Angry Planet - 50 Years Since the Draft

Episode Date: February 27, 2023

In 1973, as most American troops left Vietnam, President Richard M. Nixon ended compulsory military service for males over the age of 18. It was an end of system that had been in place since the Second World War and came in answer—at least in part—to an ever-growing anti-war, anti-draft movement. Historian and writer Max Boot joins us to talk about the history of the draft and the all-volunteer force that now has 50 years under its belt.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast. Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. People live in a world and their own making. Frankly, that seems to be the problem. Welcome to Angry Planet. Hello and welcome to Angry Planet. I'm Jason Fields. Matthew Galt is watching the skies. 38 years ago, I signed on to the Selective Service System. Five years ago, my oldest son did. Last year, it was my second son. I think many, if not most, 18-year-old men, sign on without giving too much thought to it. You have to, or you're not eligible for certain student loans and other privileges.

Still, Selective Service is there for a reason. It's about keeping America prepared to fight a war of such a size that we need a larger military. In some ways, it's like what Russia is doing now. Hopefully there's some differences. The active draft ended 50 years ago in 1973, and historian and writer Max Boot made note of it in a terrific column for the Washington Post. Today, we're going to talk about the draft, what it was, what it is now, what it could be, and what it should be. Max Boot, thanks so much for joining us. Thanks for having me.

So can we start? We always start very much at the beginning. What's a draft? A draft is the involuntary military service of young men and in the past young men. Now it might well be young men and women called to serve in a country's military, which is something that a number of countries around the world currently have. I mean, Taiwan, for example, just recently extended their draft to one year of mandatory service. And it's something we have not had in the U.S. since the U.S. ended its involvement in the Vietnam War in 1973.

Before the Vietnam War, I think some people who are on the younger side think that the draft started with the Vietnam War, practically. What is a little bit of the history of the draft in the United States? I mean, we don't have to go back to Napoleon in France or anything like that. Well, in the United States, we have generally not had a peacetime draft. We had a draft during the Civil War. We had a draft in World War I. Then our first peacetime draft started in 1940. But, you know, you got to put kind of an asterisk around peacetime because that was after the outbreak of World War II.

It was before we got into it. But it was after the outbreak of the war in Asia and in Europe. up and it was clear that war was coming for us as well. And that's why Congress asked the Selective Service Act and President Franklin Roosevelt signed it. And so then from 1940 on, there was a brief break after the end of World War II, but generally, pretty much nonstop from 1940 to 1973, we had a draft in this country. And everybody had to, all young men, between certain ages and and those parameters changed. All young men had to register for the draft, and then a certain number of them were actually called to the colors. And obviously, the numbers called up greatly

expanded in wartime, because in World War II, we had something like 12 million people serving in uniform. That's a huge military, especially considering that the country was about one-third the size it is today, population-wise. Then, of course, the number of draftees dramatically shrank in the late 40s, and then we had the Korean War, and so the number of draftees expanded again, and then after the end of the Korean War,

the number of draftees fell again until the Vietnam War broke out and, you know, started sucking up American military manpower between 1965 and 1968 in particular, And at that point, the draft became hugely contentious because a lot of people did not support the Vietnam War. A lot of young men did not want to be called up for service. So you had people fleeing to Canada to avoid the draft. You had people draft resistors burning their draft cards.

And there was a general sense in the 1960s that the draft was fundamentally unfair because there were occupational and student deferments. which allowed more privileged young men to avoid service. They could go to college or grad school, or they could serve in the National Guard as George W. Bush did. Or they could come up with bogus medical excuses for why they couldn't serve, like Donald Trump in his bone spurs and his heel. there was a sense that it was the underprivileged, you know, men of minorities and poor whites who were being sent to Vietnam, whereas the privilege were dodging the draft. And that contributed to the unpopularity of the draft.

And eventually, and it certainly contributed, and the threat of being drafted, it certainly contributed to massive anti-war protests on campus. and contributed to the pressure on first and Johnson administration and the Nixon administration to end American involvement in Vietnam. And eventually Nixon did that the Paris Peace Accords in 1973 and at that very point he said no more draft call-ups

and that was the end of it. And at that point, the U.S. military, which had been really dependent on draftees since 1940, had to overnight transition to an all-volunteer force. So, an all volunteer force, I mean, I guess that was what it would have been between, let's say, World War I and World War II, right? Although, but I know the U.S. military was absolutely tiny. I used to work at the Holocaust Museum, and part of the Holocaust Museum, you know, Holocaust is that the U.S. was not a military force as World War II was starting up. So you talked about the draft lottery. And the reason why I'm talking, we're talking about such basic stuff is this is a long time ago. That was one thing that's fascinating about the column is it starts to give a sense, I think, of, I mean, it's 50 years.

And to me, it's fresh in my mind. I mean, I still, you know, think of Vietnam and I, you know, and this was a very present thing. I don't know if it's the same for you. But I was going to ask, just, it was a lottery? I mean, does that really mean that you picked a name out of a hat? Yeah, I mean, it was, yeah, that was, it was really up to local draft boards. The actual administration of the draft was very decentralized. But yeah, in general, there was certainly in the 60s, there was a draft lottery.

and unless, and then that would determine the order in which you were drafted. That was an attempt to create fairness in the system, right? Because it would be, you know, supposedly an impartial thing where it's just random generation of numbers and whoever gets the lower number gets called. But of course, as I mentioned, there was a lot of unfairness because there were also a lot of deferments and ways that the wealthy and well-connected could get out of service. And I mean, the irony of those performance, by the way, is that they were actually started in the 1950s, and they were part of a deliberate strategy to push young people into certain fields. And the idea was that we needed more teachers, we needed more scientists, we needed all these other professionals to compete with the Soviets in the space race and the science and technology race. And so the draft created deferments for people going to graduate school. It created deferments for people becoming teachers in addition to existing deferments for, you know, people who had kids and were the breadwinners of their families.

And those parameters went back and forth over the years. But there was a conscious strategy behind the administration of the selective service system in the 50s and 60s to push people into professions, basically to, to, push people to dodge the draft was essentially the strategy behind the draft because they wanted you to avoid the draft by doing things that they thought would be socially useful like, you know, teaching or becoming scientists or whatever. And so that wasn't a huge issue in the 50s and 60s when we were basically in a peacetime establishment and, you know, men might be annoyed by being sent, you know, to Germany for a couple of years like Elvis Presley, but it wasn't a big deal. But then all of a sudden becomes a big deal when you're not just being sent to hang out in Germany and clean latrines for a couple of years.

You might be sent to the jungles of Vietnam. You may never come back. And so then it became much more contentious. And these kind of well-intentioned deferments, which were designed to meet societal needs, were seen as a way for the privilege to cop out of their obligation to serve. And would you argue that that had a large impact on the force that we actually had in Vietnam? I mean, was morale that larger part of the issue? I mean, morale did become an issue. I mean, it's a little bit hard to disentangle because actually I think most of the troops in combat, certainly for the Marine Corps, and I think even for the Army, I think most of them are volunteers.

So it wasn't just simply draftees. And in fact, a lot of draftees wound up doing administrative jobs, stateside, or, you know, in Europe or someplace like that. So it wasn't necessarily the case that everybody got drafted, got handed a rifle and got sent to a rice patty. But it definitely created a perception of unfairness. There was definitely a sense. I mean, the statistics are very hard to parse, but there's kind of a sense. There was certainly evidence to show that, as you would expect, that in Vietnam, it was not the same kind of universal services in World War II. that there were a lot of, you know, graduates of Ivy League universities who served and fell fighting in World War II.

There were very few who served and fell fighting, you know, in Vietnam, whereas a lot of people from, you know, poor neighborhoods wound up going over there and some of them not coming back or, you know, coming back wounded or what have you. And so it definitely became, you know, in addition to a guerrilla war, became kind of a class war. or that was kind of the perception. And so that helped to undermine public support for the draft. What, you know, I argued in my column that I wrote about the end of the draft in Washington Post was that ironically, in some ways, even though in its last years, the draft was undermining national cohesion. It was really a very divisive force in American society leading to mass protests and public dissension

and it lacked legitimacy at the end, really. what I suggested my column is that in the last 50 years since the end of the draft, ironically, I think one of the consequences of winning the draft is it has led to less national cohesion and greater public divisiveness because we've kind of lost what we had in the heyday of the draft in World War II, and we had the largest percentage of the population in service, which was kind of a melting pot phenomenon occurring within the military where people were being forced to serve, alongside folks from different parts of the country, different walks of life, different religions, different ethnic groups, in other words, being exposed to, you know, the diversity of America in a way they would not have been if they just stayed in, you know, whatever their hometown happened to be.

And that was seen as a very positive social force. I mean, it wasn't something that was expected or planned, but it kind of broke down some of the barriers in American society and created this greater, cohesion. And so, you know, when when the war ended, there was a greater desire to redress social ills, you know, a few years after the end of World War II, President Truman desegregated the armed services. And then, of course, you had the great civil rights initiatives of the 1950s and 60s. And then you had, you know, Lyndon Johnson creating the great society to tackle poverty. And a lot of those things, we forget. We're done with tremendous national unity and even near unanimity. I mean, if you look at like the passage of Medicare, Medicaid,

you know, the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the 1965 Voting Rights Act, what you will see is that they passed by overwhelming bipartisan majorities. There is not that much dissent, honestly. There was some, but it was hugely bipartisan, hugely popular. And now it's almost impossible to imagine any major piece of legislation. with that degree of public support. I mean, when, you know, President Obama passed the Affordable Care Act, I think there was not a single Republican who voted for it. So, you know, and that certainly happened with Senate President Biden's legislation as well.

So, you know, we've gotten used to this kind of tremendously polarized society with these huge differences in ideology, politics, race, religion, ethnicity, regions, you know, and then city versus country, all these divisions that are, you know, creating greater discord and disunity in modern America. And, you know, I think in retrospect, we can see that the draft in its heyday in the 40s and 50s helped to break down in earlier generation divisions and not having that draft means there's kind of no common bonding experience from most people in this country as they're growing up. It's interesting. I mean, it's obvious when you think about it that most people have not met people very much unlike themselves. I mean, I grew up in New York City. I live in Washington, D.C. I have spent no time outside of urban areas that really counts. I can see that just that divide would be something that would be shaken up by having a draft. Right. I mean, if you read like, it's really interesting because if you read the letters or memoirs, you know, of a lot of novelists, for example, often, or writers, you know, like Jewish kids from New York, like Norman Mailer or Norman Pat Horowitz or whoever, who served in the military in the 40s and 50s. I mean, they will, like, this was a huge experience from like, hey, I'm meeting all these, you know, southern kids from backwoods, Louisiana or something. I've never met anybody like this before. And it really kind of opened.

their horizons. It opened their eyes to what America was like. And I'm sure, like for those Southern kids, they'd ever met a Jewish kid from New York. So it was like a hugely, you know, disorienting experience for both of them. But it was, you know, very positive. We'll be back after these messages. And we're back. You're listening to Angry Planet. of course, this is perhaps the most idealistic way of looking at the draft as well. And, you know, I like to point out when I'm talking about things like this that I actually have not served. Right. Well, that's, I mean, that's, that's one of the products, obviously, of not having a draft.

It's very few people served. You only have about, you know, 1% or fewer of the country in uniform at any one time. And the number of veterans is rapidly declining. And so that's something that, you know, folks in uniform, you know, I, I talked to a number of retired officers for this article, and a lot of them lament the fact that there is this widening gap between civil society and the military because so few people in this country have experience of military service anymore. What does that division mean? Do you have any sort of view into it? I mean, the professionalization of the military, which has been going on now for 50 years or has been achieved, I guess, for quite a long time. And that this professional core does not spend a lot of time with the rest of the public. What is the cautionary tale there, if there is one?

Well, again, I think there are two costs, one that I alluded to earlier, which is I think there is greater societal discord and polarization because, you know, young people are not brought together in their formative years in boot camp, you know, or, you know, military service. service. But there's also a, you know, there's a, there's a larger cost down the line, which is that we kind of, you know, hand over military service to a core of professionals. And there's an upside to that, which is that we get a more capable military. And I've never talked to anybody in a senior position in uniform who says, we want draftees back because they understand that when you have people who are serving against their will, you often have morale problems, discipline problems. it's not as effective as having volunteers who want to be there, you know, and are eager to be part of the service. But it also creates, you know, this concern that you have this kind

of professional cast of warriors who are very divorced from civil society and they don't only understand the civil society and civil society doesn't only understand them. And so, you know, that that's something that, you know, people who follow civil military issues worry worry about. And I think that's, you know, that is kind of, in fact, where we are today. And now it's, you know, it's kind of rubber meets the road time right now because although the all-volunteer force has been a huge success over the last 50 years, it wasn't an overnight success. It really struggled in the 70s and then gradually became a success in the 80s. But right now, it's struggling again. There's a huge recruiting problems within the services. The Army missed their recruiting quarters by 15,000 soldiers last year. That's an entire division's work. So there's a lot of people in military positions of authority who are concerned that there are not enough young people who are, A, qualified to serve and be willing to serve. And so they're having trouble tapping into a high-quality pool of recruits. And they're concerned one of the reasons is that because of this growing civil military gap, that people don't really understand the military, don't necessarily trust the military, that there is kind of this. chasm of incomprehension. That divides the military from the rest of society.

I guess I would like to know if you see these things as something that we need to address urgently. Do we need to reinstate the draft or some form of the draft in order to heal these problems? Well, there's nobody I've talked to who really thinks there's any realistic prospect of reinstating a military draft. right now because the apparatus is in place, as you mentioned, the selective service registrations have continued since 1973. So in theory, if we were to institute the draft, we could do so because, you know, young men have to register. And there was an attempt to extend that to young women, too, which narrowly failed, but which may succeed in the future. But there is no, you know, overriding national emergency right now that would justify that kind of mobilization. And, you know,

keep in mind, we're talking about a lot of people, just in the 18 to 20 age range, are, you know, 12 million people in America, you know, presumably about 6 million men's, roughly 6 million women. So that's, you know, that's a lot of people and the entire active duty force right now, the U.S. military is about 1.2 million. So, you know, if you started to draft all of them, you would have a military like 10 times dollars than what you have today. And we don't need that. We can't afford it. It's very costly to train and equip. individual soldier. We don't need like 10 million soldiers. Maybe, you know, we might need a few more than we have today, but we certainly don't need 10 million more. So there's basically zero support

for military conscription, but there is concern that without conscription that as we're continuing to rely on the all-volunteer force, that it has become harder to recruit in the last year so in part because the unemployment rate is at the lowest level since 1969. So a lot of kids coming out of high school have other opportunities, can get jobs doing other things. There's kind of a war awareness that's set in after, you know, more than 20 years after 9-11, you know, nearly two years after the U.S. defeat in Afghanistan. So there's not a, you know, there's a lot of charges being hurled at the military from the right that they're supposedly too woke, but a lot of, you know, progressive Gen Xers think it's actually

too conservative. So there's a lot of, there's a lot of things going on, including the fact, that there's a lot of young people who are, you know, overweight out of shape and just can't meet the military requirements. So there's a lot of reasons why, you know, they're having, you know, big problems with the volunteer force right now, but there's no real support and no real prospect of a military draft. What there is is, I mean, there's talk about some kind of national service, you know, about which exists now and in a very small way with America.

and, you know, Peace Corps and a few other programs. So there's talk in Congress about expanding some of those programs to create more service opportunities. But in those, you know, that's, I'm in favor of that. I think those are good programs. But, you know, it's not going to address societal discord. It's not going to address some of the larger problems that we have because those are very boutique programs that serve the small niche of people.

And the paradox of those voluntary national service programs is the people, the people, who are most likely to go into them are probably the most civic-minded people in society to begin with and don't really need what those programs offer. I mean, you really need to be forcing people who aren't so civic-minded into those programs. But again, that would have to be done with some kind of, you know, involuntary service mechanism. Again, there's really no support for that. So it's very unlikely to happen. After my column came out, I actually had an intriguing suggestion from a retired Army officer, which I hadn't even thought of, but it struck me as an interesting idea where he said that, you know, instead of offering, you know, loan forgiveness, willy-nilly,

as, you know, President Biden proposes to do for a number of folks who have, you know, student loans, he says, why don't we offer loan forgiveness and we turn for like two years of national service? And if you go to college and take out loans and then you can get them all repaid if you volunteer for a couple of years in America Corps or, you know, Peace Corps, whatever the program is, that actually seems like an intriguing suggestion to me. Yeah, although we're talking about a quarter million dollars per person if you don't go to a state college. So that adds up kind of quickly. Yeah, it adds up. Yeah, there's a lot of reasons why, I mean, people, there's a lot of reasons why people talk about. expanding service programs, but very little ever happens because those programs are expensive, too,

and there's very little will in Congress to fund them. So where do we go from here? And just to sort of wrap up, we've talked about what it was, and we've talked a bit about what it is. And I'm glad you touched on the fact that many people are physically just not capable of being dragged, I mean, taken into it. the military. What can we do if there's no will to bring service into our, you know, society? That's a great question without an obvious answer. I mean, where I concluded my column was saying that because I don't think there's any real prospect of a military draft being reinstated, and I don't think there's any real prospect of creating a national service draft, we have to

look at other ways to try to break down barriers and to build better citizens who are more conscious about, you know, what they owe the country. And so my kind of closing line was about civics education. They need to revive civics education. It's not, it's, you know, it's a little bit of a detour. It's not exactly the same thing. But that is something that we need to do as well, I think. And it could achieve at least some of the benefits, not all, but at least some of the benefits of service programs by making young people more aware of, you know, what the Constitution says, how our government works, what this country is about, good and bad, doesn't have to be propaganda. It can be worse and all. But just to educate young people because, you know, surveys show that

that most people today are just, you know, appallingly ignorant about, about the basics of, of how, you know, the U.S. functions. The only problem I can see with something I agree with you completely, unfortunately, I'm not sure that we can agree on what civics are anymore even. Well, that's kind of a symptom of the problem, right? I'm talking about national divisions, and I'm saying, we need to teach civics, and then you're saying, like, well, we can't even agree on what civics are. And I think you may be right, but that's kind of a chicken and the egg problem, right? Right. Yeah, it really is. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. I really appreciate your insights.

Thanks for having me. Good discussion. Thanks for listening to another episode of Angry Planet. The show is produced with love by Matthew Galt and Jason Fields with the assistants of Kevin Medell. This is the place where we ask you for money. If you subscribe to us on substack.angryplanet.com, it means the world to us. The show, which we've been doing for more than seven years now, means the world to us, and we hope it means a lot to you. We're incredibly grateful to our subscribers. Please feel free to ask us questions, suggest show ideas, or just say hi.

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