Let's you and him fight, Part 2

This is a direct continuation of my previous post, "Let's you and him fight," which I strongly recommend reading before this one if you haven't. 

The subject at hand is the strange argument often seen, mostly but not exclusively on the political Left, that a military draft is desirable because it would encourage a less bellicose American foreign policy. I talked about some reasons to believe that this is wrong last time, but such arguments are unavoidably speculative. 

So let's get more empirical. Proponents of the idea that conscription will strengthen antiwar opinion and encourage peace frequently claim to have the evidence of history on their side, comparing the relatively flaccid antiwar movement of conscriptionless present-day America to larger antiwar movements of the past. History does not allow controlled experiments. It does, however, provide us with a series of wars the United States has fought with conscript troops over the past century and a half.  Let's have a look, shall we?

Vietnam War 

Duration of Direct American Military Involvement: 8 yearsInvolvement in hostilities ended with: Withdrawal and ultimately unsuccessful attempt to turn responsibility for the war over to local allyAmerican Deaths: 58,220

Korean War

Duration of Direct American Military Involvement: 3 yearsInvolvement in hostilities ended with: Successful prevention of communist takeover of South Korea and expulsion of invading North Korean forces, establishment of permanent US military presence.American Deaths: 33, 686

Second World War

Duration of Direct American Military Involvement: 3 years, 8 monthsInvolvement in hostilities ended with:  Total victory, unconditional surrender of Japan, conquest of Germany and complete destruction of German state. (Fun fact: The war between the United States and Germany did not legally end until 1951, since there was no one left in Germany with the recognized authority to surrender.)American Deaths: 405, 000 (Does not include merchant marine)

First World War

Duration of Direct American Military Involvement: 1 year, 7 monthsInvolvement in hostilities ended with: Total victory, unconditional surrender of hostile powersAmerican Deaths: 116,000

The Civil War

Duration of Direct American Military Involvement: 4 yearsInvolvement in hostilities ended with: Total Union victory, dissolution of Confederate government, forcible reincorporation of all Confederate territory into United StatesAmerican Deaths: 620,000; 360,000 Union, 260,000 Confederate (possibly underestimates)
(Due to the much smaller population of the era, these casualties represent over two percent of the entire combined Union and Confederate population at the time, equivalent to the death of over six million Americans today.)

Of five wars fought with conscripts, US involvement ended for reasons other than the successful filament of the war's objectives in only one of them, Vietnam. The only other example of an American government with a conscript army giving up the fight was the Confederate States of America, which resorted to conscription sooner and much more extensively than the Union but only capitulated after its economic infrastructure had been systematically wrecked by invading armies, its territories overrun, and over 10% of its male citizens- not “military-age,”, 10% of all of them- killed. Comparing the losses of other countries in detail is beyond our scope here, so I will merely point out that each the four wars above fought against foreign states also had higher total non-American deaths than even the most extreme excess mortality estimates for Afghanistan and Iraq combined.

So, as one can clearly once one remembers that American history did not begin during the Kennedy administration, the idea that the country loses its stomach for war when conscription is in effect is not merely unsupported by the evidence, it is overwhelmingly contradicted by it. The usual result when America fields conscripted soldiers is that the war continues until the original objective is fully achieved, even if it requires hundreds of thousands of dead Americans.

The supposed value of the draft as a means of encouraging peace becomes even weaker when one considers something the idea's supporters invariably leave out when they compare Vietnam to post-draft conflicts: Scale. At the time I write this, about 7,000 Americans have been killed in operations in Iraq and Afghanistan since the 9/11 attacks out of a population of (as of the 2010 Census) over 308,000,000 people. Over 58,000 Americans died in Vietnam- out of a population that was smaller by about 100,000,000.

So the fact that Vietnam eventually spawned a much more vigorous antiwar movement than the War on Terror is hardly surprising or noteworthy. Even if the beliefs of conscription advocates about conscription's effects weren't historical nonsense, claiming that the absence of conscription is the explanation for the relative lack of an antiwar movement now is highly dubious simply because it presupposes that some further explanation is actually needed in the first place. It's like looking for some deep, subconscious reason rooted in my relationship with my mother to explain why being punched in the stomach would bother me less than being doused with molten steel. If you can do basic arithmetic, you already have a quite solid explanation of why the antiwar movement of the 21st century has fallen short of the Vietnam era.

If anything, the discrepancy calling for explanation is how strong antiwar sentiment been at times in this century, when American casualties have been a small fraction of what they were in Vietnam and the justification offered for today's wars is so much more viscerally appealing. The Vietnam-era antiwar movement also benefited from the fact that a not-insignificant portion of the American intelligentsia was to at least some degree sympathetic to the Vietnamese Communists, or Communism more generally, while the number of Americans who feel any affinity for Ba'athism or the Taliban- even in a vague “They're noble ideals that haven't worked in practice” sort of way- is effectively nil. If we're going to leap wildly from correlation to causation, it would be more reasonable to conclude that the draft makes the country more supportive of war, not less.

Nevertheless, let us briefly imagine that conscription really does have the pacifying effects some of its advocates claim for it, taking Vietnam as our model. Granting all that there's still no reason to believe that a draft would have made any difference to American foreign policy as of yet.

As previously mentioned, around 7,000 American troops have been killed in Iraq and Afghanistan to date. The 7,000th American soldier killed in action in Vietnam died sometime in 1966; the American military presence in Vietnam would grow for several years thereafter, peaking at over half a million troops. More Americans soldiers were killed in Vietnam in 1967 alone than have died in Iraq and Afghanistan over the past 12 years. In 1968, American deaths were more than twice those of the entire War on Terror. American deaths in 1969 were also higher in a single year than they've been in the entire past 12. By 1970, the American military presence in Vietnam was diminishing (though still larger than in 1966), and “only” 6,000 Americans were killed in a single year. In 1971, with Vietnamization of the war effort well under way, there were still over 2,000 American deaths, far more than any single year in the War on Terror. The US was still involved enough for the number of Americans killed to reach triple digits in 1972, 1973, 1974, and 1975, when American involvement was finally forced to a complete halt by the lack of a South Vietnam to continue defending.

If we're to take Vietnam as our model, as conscription advocates suggest, the draft still needs another 51,000 American corpses to fully work it's peacemaking magic. And that's assuming we're being generous and not adjusting for population growth.

So again, the mystery: Why does the idea that the draft would have prevented or more rapidly hastened the end of American military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, or prevent American military intervention in Syria (which the American public opposed by a substantial margin, the fact that the risks would be borne by volunteers notwithstanding) have such currency?

It's not just baseless. It's stupidly, embarrassingly, obviously baseless. Basic historical facts demonstrate that it's nonsense. It doesn't even have the thin superficial plausibility that most widely believed nonsense has. The idea that you can help the poor by making it illegal to pay low wages or minimize the harm caused by cocaine by making it illegal makes sense if you don't think beyond the most obvious, immediate effects, whereas “politicians will fight fewer wars if they're guaranteed an unlimited supply of the young men needed to fight them whether those men are willing or not” doesn't even rise to that level.

More to come.

Let's you and him fight, Part 1

(Note: This article turned out a lot longer than I planned, so I'm breaking it into multiple parts.)

There's a question I've long been interested by, and with talk of possible American military intervention in Syria over the past few months it's taken greater prominence again: Where the hell did so many ostensibly anti-war people left of political center- from garden-variety liberals/progressives to more radical sorts to “anarchists”- get the idea that the draft is a good idea as an anti-war measure?

You certainly don't have to look far for examples. Renowned scholar, activist, and alleged anarchist Noam Chomsky has endorsed the draft on that basis. It's the perennial obsession of Congressmen Charles Rangel (lifetimes ratings of 4% from the American Conservative Union, 95% from the AFL-CIO, 92% from the Brady Campaign, 91% lifetime yearly average from American for Democratic Action) of New York. MSNBC talking head and self-described "practical European socialist" Lawrence O'Donnell is a fan. And it's easy enough to find it supported in publications like In These Times, Mother Jones, or London Progressive Journal. You can hardly take a metaphorical step in the comments sections of most major "progressive" sites without tripping over a horde of boosters for the idea when the military and foreign policy are the issue at hand. It may not be a majority opinion, but it's certainly not a rare one

Now, I wouldn't be surprised by folks like that liking the draft as a matter of general principle, as indeed many openly are. If you're a big fan of forcing people to do things in groups, fetishize things like "shared" sacrifice for the state, and/or want to decisively repudiate the idea that a man's life belongs to him and not the rulers of some collective, it doesn't get much better than conscription. But the idea that it would encourage a more peaceful foreign policy as well is still pretty common.

The argument is usually that conscription gives more Americans a direct stake in decisions to use military force by raising the threat that they or someone they love will be drafted and possibly killed, and so will prevent the public from supporting war without good reason. The volunteer military, on the other hand, is said to insulate much of the public from the costs of war by drawing a disproportionate amount of its personnel from particular subsets of society,  typically said to be racial minorities and the poor, who join for lack of other options.

Now, one problem with this is that it's not actually accurate in the modern United States. The poorest fifth of Americans are actually underrepresented in the US military; enlistment rules concerning education and criminal records make a disproportionately large percentage of them ineligible. The military is disproportionately black, but- due to relatively lower Hispanic and Asians enlistment- not disproportionately nonwhite. The actual disparity most worth noting (other than sex, which a draft wouldn't change*) is regional, with a disproportionate number of military personnel coming from the South or the states around the Rocky Mountains. Inconveniently, these are also the parts of the country that are most pro-war, so the supposed mechanism by which the draft would discourage support for war is questionable.

(If any American military draft included women, I'd be very surprised. If that draft were continued into a war of any significant size and length and didn't offer females enough exemptions to make their inclusion a dead letter, I'd be even more surprised. If it actually put female conscripts into the line of fire in any significant numbers, I'd be absolutely shocked. If someone invented some sort of superdrug that gave the average woman the upper body strength and bone density of the average man, those predictions would not change. American conservatives are antsy enough about women's current degree of involvement in the military when they're all volunteers and there's nearly 49 dead men for every dead woman. Actually existing American feminism has a habit of recoiling in horror upon contact with anything resembling equality with non-elite men and retreating into leftish-sounding justifications for traditional protections and privileges. Women currently aren't even required to register for a draft that hasn't actually been used in decades; the idea that any restoration of conscription in the United States would be done in anything resembling a gender-neutral fashion is laughable, and the claims of some conscription advocates that it would or should be are empty showboating.)

And, more generally, the popular cliché about how the wealthy and powerful would lose their taste for war if it were their sons in harm's way doesn't actually hold up to scrutiny very well. Young men of the upper and upper-middle classes have suffered disproportionately in many wars, and not just in pre-industrial societies where the nobility was also the warrior class or where the army was composed of those who could afford to provide their own arms. It's typically been more dangerous in modern armies to be a junior officer then an enlisted man, which historically didn't prevent the ranks of freshly commissioned lieutenants from being filled with the sons of aristocrats or the upper bourgeoisie, and even in the enlisted ranks front-line combatants have often disproportionately been men from comfortable backgrounds simply because they were healthier. Casualties were disproportionately high among men from upper and upper-middle class families in First World War Britain, to cite one conspicuous example; those in power still thought the conflict was worth the lives of well over 800,000 British men.

Joe Biden's son spent a year on active duty in Iraq. Sarah Palin's son spent a year on active duty in Iraq. John McCain's son served in Iraq. The period of all three deployments partially overlapped with the 2008 Presidential race. If any of them experienced some sort of epiphany about the horrors of war as a result, they kept it to themselves. 

A less commonly heard argument, generally limited to more radical circles, is the idea that a conscript (Noam Chomsky slips the euphemism “citizen” in here) army will be less willing than a volunteer (often dysphemized as “mercenary,” as if in unconscious tribute to the modern Left's reactionary Prussian roots) army to fight in imperialistic wars or commit atrocities.

This is historically dubious, to put it mildly. Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union had “citizen” armies. The Japanese Empire conquered and brutalized much of Asia with a “citizen” army that- just to recap, since some people seem to forget that Asians are not indeterminate clouds of quantum fuzz that only have definite characteristics and histories when white people are fucking with them- slaughtered millions, killed hundreds of thousands of civilians by dousing Chinese cities in cholera and bubonic plague, and torturously killed thousands more researching medical mysteries like "What happens if you saw a still-conscious infant's torso open and start yanking stuff out?"  Every major belligerent in World War I had a “citizen” army. Napoleon conquered much of Europe with a “citizen” army. The first modern “citizen” army in Europe carried out the first modern ideological genocide in Europe on tens of thousand of civilians in the Vendée before it was even half a decade old.

For a bit of irony, that link up above leads to a transcript of a talk Noam Chomsky gave on the occasion of Yasser Arafat's death, condemning the ongoing occupation of Palestinian territory... by the State of Israel, which is so enthusiastic about the idea of “citizen armies” that it has mandatory military service for all men 18-21 and is one of the only countries on Earth that conscripts women as well.

For bonus irony, in light of the fact it's radical leftists making this argument, consider the implications of simultaneously agreeing- as Chomsky does- with the statements that:

1.Volunteer armies are full of the sort of brutal, amoral “mercenaries” well-suited to murderous campaigns of aggression and imperialism, while a conscript army would be full of much more humane, thoughtful “citizens” who wouldn't be able to stomach such depravity.
2. Volunteer armies are dark-skinned and poor, while a conscript army would have a greatly increased proportion of whites and the rich.

I don't want to wander too far afield of my main subject, so I leave the question of what a naturally concomitant 3 might be to others.

There's another problem when we look at the American historical record. Proponents of these pro-draft arguments often cite the size of the antiwar movement and the eventual shift in public opinion against the war during America's involvement in Vietnam as an example of the draft having the effect they claim, and the relative lack of a noisy antiwar movement during America's even longer military conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan as a demonstration of how the lack of a draft makes the public tolerant of unjustified military adventurism.

How well does this claim hold up? We'll examine that next time.

(Spoiler alert: Poorly.)