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>The US no longer has a draft law because the US determined that the draft was bad both from a military manpower perspective and from a domestic politics perspe

>The US no longer has a draft law because the US determined that the draft was bad both from a military manpower perspective and from a domestic politics perspective as to maintaining national will to continue a conflict. Nixon got rid of the draft for reasons that had to do with the unpopularity of the Vietnam War and his presidential election. The argument was that the AVF wouldn't negatively impact force readiness, not that the draft was "bad" from a military manpower perspective (I'm not sure what that means). There's some other reasons peppered in correspondence from that time, but I'm super skeptical of this argument for enough reasons to finish a PhD thesis. It's been a long time coming, but the conversation needs to be had about how even if the United States needed to institute a draft we may not actually be able to do so anymore because of the general decline in health and fitness of men in this country. More over, there are civ-mil relations considerations that aren't properly accounted for when you claim the AVF is superior - we have essentially a warrior caste now, that's in many ways sectioned off from the reset of the civilian population. Good? Bad? Exercise for the reader but you can probably guess my stance. >The US will not reauthorize a draft for an overseas war while the US remains a major power. I don't see how these are related. Plenty of non "major" powers have conscription (in some form or another), as do plenty of "major" powers. The US wasn't a "major" power before WWI, though it was certainly "a power", and yet my great grandfather was drafted. Maybe you mean the US won't get into an unwinnable and unpopular ground war in South East Asia and then re-institute the draft, but you may be underestimating the depth of ineptitude of the people who've been running the show the last 30ish years. Everyone I served with was a volunteer, obviously, but war necessitates a lot of things that people would otherwise consider impossible right up until they happen.

dragonwriter 4y ago
> 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.
- remarkEon 4y ago
  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
  - dragonwriter 4y ago
    > 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.
    - remarkEon 4y ago
      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.

dragonwriter 4y ago

> 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.

remarkEon 4y ago
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
- dragonwriter 4y ago
  > 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.
  - remarkEon 4y ago
    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.