I remember reading “Chance and Circumstance”, a book about the Vietnam era draft:
IIRC, the author pointed out that it was overwhelmingly the poor and uneducated who ended up going to Vietnam. I think we pretty much accept that as fact today. So with this in mind, I think drafting people into the military is usually a bad idea.
I don’t think anyone has mentioned Israel yet in this thread. They have mandatory military service for most people. What do we think of that? Is it morally different than a draft? I suppose it depends on whether there is a war on, and what sort of war it is. Thoughts?
Israel has always had compulsory military service, since 1948, so it was not linked to any single specific war. I do not know how easy it is to get out of if you are rich as opposed to “poor and uneducated”. Apparently you can get out of it by being too Arab, too religious, or for a few other reasons.
In Britain, a whole bunch of soldiers were executed during WW1 for offenses such as desertion, cowardice, and sleeping at their post, but such penalties were abolished in 1930, in parallel with increased understanding of PTSD and shell-shock.
I will, however, note that I think the proper way to enlist soldiers to fight in a brutal war is to lay whatever needs to be paid to enlist volunteers. If it’s truly necessary, then the nation should be willing to pay through the nose for it.
The Fourteenth Amendment very clearly prohibits involuntary servitude. A military draft is very clearly involuntary servitude. The government has never taken this argument seriously, but their argument is generally just “no, of course the law doesn’t mean what it very obviously and very clearly does mean”.
I am not sure it literally says that. For example, it includes text like “…nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law…”, but no State is suggesting that imprisoning criminals or conscripting cannon fodder is outside due process of law.
Because of its small size and unique risks, Israel’s policy has always been to draft as many soldiers as possible during times of peace, so that it’ll have huge reserves of trained civilians to call up immediately during times of war.
People from all courses of life still get out of service, of course, but I don’t think rich people dodge more than poor do. If anything, the core of the IDF is the Israeli middle class.
Yes, I know that the Supreme Court has rejected the argument. But they never gave any actual reason for rejecting it. Conscription is servitude, and it is, by definition, involuntary. How can one interpret it as not being involuntary servitude?
And yes, before anyone says it, I know that draftees get paid. That’s completely irrelevant. Paid involuntary servitude is still prohibited, and unpaid voluntary servitude is still permitted.
the Court’s reasoning certainly involved a good bit of hand waving, but the social contract implication and the draft as a civic duty (the common law duties citizens owe to a state) had certain appeal in the midst of WW1, and an originalist could certainly find support that historical intent of the 13th amendment was not to abolish the draft. I think a stronger argument could be made for opposing mandatory jury duty under the 13th Amendment. The stakes are far lower and alternatives are much more available.
True. But they don’t always have the choice about getting killed.
When faced with a one-on-one him-or-me situation rather few people would prefer to be the loser. Not zero, but very few.
Which I interpret to mean that as between being forced into being killed or doing killing, most folks would be a lot more upset about the former than the latter. And so that’s the real imposition of a draft: being involuntarily forced into a situation where you have a real likelihood of being killed. Or maimed. Or psychologically ruined.
