The only way a draft can work politically is a universal draft. Everyone, regardless of sex, fitness, or religious belief, is drafted and must serve in some capacity. On your 18th birthday you are forced to go. And if you don’t go, you spend the exact same amount of time in prison as you would have spent in the service.
So everybody serves. Except we don’t need that many untrained infantrymen, so the military will select the people they want out of the draft pool, and the rest including all conscientious objectors and various other troublemakers go into the non-military pool. Everyone goes through boot camp, I guess the military draftees would have to go on to a second boot camp to get specific military training. Military draftees get sent overseas as cannon fodder for the various countries we’ll be occupying indefinately. Non-military draftees form labor batallions. Really unskilled people will be used as migrant farm workers, others will become nurse’s aides, orderlies, truck drivers, garbage collectors, road crews, caterpillar fur-counters by touch, testing survival gear on Titan, and any other government job that we currently use minimum wage workers for.
Of course, what this amounts to is a direct tax on labor…everyone, regardless of skill, regardless of ability, regardless of the opportunity cost, is shoveled into unskilled, uncompensated dangerous minimum wage positions. And the benefit to society would be that we don’t have to pay taxes to pay the current minimum wage workers…we would have paid our dues already in the form of uncompensated labor.
Only the trouble is that paying room, board, medical insurance, training, counseling, liability insurance and so forth for a bunch of resentful 18 year olds is almost certainly going to cost more than simply paying minimum wage (or higher) to hire the people we need to to the jobs we deem neccesary.
The alternative…just picking people at random and forcing them to join the military up to the levels required to meet military staffing levels…would be so unfair as to be politically impossible. A draft could possibly be sold if everyone had to go. A draft where only a miserable few were selected to pay the price could not be.
If we need a draft to support the indefinate occupation of an indefinate number of third world shitholes for the forseeable future, then such occupations simply won’t happen.
The other alternative…paying people wages and benefits so generous that they choose to enlist…reveals the true cost of the occupation while a draft sweeps the costs under the rug. But paying soldiers what they would be worth would also be politically unsupportable.