Discard all ideas of the draft

I hear talk of the draft whenever talk of our many commitments comes up. My reply is always the same. We will never see a draft. You see, the draft was part of the modern experience. Its as much a thing of the past is is high paying, unskilled factory work. Mass institutions were based on uniform technology distributed to everyone in identical fasion. This was possible because specialization was mostly, just not a part of these mass institutions. Anyone could be trained to do the work of anyone else. Mass conscription produced large, reasonably effective armies which must have one primary mission. Multiple missions requires specialization and that is the enemy of any mass institution. Today's military is highly specialized. Talk to recruiters, the requirements for new recruits are very high. This is because today's soldier must be make into a specialist. The Air Force requires potential pilots to bring their own pilot's licence to the table. The GED, once introduced by the Army, is no longer acceptable to the Army.

All volunteer armies are capable of highly specialized and difficult operations. The Second Gulf War was the product of one such volunteer army. A draft army would require figuring out how to fight wars with lower quality troops. This is the same as the old Landwehr debates in Prussia. Rely on a small, highly trained professional force or a large less well trained force of conscripts. The industrial revolution, with mass production as its great principle, put the winning chips behind mass conscripts. Consider the American Civil War. The South had the tradition, the bulk of the good officers, and the quality troops. The north had factories and a huge conscription pool. That combination wins.

Today's military is the 18th century army. Small, highly trained, professional, vastly superior man for man to any conscript force. Its principle problem is its size. A secondary problem is that it develops doctrine that takes advantage of its highly trained professionals to do what conscripts cannot. Again we return to the 19th century. During the French Revolution, when conscription was first introduced in a modern fashion, they abandon the drill manual. Conscripts could not perform the manouvers or handle themselves as described under fire. Rather than fighting in line and emphasizing firepower, the Revolution fought in column and emphasized mass. Our army has developed doctrines that will not accomodate mass conscription. We would have to throw away the book and imagine a new way to wage war.

The height of the age of conscription is WWI and its hallmark a series of battles such as Verdun and Somme. This is what conscripts can do. Those familiar with the American Civil War can see the same process at work. Large armies that clumsily run at each other with much death resulting. Our present military draws on the opposite methods of war to use highly trained troops with high morale to win wars without much bloodshed on either side in the best of cases and at least much less bloodshed on our side when things don't go so well.

This has several implications:
* The military can not grow quickly, new recruits have to be converted into highly trained, highly motivated soldiers and that takes time.
* The military cannot shift from a small professional force into a large conscript force without a long period of learning the hard way. How long is a function of how much hard there is. France in 1793-1795 was constantly at war, lost a lot of battles against less than determined foes and by 1796 had devised a new way to fight. On the other hand, tanks were introduced at the end of the First World War and from then until they were employed again in battle in 1939 people were guessing about how they would best be employed. Most of those ideas turned out to be wrong, very painfully for some countries.
* If the military cannot quickly turn recruits into professional soldiers, and we cannot shift to a large conscript force, then the troops we have now are the troops we'll have for the forseable future. That means we have to use them wisely. Deployments have to do one of two things and preferably both. They either need to stabilize a region, so that we can make sense of what kind of commitments we need to make there (rather than haveing to keep a worst-case scenario reserve to deal with it); or they need to reduce the treat directly. To put this another way, deployment must reduce either a direct threat or a potential threat. Preferably both.

Take Liberia. The New Republic has argued for intervention in Liberia for several weeks now. Their latest article is here, and key articles can be found here, here, and here. In fact most of the TRB columns in the past several months involve Liberia. From a Wilsonian perspective, intervention to end the civil war and the suffering it creates makes perfect sense. In the abstract I have no problem with such intervention. Its Wilsonian, but I prefer them as advocates of the American foriegn policy rather than critics. However, under the current circumstances I need them to meet a higher test. Will this directly advance the war on terror or reduce the threat of terror in west Africa sufficiently as to make the commitment of troops a sound investment because we free up troops we had to keep in reserve. Since I doubt very much we were keeping any such troops in reserve, they have to answer the first part of this requirement. Ryan Lizza tries to make this case here, but I am not convinced. Liberia is a long term commitment and with the war on terror still unresolved (as I expect it to be for some time) we probabaly cannot afford to put several thousand troops there for several years.

If we can put American command and support troops on top of a force of west Africans and who ever else can be induced to garrison Liberia, I am happy to see that go forward. Hudson Morgan makes a good case that the west Africans won't do a good job themselves. Ideally, we could hand the job of supervising the garrison over to someone else if we needed to use those specialists elsewhere.

Who knows what will happen in Iraq, Iran, or anywhere else in west Asia. North Korea is not put to bed. We can't over-reach and leave ourselves vulnerable should a crises develope in either of those places. Lets do what we can do without leaving ourselves vulnerable, and in the meantime, lets build another light division. By the time its available we well may need it.

Note: some of the links to TNR require subscription, other so not.