The economics of a volunteer army
It's really very simple.
In an interview on Wednesday, Lt. Gen. Franklin L. Hagenbeck, the Army's top personnel officer, said that the Army would use incentives like cash bonuses, educational benefits and choice base assignments to help meet its overall recruiting and re-enlistment goals next year, as it has in almost every year when it started with so few advance recruits. But he acknowledged that factors including the American casualties in Iraq and the improving job market made filling the ranks a challenge.
In other words, when demand for recruits is high, they have to make enlisting more attractive, mainly through financial incentives.
Despite all the talk about "shared sacrifice" and "equality of burden", it seems to me that the main point of a military draft is to provide the government a military force as large as it wants and on the cheap.
Michael Kinsley recently said:
A volunteer army is too easy to send to war. If the decision makers of society -- politicians, business leaders, and so on -- had children at risk, a war would be a lot less likely.
Perhaps a volunteer army is easier to send to war. I'm not convinced of that, but I'll concede the point for the moment. But, it seems to me that a volunteer army makes it more difficult to sustain a long, drawn-out, unpopular war.
Could the Vietnam war have continued as long as it did if the Army had been forced to rely on volunteers?
Posted by Chip on July 22, 2004 at 07:00 AMIf you destroy alternative economic opportunities for the working class, and censor sexually explicit material from the public airwaves, leaving violence as the de facto socially-approved outlet for the frustrations of young men ... that will facilitate enlistment levels.
Posted by: Danny Howard at July 22, 2004 11:22 AM
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