In the past 5 weeks, I have written two articles about the Hoover Institution’s online publication draft. Defining Ideas. The former filed a case against the army; the second filed a lawsuit against the national service of the world.
In the answers to Defining Ideas site, some commenters argue that another benefit of the draft is that it creates for people who benefit from protection to have “skin in the game.”
In response to my original article, one commenter wrote:
Our freedom is not free. David Henderson wants those who are prepared to risk their lives for our freedom to do so for the benefit of those who want their freedom for free.
In response to my second article, one commenter wrote:
When American men do not serve their country, they have no skin in the game and, therefore, feel no obligation to fight and defend.
In reality, however, if the goal is for defense beneficiaries to have skin in the game, an all-volunteer army does a better job than a draft.
Why?
The reason is that the draft places a disproportionate burden on draftees. An all-volunteer army, on the other hand, spreads the burden on defense beneficiaries whether they are in the military or not.
In the late 1970s, there was a major push, led by Senator Sam Nunn (D-GA), to reinstate the draft. I got copies of all the bills to do that. Each of them—and there were many—cut the starting salary, often by large percentages. Why pay if you can threaten people with possible prison sentences for non-compliance? Therefore, the burden would be unfairly placed on the recruits.
Consider, in contrast, an all-volunteer army. The reason the military had problems recruiting quality personnel in the late 1970s was that we had a booming economy coupled with high inflation. It was a double whammy. This increase gave potential recruits better opportunities for military service; the failure to raise wages in line with the Consumer Price Index made military service more attractive than it was.
President Jimmy Carter rationalized the situation after four years in the White House and, with Congress, raised the starting wage. Then Ronald Reagan became president and he raised it again. That’s how we went out in the late 1970s and hired a lot of people.
So notice what happens. Because we had an all-volunteer army, the responsibility of defense could not be placed on the shoulders of young soldiers. Instead it is shared by all taxpayers.
We saw the same thing in the mid-2000s, during the second war with Iraq. Here’s what I wrote in September 2015, drawing on a scholarly article co-authored by then-Marine Major Chad W. Seagren:
Henderson and Seagren note that, as the number of troops in Vietnam increased from 1964 onward, actual military output per member of the military did not decrease. In contrast, actual military spending per member rose sharply as the US government entered the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. From an average of $73,887 per member between 1996 and 2001, actual costs rose to $103,772 from 2004 to 2010, a 40 percent increase. The reason: the government had to raise wages to meet its labor targets. Henderson and Seagren point out that this high cost per member of the military resulted in about $45 billion a year in US government spending. Those higher costs, admittedly, were funded primarily through deficit spending rather than current taxes. But deficits now, unless the government later fails or cuts spending, lead to higher taxes in the future. And if, as seems likely, the future tax system resembles the current tax system in forcing the highest earners to pay a much higher percentage of their income in taxes, the rich and powerful. the will pay more for the war.
The bottom line is that if you want all the people who benefit from the defense to have skin in the game and not just focus on a small group, you should oppose the draft and favor an all-volunteer army.
Postscript:
In researching this piece, I found this Econlib article by Chad Seagren, “Service in a Free Society,” May 2, 2011. I had posted and edited it during my time as Econlib’s articles editor. I had forgotten about it. It addresses a lot of issues with the framework, and it does it very well.
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