The Case Against Compulsory National Service

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.

 

These are the opening paragraphs of my latest piece for the Hoover Institution, “Forced National Service: Worse Than The Draft,” Defining Ideas, August 2, 2024.

Another excerpt:

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.)

Read the whole thing.

 

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