Notes on the Comeback of Conscription

As the reaction to a deepfake video of Joe Biden reviving the draft has reminded news-watchers, conscription is appearing on the agenda across much of the Western world. Sweden, scarcely after ending it, has already reinstituted it in a limited way (having a draft, but so far limited call-ups). Meanwhile France, where President Emmanuel Macron who had wanted to mandate "direct experience of military life" for the young for at least a month, now enrolls its young people in a "national service" program where they are "encouraged" to partake of a military component that can seem at least a quarter-step in that direction. Meanwhile Germany's Minister of Defense, while demanding ever more resources for a program of German rearmament already without any point of comparison since at least the founding of the Bundeswehr in the 1950s, openly speaks of the end of conscription as a "mistake."

In the U.S. there has been less discussion as yet, for ample reason, not least an insular geography that makes a manpower-intensive army relatively less important than a technology-intensive navy than is the case for a country with long land borders with big military powers; and a vast and relatively youthful population base that makes it easy to raise large land armies on even a volunteer base. (Compared with the biggest West European power, Germany, the U.S. has four times as big a population, and five times as many people in the critical "military age" category of 18-24--some 30 million to Germany's 6 million.) However, the most immediately important fact is that the U.S. armed forces were never reduced from their Cold War level of strength to anything like the same degree as the European nations. The U.S. cut its armed forces by a third after that conflict--while the cut was closer to two-thirds in the case of the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), and much deeper where fighting forces were concerned. Where in the Cold War the FRG's army had a dozen active-duty divisions, including six armored divisions, today it has just three divisions--not a single one of which is a proper armored division on the old standard, because of how the country's "tank park" shrank, from some five thousand tanks to perhaps not even two hundred and fifty--a 95 percent contraction. It is likewise with the reserves whose mobilization would come ahead of any draft. Where the Bundeswehr's massive reserve once permitted its ground-forces component to by itself put over 1 million soldiers into the field when fully mobilized, now it would manage 70,000--a 93 percent drop. And so does it go, more or less, with France, and Britain, and Italy.

The result is that if really intent on in short order restoring the capability to fight a conventional conflict on any significant scale (even one well short of what they were prepared for in the Cold War) the European states have few alternatives to conscription, as compared with a U.S. which would not have to go anywhere near so far, so soon, still possessing as it does massive conventional war-fighting capabilities (even where ground forces are concerned, plausibly disposing of a greater mechanized fighting capability than Europe's powers bring to the table combined). However, whether other Western states actually will follow Sweden's example will have much to do with how the international scene evolves--and what the publics of those countries will accept. The media is characteristically eager for the most militarized response to the international situation of today--but it is far from clear that the broader public is as enthusiastic. Moreover, the attractiveness of the idea falls in proportion to one's expectation that they will be the one actually drafted--"Back in my day"-growling old people who don't much like young people, and know they themselves are safe from call-up, very readily support the idea--but young people not so much. (After all, if they wanted to be in the armed forces they would likely already be there.) Indeed, forcing large numbers of young people into military service could be exactly what catalyzes the relatively marginal opposition to the conflict seen to date into something much more difficult for supporters of the very conflict for which they drafted them.