The Case for a Volunteer Army

(The following represents the view of a minority of the CRIMSON Editorial Board.)

The United States has sufficient resources to abolish the draft. It lacks only the inclination. With a relatively small increase in wages and benefits, the Army's strength could be maintained, according to studies by several economists, entirely by volunteer enlistments.

The draft has never been popular, but has long been tolerated as a necessary evil. It is more insidious than that. Conscription is a totalitarian concept, out of place in a liberal society except in time of national peril. Forcing a man to devote two years of his life to servitude of the state should not be dismissed as a legitimate and unchallengeable exercise of governmental authority.

Savings and Survival

A volunteer army would restore the individual's right to allocate his own time, and create a more effective and efficient military force. The Army would realize substantial savings, since longer terms of enlistment would reduce the personnel turnover and hence training costs. In addition, a man who is a soldier because he wants to be, and who is in the army more than a few months, will willingly acquire more of the technical expertise modern warfare demands, and will presumably have a better chance for survival in combat.

Yet the volunteer army has not received the consideration it deserves. Its critics have argued that it would provide the military with new and dangerous power and that it would create a poor man's army. The poor have no chance to exercise individual liberty, these critics claim, because the prospect of low wages in civilian jobs will force them to take advantage of the army's financially attractive offer. A volunteer army, in other words, would coerce the poor into becoming paid killers for the rich.

Putschless Precedents

The first objection -- the threat of rampant militarism -- seems highly illusory. The doctrine of military subservience to civilian institutions has been firmly and irrevocably established in this their susceptibility to the charisma of Commanders-in-Chief, but no one, from William Henry Harrison to Dwight David Eisenhower, ever came to power at the head of an infantry column. It is unlikely that establishing a volunteer army would unleash a succession of military coups.

As its critics contend, an army, composed of volunteers would be a poor man's army. But there is no reason why the army should reflect the basic inequities of American society any less than other jobs or institutions. Already the rich are freed from ditch-digging, construction work, hard labor of any sort. Are we to correct this inequity by conscripting people into the ditches? Highways, after all, are as much of a national necessity as wars.

If the opponents of the volunteer army are truly distressed by the problem of inequity, they should attack it at its source. Society cannot ease its conscience by symbolically freeing the army from the social forces of a whole country.

The laws of economics predict that if wages for military service are raised, then enlistments will increase as well. Few people are so poor that they have no alternative but to respond to the offer of higher wages. Those who enlist are simply deciding that, all things considered, it is in their own best interest to join the army. This is hardly coercion.

Compulsion

The danger is not that too many poor people will join the army, but that anyone -- rich or poor -- will be compelled to act against his own will. Drafting men by lottery and therefore without bias is preferable to drafting them according to class distinctions. The student deferment should be abolished because it is inequitable -- it dramatically increases the coercion on particular sectors of the population by removing the rich and the smart from the manpower pool.

The lottery would effectively end this inequity, but it would not deal with the essential problem: coercion. What the lottery's advocates fail to realize is that an objectionable policy applied equally to all is still an objectionable policy.