Imagine drafting in your profession. In many jobs, it takes months of training, then months for people to become truly productive - at the entry level. With the draft, you are mostly employing trainees and entry-level employees, all of them forced to be there.
> when you accept volunteers, you get people self-selecting and that's way worse. / You get the people who are mentally ill and not self-aware and seeking something they can't find anywhere else signing up.
There is some risk of that, but it looks like you are suggesting that it's the predominant motive for volunteering. People do it for many reasons. Almost all jobs in the world are filled by volunteers.
If the Swiss army was sent to distant countries to protect Swiss economic interest, to enforce a certain system of government, or even in 'self-defense' but against nebulous and theoretical threats, rather than the imminent risk of a direct attack, Swiss people would widely refuse to serve.
Similarly in America. If, for example, Canada carried out an aggressive land invasion of the United States, a very large number of people would be willing to serve, and accept a draft as well as poor conditions, low pay etc.
On the other hand, if there was a draft for young people to participate in controversial US overseas operations like Iraq, Afghanistan, etc, there would be widespread resistance. Many people would evade the draft either illegally (going to prison, disappearing, moving abroad) or legally (using college exemptions, National Guard, bone spurs, etc). Some people in the military would refuse to follow orders, pursue criminal or radical political activity (more than they already do), sabotage or go AWOL.
This was attempted with the Vietnam war. It wasn't stopped despite its success. It was stopped because it didn't work and threatened to destroy the entire fabric of US military forces.
>It wasn't stopped despite its success. It was stopped because it didn't work and threatened to destroy the entire fabric of US military forces.
Whether something "works" depends on what you define its purpose to be.
Saying the draft "didn't work" is exactly where I think we went wrong.
"Threatening to destroy the entire fabric of US military forces" (or of society in general) constitutes "working" if it prevents the continuation of that sort of war and in the long run, preserves a country that is as we would like it to be.
It was the war that didn't work.
You are welcome to your beliefs about international involvement, but often people see it otherwise.
There was no draft for the Gulf War. The United States entered WW2 after an unprovoked act of aggression against US territory.
I'm not sure which 'smaller conflicts' you are referring to because conscription has only been used in the Korean war, the American Civil War and the American Revolutionary War, other than the 3 already mentioned.
You are technically correct about WW1. The situation has changed in the more than 100 years since that conflict.
I think this common statement may be a bit misleading whether or not strictly accurate.
From what I've read, the Flying Tigers were authorized by Roosevelt, and the only reason they failed to engage in combat with Japan until after Pearl Harbor was because of unforeseen delays.
Recruit say the smartest 5% of the population and their median IQ is ~130. The tallest 5% and sure you get everyone in the NBA, but also the more normal person at 6’ 1”. Considering in the real world you can’t select the most extreme in every category and the US military is more or less forced to be fairly average compared to the US population simply because they want multiple things. Select for decent health, decent intelligence, and decent physical capacity and you can only focus so much on mental health.
I would expect the top (or bottom) 5% of the population in any dimension to be far from the norm.
>Select for decent health, decent intelligence, and decent physical capacity and you can only focus so much on mental health
I think these are wishful thinking, not what is actually selected for. As long as there's no draft, the military does not get to select people. Someone takes the ASVAB, and decides against going further, there's nothing that can be done. People select themselves. The minimum standards weren't that high when I last talked to a recruiter and over the years I've read a lot of articles that suggest they've gotten lower.
The military, like a lot of difficult jobs (police officer, teacher, etc.) doesn't pay proportionally.
So recruits are selected for willingness to put up with that. From an abstract economic perspective, someone who accepts lower than market pay must receive some other form of non-monetary compensation that explains it. It would be nice to attribute it always and only to patriotism, but there are other possibilities, conscious or unconscious, just like a devotion to justice and protecting people is one particular reason for becoming a police officer.
In letting people select themselves for a difficult and low paid job, you will get people who are not near average because they highly value access to things that cannot be found anywhere else, for any amount of money. And they will be concentrated together, changing the character of an organization.
Modern Western culture holds individual freedom, social mobility, and self-direction in such esteem I think we may have a blind spot with regard to how random selection and assignment of people to jobs can sometimes produce better results.
The military rejects ~23% of applicants due to educational issues. One of the results of this is members of the military are above the average intelligence in the US. But they also reject people with excessive criminal history, significant physical disability, or even extreme weight. Though it’s a sliding scale based on rates of recruitment.
https://www.factcheck.org/2016/02/carson-botches-military-el...
This is putting a civilian-centric filter on the problem. Many, many people chose the military for reasons other than pay. If it were strictly for pay, almost nobody would choose the “harder” military occupations like Marines, or Army infantry, or Navy SEALs etc. Yet those often get more applicants than they have slots.
As for your statistical claim, we’re not really wired to think well about stats so we get erroneous intuitions. To be in the 95th percentile, you’re away from the norm but not as much as you may think, which is the GP’s point. A quick Google search shows 95th percentile for height is 6’2”…it’s tall but not so tall as to actually catch my attention. 95th percentile in IQ is 125, in pay is $248k, in male weight is 246 lbs. Non-normative, sure, but none so far away as to leave someone awestruck
Slow down, that's exactly what I said.
I work for (a) government, and of course I didn't choose to because it paid more than anything else. And I didn't decide not to join the Navy because it paid too little.
What I'm claiming as a general principle is that some people have a huge advantage in opportunity cost for a certain job, and organizations can be seriously affected by concentrating those people together. And we see this all over the place.
Consider the Abu Ghraib scandal. It's not that joining the military entails that sort of thing, or that it's rightly part of the job, but if someone has an affinity for abusing prisoners, then most jobs do not offer the same opportunity. Theoretically, decent people who value doing good should be attracted to jobs that are important and underpaid, but in practice, bad people who value side benefits to an extreme degree may dominate the market of people who will take the job.
Or you know, by not going to the other side of the world to kill people.
When a person has terminal cancer of some kinds, fentanyl and even morphine can't fully stop the pain. So there is a standard surgical procedure where they go in and cut a primary nerve.
That is in effect what was done in eliminating the draft. It did away with the feedback loop, not the problem.
I’m not sure this is true. There’s a reason commanders generally oppose the draft; they know volunteers tend to be better service members than draftees. Imagine if your civilian job was full of people who were conscripted rather than chose that field (even if they chose it for the wrong reasons). I can imagine the amount of disciplinary problems would rise dramatically. I don’t know the statistics, but draft-era service members seemed to have serious problems from drug abuse to fratricide too.
Well, consider juries. While they don't end up being completely random, still, there seems to be a recognition that nobody or no organization should be unilaterally trying to select the best. Or taking volunteers.
I think most people agree that juries are very important.
>draft-era service members seemed to have serious problems from drug abuse to fratricide too
Yes, I just think the problems should have been attributed to the war being fought and not the fact of the draft. Maybe the corruption of the draft; I'm not old enough to have a sense of what it was like during Vietnam, but obviously it's a cliche how people were able to avoid it.
Which reminds me of juries again - it used to be, in my state, there were tons of exemptions for jury duty, and that really biased the pool. There were reforms to eliminate most of the exemptions.
I think you underestimate the effect of a draft on unit morale. Units can become more undisciplined because commanders have limited recourse for transgressions and people dont want to be there in the first place. Imagine if you and your coworkers were uprooted to perform some difficult, manual, potentially life threatening task. Not by choice, but by conscription; what do you think organizational morale (and productivity) would be like? I’d much rather be with people who chose that path.
>I just think the problems should have been attributed to the war being fought and not the fact of the draft.
And yet you recognize the premium Western cultures put on personal agency. The irony of your above statement is that in a “popular and just” war (if such a thing exists), there’s no need for a draft because ranks will be filled with volunteers. If you’re old enough, you probably remember the long lines at recruiting centers on Sept. 12, 2001.
This reflects the fact that the US military has learned how to carry on a substantial conflict without large numbers of casualties.
That sounds like a great achievement. But I think it's the problem.
There shouldn't be wars that can be run by a relatively small number of volunteers. That is the problem.
WWII and the US Civil War had drafts.
I wish I could find some cartoons that I remember from fairly soon after 9/11, about the dread people had that we were headed straight to hell in the military response.
I remember them as profoundly different from what you might see today with a left-wing slant, exactly because of the general sense of unity and nonpartisan feeling. Foreseeing the obvious subsequent events meant being against seemingly everyone and not just the red or blue tribe.
My recollection (of what I read more recently) is that only one congressperson voted against war in Iraq.
I think that's an erroneous way to look at it.
The fundamental problem is that the military is, and has been, made up of volunteers for a long time.
It's not that with more people you get proportionally more bad apples, it's that when you accept volunteers, you get people self-selecting and that's way worse.
You get the people who are mentally ill and not self-aware and seeking something they can't find anywhere else signing up.
Consider Tim McVeigh, who was taught to kill in Iraq. Allegedly (may be controversial) "schizotypal". That basically means "has some weird ideas, might develop schizophrenia some day, but not actively psychotic". Plenty of people could be like him - unstable in a lot of respects, but after talking to a recruiter go "nah, killing people on the other side of the world doesn't sound fun". So they don't enlist, and that shapes the military.
The only way to fix this is a return to the draft. Of course that's easier said than done. I know little about them, but people always mention Switzerland and Israel as having practically universal military service. So if it seems impossible, yet it must be possible somehow.