In mine Defining Ideas In last month’s article, “The Draft Is Still a Bad Idea,” I made the case against the traditional draft for military acquisitions. A related proposal is for a comprehensive draft for young people, men and women, 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 framework are similar to the arguments against a military framework. The unique features of the universal draft also present other problems. The key point, as I will show, is that the international framework is even more questionable than the limited military framework. A global structure, like a military structure, will abuse the freedom of young people to choose their career and will not take into account the loss of these young people. Furthermore, a global framework would, by definition, take away the freedom of more young people than a military framework would. And, as some military officials have noted, a regional structure can make it more difficult for the military to find the desired number of high-quality first-time recruits.
These are the opening paragraphs of my latest Hoover Institution piece, “Forced National Service: Worse than The Draft,” Defining IdeasAugust 2, 2024.
Another quote:
The suggestion of harsh measures for the young people was not only William James. At the famous December 1966 conference on the military draft, a conference that Milton Friedman saw as a turning point toward opposition to the draft, noted anthropologist Margaret Mead called for women to be drafted as well as men. He realized that there was a special problem with women that men did not have: women could get pregnant. (It’s too bad Mead wasn’t there to explain that fact to Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who, at her trial, said that because she wasn’t a biologist, she couldn’t give an explanation of the woman. Not a biologist, Margaret Mead had no such difficulty. .)
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