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March 09, 2005

Rethinking the Draft I

As many readers are probably already aware, blogger Phillip Carter and Washington Monthly editor Paul Glastris have put forth a call to revamp America's military forces via a new draft. Their draft would be unlike prior drafts, in that they would forbid colleges and universities from accepting applicants who haven't performed some kind of national service. This service could be military, but could also be in something like AmeriCorps or in support of homeland security operations. They posit this would create a large base of trained personnel for future military operations without requiring a major expansion of the force. Unfortunately, their analysis is flawed in several respects, which I will analyze over the next few days. I'll begin with an analysis of the costs of their plan.

I've pointed out before that expanding the current force is necessary to support our current requirements in Iraq and Afghanistan. Carter and Glastris counter that we don't need a long-term increase in the size of the active force, because our commitments overseas will not last that long. That may be true, although our experience in the Balkans suggests that 'short-term' deployments have a bad habit of lingering like a case of herpes. But we've faced that type of issue in the past; indeed, the history of this country is repeated buildups when we go to war followed by drawdowns after the war is over. It's clear that we need to expand the force for the current fight, and there are only so many ways to do that. We can continue on our current course of using Reserve soldiers to fill the gaps. We can expand the active force to a level commensurate with its responsibilities. Or we can expand the Reserve to continue using our current strategy while placing less strain on the Reserve Component. Carter and Glastris prefer option 3, using a draft to provide the manpower needed to build the force.

This strategy founders on the question of money. Carter and Glastris never address the question of where the money will come from to fund the draft or the expanded force, let alone the additional training costs such an undertaking will require. Yet they argue that a draft is absolutely necessary because it's impossible to fund an expanded volunteer force. From a political standpoint, they may be correct in this latter assessment: building a few new divisions to round out the current force would be hideously expensive, on the order of $2-3 billion in initial costs and another $3-5 billion annually in personnel and training costs. Supporting that kind of increase would not be politically popular even now, and would be even more difficult once the war wound down. But what they fail to consider is how they would fund their plan.

There are roughly 28 million draft-age people in America now. Assuming only one-tenth of them want to go to college, that's 2.8 million jobs that have to be provided in homeland security, AmeriCorps, and the military. Where is that money going to come from? Even supposing we increase the size of the military by 100,000 people at a cost of $15 billion a year, I'm far from convinced their plan will be any cheaper. Paying 2.8 million people a mere $10,000 a year adds up to $28 billion, almost twice the costs of expanding the military. Fiscally, their plan simply doesn't pass muster.

That doesn't consider several other problems their plan fails to consider. I'll address those in further posts over the next few days.