The case for mandatory military

By JM Cummings

The draft seems like an anachronistic and unnecessary practice in post-Cold War America.

Conscription has become increasingly unpopular over the past thirty years, and not just in the United States. Many Western democracies, such as France, Portugal and Italy, have increased their efforts to professionalize their militaries and decrease their reliance on conscripts.

The proliferation of small-scale wars in the developing world and the resulting United Nations and NATO peacekeeping operations have instigated a paradigm shift in the organizational strategy implemented by Western military powers.

The dominant theory maintains that professional armies are better suited to the modern combat environment, in light of its highly technical and complicated nature.

On the other hand, some nations, such as Germany and the Scandinavian countries, have continued the practice of conscription despite strategic and political criticism.

The Germans resolve the difficulty of conscripting in modern war through a two-tiered system that employs conscripts to fill ancillary roles and professional volunteers in direct combat and more specialized roles.

Although the military value of conscripts is debatable, conscription need not serve only military purposes.

The Germans, for example, allow for potential conscripts to opt for alternative service, which allows citizens to serve in many different capacities, including work in disaster relief or international aid organizations, emergency assistance, education or health care.

Conscription thus provides invaluable labor resources to important public services, ranging from care for the elderly to volunteer fire departments.

Alternative service further resolves the difficult moral quandaries resulting from conscientious objection by allowing objectors to serve society in ways other than direct military service.

This approach to conscription can boost civic engagement and help resolve difficult social problems.

Hurricane Katrina, for example, demonstrated the woeful inadequacy of our emergency management system. Perhaps a form of alternative service could improve the quality and scale of essential public services in such emergency situations by creating a large labor pool to help address them.

The Germans originally adopted the law authorizing conscription with the intention of preventing the military from dominating society as occurred under Adolf Hitler's Nazi regime.

This was done by integrating and grounding the military in the civilian world. This grounding can provide a number of benefits, and the same idea can apply to other democracies.

Many soldiers returning from war complain about the lack of understanding and sympathy in which the civilian world greets veterans. Conscription helps spread understanding of the military throughout society and limits the alienation from civilians experienced by some members of the Armed Forces.

Military training can also help equip the workforce with basic social and technical skills that can boost productivity and increase the opportunities available to citizens.

The Armed Forces emphasize the career building advantages of military service as part of their overall recruitment efforts. Universal conscription ensures that citizens who would otherwise avoid service can capitalize on those opportunities.

Meanwhile, the volunteer model that exists in the U.S. places an unfair portion of the burden on the poorer members of society to whom the incentives for military service are much more attractive than they are to wealthier people. Compulsory service spreads the human cost of wars more evenly across society.

Psychological studies demonstrate that an individual is more likely to critically assess an argument when he or she is personally involved in its outcome.

If a broader cross section of society served in the military, more people would have personal stakes in any decision to go to war and would therefore apply more of their attention to that decision.

Before deciding to support a war, each citizen would be forced to consider the risk to his or her loved ones. Moreover, citizens who serve are better equipped as voters to make informed decisions regarding the viability of potential wars.

A professional army contains the human cost of war, isolating the average citizens from much of the pain associated with a war.

Conscription, however, deters voters from supporting a frivolous or unnecessarily-risky war by distributing the risk more evenly across the whole population. In the event of an unpopular war, such as Vietnam, conscription can mobilize opposition.

Protests against the war in Iraq have been less visible, significant and widespread than those held during the earlier war, despite being nearly as unpopular. The absence of a draft may have something to do with this disparity.

Opponents of compulsory service denigrate the practice of promoting militarism, wasting valuable government resources and instituting a thinly-veiled system of indentured servitude.

The example of Germany reveals the logical fallacy of the first accusation. Strong social opposition to militarism arose in reaction to the mistakes of the Nazi era. Germany's decidedly peaceful foreign policy is attributable to this opposition.

Alternative service ensures that peaceful ideologies can thrive despite conscription. While the financial challenges of establishing universal conscription and an alternative service system are daunting, such a system could help reduce the costs associated with the current administration's drive toward universal health care and other expansions of government programs.

The potential increase in civic engagement, improvements to government programs and more equitable distribution of the human costs of war at least make a serious consideration of such a political reform worthwhile.

JM Cummings is a senior history major.