In my Defining Ideas article last month, “The Draft Is Still a Bad Idea,” I made the case against a traditional draft to obtain military manpower. A related proposal is for a universal draft of young people, male and female, that would give them a choice between military and civilian service.
That kind of draft is also a bad idea. Some of the arguments against such a draft are the same as the arguments against a military draft. The distinctive features of a universal draft also bring other issues into play. The bottom line, as I shall show, is that a universal draft is even more objectionable than a limited military draft. A universal draft, like a military draft, would violate young people’s freedom to choose their occupations and would take no account of the losses to these young people. In addition, a universal draft would, by definition, take away the freedom of many more young people than a military draft would. Also, as some officials in the military have recognized, a universal draft could make it more difficult for the military to get its desired amount of high-quality first-term manpower.
Dark impulses behind some proposals
Although some readers might think that universal national service is a new idea, it has been part of the conversation in the United States for over a century. Many of the advocates showed little regard for the people they wanted to draft.
Exhibit A is noted philosopher and psychologist William James. In 1910 he published an article titled “The Moral Equivalent of War,” in which he advocated a universal draft of young men. His article was based on a 1906 speech he gave at Stanford University. What was James’s case? He wrote:
To coal and iron mines, to freight trains, to fishing fleets in December, to dishwashing, clothes-washing, and windowwashing [sic], to road-building and tunnel-making, to foundries and stoke-holes, and to the frames of skyscrapers, would our gilded youths be drafted off, according to their choice, to get the childishness knocked out of them, and to come back into society with healthier sympathies and soberer ideas.
Note something in this quote that the late Hoover fellow Martin Anderson pointed out in a 1989 conference on national service held at the Hoover Institution. It wasn’t just that James wanted young men to be forced to work in fishing fleets. No. He wanted them to be forced to work in fishing fleets in December, one of the harshest months during which to be working on a boat. In his written remarks, Anderson stated:
There is a streak of cruelty here (fishing fleets in December?), of a barely concealed, seething lust to control the young, to hurt them, to crush the innocent enthusiasm for which the old so often envy the young.
Parenthetically, that quote reminds me of one of the main characteristics I appreciated in the late Martin Anderson. Even though he had no children, in his activity during the Nixon administration to end the draft and in his later writing against its renewal, Marty showed an intense compassion for young people.
The suggestion of harsh measures for young people wasn’t unique to William James. In the famous December 1966 conference on the military draft, a conference that attendee Milton Friedman saw as a turning point towards opposition to the draft, noted anthropologist Margaret Mead called for drafting women as well as men. She recognized that there was a special problem with women that didn’t exist for men: women can get pregnant. (It’s too bad that Mead wasn’t around to explain that fact to Supreme Court justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who, in her confirmation hearing, said that because she was not a biologist, she could not give a definition of a woman. Anthropologist, not biologist, Margaret Mead had no such difficulty.)
How did Mead suggest dealing with young women who got pregnant while in national service? In a word, harshly. In her presentation at the 1966 conference, Mead stated, “[P]regnancy could be treated as a severe breach of contract, comparable to going AWOL in males.” Was she saying that such women should be imprisoned? It appears so. Was she saying also that they should be separated from their newborn babies? We don’t know. Mead stated further, “Part of the institution of universal national service would be the postponement of marriage until the service was completed, if universal national service takes the form of a nationwide call-up at eighteen.” She didn’t say what she would do to prevent girls from marrying before age eighteen.
In the late 1970s, when I became involved in opposing measures to reinstitute the draft, the idea for a national-service draft had become popular with some people, fortunately a minority, from across the political spectrum. In January 1979, an organization called the Potomac Institute published a short book titled Youth and the Needs of the Nation that presented the case for national service. The first part of the book presented the findings and recommendations of the Committee for the Study of National Service. Here’s a quote from that part of the book:
During the Committee’s study, two participants went to China (under other auspices). Like visitors to the People’s Republic before them, they came back impressed and challenged by the extraordinary mobilization of the talent of young people possible under authoritarian, post-revolutionary conditions.
It is true that an authoritarian government can achieve “extraordinary mobilization” of millions of people. The committee did not explain how the Chinese Communist government achieved this. Maybe its members understood that specifying the needed methods would turn people off. That would explain why the committee stated:
Some of us favor the adoption of mandatory National Service as soon as the public can be persuaded to support it, although no member of the Committee favors sending anyone to jail who refuses to serve.
That makes me wonder what the committee members meant by the word “mandatory.”
Actually, though, one member of the committee, Donald J. Eberly, did favor prison sentences for people who refused to serve. I know this because I debated him at Brown University in April 1979. The topic was the McCloskey bill, named after then-congressman Pete McCloskey. Eberly was the author of the national-service part of the bill. He was also a nice elderly man who looked like one’s ideal grandfather, making me doubt whether I would win the debate. But I did win by using one simple technique: quoting again and again the part of the bill that said that those who refused to comply would be charged with a crime and would, if convicted, be subject to a fine of up to $10,000 and/or a prison sentence of up to five years.
This tour of the landscape from 1906 to 1979 gives a feel for how long the compulsory national-service idea has been with us. Later proposals are similar although, for whatever reason, less spelled out.
The case against compulsion
The above documentation of the brutality of some of the proposals for national service implicitly makes the case against compulsion. Fishing fleets in December? Pregnancy being equated to going AWOL? Advocates being impressed by the Chinese government’s “extraordinary mobilization of the talent of young people”?
Nevertheless, the case against compulsion should be made explicit. One of the most important freedoms we have is the freedom to choose what to do with our lives, whether we are old or young. A national-service draft would destroy that freedom whether, depending on the particular version, for one year or two years. That’s wrong and is inconsistent with one of our proudest founding documents, which many of us celebrated last month. The Declaration of Independence stated that among our “unalienable rights” are “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” A draft, whether for military or civilian service, violates the right to liberty.
And it’s not just the Declaration of Independence that speaks to liberty. The US Constitution, specifically the Thirteenth Amendment, guarantees freedom not to be drafted. Section I of that Amendment states, “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” Some people argue that Congress’s goal in passing that amendment was to end slavery and prevent its reimposition. But if that had been the only goal, Congress would not have added the words “nor involuntary servitude.” A draft is clearly involuntary servitude.
The negative effect on the military
During part of my time as an economics professor at the Naval Postgraduate School, the US Navy funded my research. In the late 1980s, when Senator John McCain and others were making noises in favor of universal national service, I proposed to my research sponsor that I study the issue. My sponsor quickly said yes. Why? One main reason was that two of the key people who signed off on the proposal were economists who understood the economics of the draft. They were against the draft on principle, but that wasn’t all. In previous conversations, they had pointed out an unintended negative consequence of universal national service: more difficulty in getting high-quality military manpower.
Here was their argument, which I found, and still find, persuasive. Think of the pool of young people whom the military has a chance of recruiting. The military must compete against colleges and employers. But introduce universal national service. Now the military must compete against civilian service as well. To be sure, there will be people whom the military would like to have who find civilian service unattractive. But there will also be people who want some kind of adventure and would satisfy part of their desire with a safe civilian job instead of a somewhat more dangerous military job.
The argument is not a slam dunk, but my two sponsors had thought about it enough, and looked at the demographics enough, to be convinced that a universal-service draft would make things more difficult for the military.
Building character and becoming adults
One desire that many advocates of universal national service share is that of molding young people into responsible adults. It’s a good goal.
But the main way people become responsible is by making choices and being accountable for the outcomes. Taking away their freedom to choose their work doesn’t seem like a clearcut way to make them more responsible. We do sometimes hear of former draftees asserting that being drafted was good for them because it made them responsible early. The most likely conclusion, then, is that drafting people would make some people become more responsible earlier than otherwise while postponing responsibility for others. Either way, it’s not a slam dunk.
Interestingly, though, in Youth and the Needs of the Nation, every example that the aforementioned committee gave of successful community service was of voluntary service. The committee stated:
Yet service to others, and voluntary action without waiting for government leadership or command, has been a special American theme from the first days of colonial settlement. In the early 19th century, de Tocqueville saw it as the secret of American success—just as the involuntary servitude of some Americans was the nation’s greatest sin. Frontier life required that neighbors help each other build barns, fight fires, harvest crops, and care for the sick. Popular movements for the abolition of slavery, for women’s suffrage, and for civil rights are later manifestations of the same spirit; the growth of the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, the Little Leagues and 4H Clubs, are other less political examples involving young people, as is all the free time given to the wide range of religious and civic organizations in our midst.
I emphasize that all of those activities, as the committee itself noted, were and are voluntary. I’ll close by noting an additional irony. In a document that advocated mandatory service, the authors stated that involuntary servitude “was the nation’s greatest sin.” I couldn’t have said it better.
