes clear that since we abandoned conscription, the American democracy has not in fact been all that bellicose, in large part because even with the most capable armed forces in the world we have not possessed so much force that the use of force seemed very cheap. Rep. Rangel might want to think twice about lowering the perceived risk of defeat, and hence the cost of war.
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