We have had troops on the ground in Afghanistan for nearly a year and the administration continues to press for a war with Iraq that would involve calling up a quarter of a million reservists.
This is a good time to revisit a policy issue that has stayed quiet for 25 years. Namely, we should bring back the military draft.
Now there’s an assertion that won’t bring in a flood of positive e-mails. But I believe it merits consideration.
In modern industrial societies such as ours, compulsory military service is economically preferable to an all-volunteer system.
I’ll acknowledge at the outset that this assertion is not conventional wisdom among economists. Milton Friedman, a Nobel laureate and far brighter person than me, argued just the opposite. But I think his analysis is incomplete.
Friedman argued that compulsory military service constitutes a tax on young men. While the tax was superficially uniform in that the draft was for two years of service for all, it was highly unequal in the “disutility,” or loss of satisfaction, experienced by different individuals.
Some young men don’t mind serving. They may not have good alternatives for their time or may not be fazed by the discomfort and danger associated with army life. If their employment alternatives are tearing off shingles or putting down sod, the “monetary opportunity cost” of military service may be very low.
But others, if drafted, face high costs in emotional or financial terms. They find the regimentation of military training distressing (as Friedman reportedly did when subjected to compulsory ROTC 70 years ago) or they may have more vivid fears of death or injury. And they may give up more lucrative employment or delay schooling that would equip them to eventually earn high salaries.
Friedman argued that because conscription ignored these differences in lost satisfaction, it resulted in a greater aggregate loss of satisfaction to society as a whole. With volunteer service, the nation would have to set military pay scales at levels that would convince enough young men to enlist. But that cost would be spread across all taxpayers, and no one would be forced to pay an in-kind tax of two years of involuntary servitude. Therefore, a volunteer force would be more efficient and fair than the draft.
Friedman’s logic is impeccable and his argument is sound as long as you accept at least two assumptions: First, that there is no “information problem”; that the 18- and 19-year-olds who choose to enlist have complete knowledge of all the potential costs and benefits of their decisions. And second, one has to assume that there are no “externalities” associated with either compulsory or voluntary systems; that is, there are no unintended or collateral costs or benefits to society as a whole that result from the draft.
Both assumptions are false. Like Friedman, I am influenced by personal experience. I enlisted in the Army just after my 17th birthday and a few months after completing high school. With 35 years of hindsight, I would probably do it all over again. But it also is clear that virtually none of the 52 men in my basic training platoon — volunteer or draftee — possessed a complete idea of what lay ahead.
Medicines provide an instructive parallel. Friedman argues that there should be no regulation of therapeutic drugs by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration or other agency. Consumers should have the freedom to choose to use drugs as they see fit. They are the best judges of the possible costs and benefits.
That is true with perfect knowledge, which we seldom have. Women who used DES or thalidomide did not know all the costs nor did anyone who recently used fen-phen. True, those drugs were approved by some regulatory authorities, so regulation is not a panacea. But I would rather have an agency such as the FDA with the authority to halt use of a drug when its danger becomes obvious than to depend on consumers getting the word haphazardly — as Friedman would.
Similarly, it is not clear that if we are going to expose young people to death or maiming, that the total loss to society is less when those risks fall on the less well-educated and informed, as volunteers tend to be, than on draftees randomly selected by lottery.
I think that the draft clearly had spillover benefits. One was that it tended to focus the attention of many households on U.S. foreign and military policy in a way that is visibly lacking today.
College students who faced being shipped to Vietnam had a more personal stake than today’s young people who may or may not care about what the United States does in Iraq or Afghanistan because, terrorism aside, they do not have to worry about their personal safety.
The draft focused the attention of many households on important national policy issues. If you believe that democracy works, greater citizen involvement leads to better decisions that have greater benefits and lower costs to our society as a whole.
Moreover, the draft forced people from all social levels and regions to serve together. That contributed to broader understanding of the diversity and complexity of U.S. society. The draft served as an instrument of national integration.
I don’t expect any groundswell of calls for restoring the draft. But it would be helpful to think about what we lost as well as what we gained when we moved to all-volunteer armed forces.
© 2002 Edward Lotterman
Chanarambie Consulting, Inc.