> The argument was that the AVF wouldn't negatively impact force readiness, not that the draft was "bad" from a military manpower perspective

The argument for the AVF has evolved over time; the issue wasn't once and done, and the importance of longer service terms in a wide range of specialties has been increasingly cited in arguments for maintaining the AVF. But even in the original Gates Commission report, the AVF was not, contrary to your description, painted as merely non-harmful, but as a more efficient means of meeting military requirements, with extensive supporting analysis.

That's a really charitable description. There was enormous political pressure in 1968 to find a way to end the draft since Nixon promised in the campaign that he would do it. When you tell people to go find ways to do it, especially when you're the President, they're going to find ways. The entire premise of the AVF at the time was that it would work fine, if you could still do a draft if you needed to.

The Commission's charter wasn't "figure out how to never do a draft again". It was "figure out how to turn this draft that everyone hates off".

edit: bad grammar

> That's a really charitable description.

No, it's just accurate to what's in the report.

> The entire premise of the AVF at the time was that it would work fine, if you could still do a draft if you needed to.

No, it wasn't. While the standby draft was in the report as a safeguard to slightly reduce the the from-0 spinup time of a draft, the argument presented is not “an AVF is non-harmful as long as backstopped by a standby draft”, but “the AVF is superior on both practical economic efficiency grounds and ethical respect for personal liberty grounds in essentially every conceivable situation (with extensive analysis of the former and philosophical argument for the latter), and, just in case, we can also set up a standby draft system so things aren't quite needing to be built from scratch if Congress and the President ever decide a draft is needed for some reason again.”

In fact, the section of the Gates Commission report on the Standby Draft makes, obliquely, very good argument against the standby draft ever being the right choice, pointing out that it cannot immediately produce forces in an emergency because of time to train and organize, so it is only useful for gradual expansion, but then arguing for voluntary recruitment measures like compensation boosts for gradual expansion to be used in preference to activating the standby draft.

Again. I'm not contesting that these arguments exist and were in the report from back in 1968. (I'm going to ignore for a second that we don't actually do anything to rehearse a draft, standby or not, so yes we actually would have to build everything from scratch again.) I'm stating that there is no way the political direction from the White House to end the draft didn't influence what ended up happening, who got to write it, and what was in it. That does not detract from the arguments that you may find compelling, and that's fine. To your example, that we can just boost compensation to make up for not having conscription. How exactly do you do that if, say, you need an army of engineers to staff cyber warfare operations? Pay them $500k to put on a uniform, hoping that $500k is the "market clearing price" where someone decides "okay fine I'll quit my FANG job and go to war"? At some point the AVF starts looking like a contract Army, and not a functioning part of a republic, let alone an actual state military. The AVF is a libertarian dream, I'll grant you that, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's longer term effects haven't been bad and it couldn't use a rethink.

The usual approach is to delegate the most complex technical work to defense contractors who can pay market rates (or close enough) to civilian employees.

The military doesn't even want conscripts anymore. They have discipline problems, take too long to train, and don't stay long enough. Conscription stopped being relevant when technology became more important than numbers.

Perhaps I really should just pull up my notes from college and when I was in, but I am very much unconvinced by the arguments that take the form of "the free market solves this military staffing problem and technology made the draft obsolete, so whatever". I realize that what you're saying is more nuanced than that, but after witnessing how contractors behaved in Afghanistan I'll just say I'm not convinced of their competence, let alone their actual commitment to the job.

I am not, necessarily, concerned about questions of if the military wants conscripts. I'm concerned about the ability of the nation-state to properly respond to a crisis that precipitates major war. If you just consider the military's wants in a static context and extrapolate forward, just giving them what they want, the entire procurement roadmap for the next 10 years would probably still look like IED defeat devices and other garbage "future" tech that didn't and doesn't work, with the actually useful stuff arriving in 2040. We've thankfully had, on rare occasions, some smart civilians and DoD contrarians who have edged things in a different direction in some cases.

>Conscription stopped being relevant when technology became more important than numbers.

Hard, hard disagree. It is not at all decided that technology is more important than "numbers" (I'm assuming you are referring to raw numbers of troops in a particular combat zone). "Technology" has a lead time, and while humans have an approximate lead time of ~18 years, whatever technology that would beat them on the battlefield isn't stockpiled like humans are.

None of that matters. If there's a major war with, let's say China, it's all going to be over one way or another before any conscripts could be drafted and trained to a useful level. And even if they could be trained, there aren't enough stockpiles of advanced weapons systems for them to use.

The premise here is that a major war would automatically escalate into nuclear right away. That premise is disputed by many, however.