Angry Planet - Service Without a Smile: A History of the Draft

Episode Date: February 12, 2021

The United States’ military is an all volunteer force and has been since 1973. The people who fought both Gulf Wars and the war in Afghanistan asked to join up. They had as many reasons as there are troops, but not one was compelled by the government. Today, we’re talking to Beth Bailey, Distinguished Professor at Kansas University and the author of AMERICA'S ARMY: Making the All-Volunteer Force. We’re going to talk about the history of the draft and what came after.Recorded 1/19/21Support 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. The notion was you defer the people who are studying things and developing techniques and technologies that will give the United States privacy, which meant deferring people who studied science and engineering, which turned into deferring people who went to college, which turned in by the time we get to Vietnam to an extremely class-based system, where those people who are able to go to college, for whatever reasons, and often in economic circumstances were critical, They had a much greater, they were deferred, unless they were going into the officer corps. One day, all of the facts in about 30 years' time will be published. When genocide has been cut out in this country, almost with infinity, and when it is near to completion, people talk about intervention. You don't get freedom peacefully. Freedom is never state-guided peacefully.

Anyone who is depriving you of freedom isn't deserving of a freedom. of a peaceful approach. Welcome to Angry Planet. I'm Jason Fields. And I'm Matthew Galt. The United States military is an all-volunteer force and has been since 1973. The people who fought both Gulf Wars and the war in Afghanistan asked to join up. They had as many reasons as there are troops, but not one was compelled by the government. Today, we're talking to Beth Bailey, distinguished professor at Kansas University,

and the author of America's Army, making the all-volunteer force. We're going to talk about the history of the draft and what came after. Thank you so much for joining us. Happy to be here. To start at the very beginning, which is usually what we like to do with the show,

how old is the concept of the draft going all the way back as far as you can? Nobody would have called it the draft, but there were conscripted troops going back as far as there's any kind of recorded history, people who were expected to trade their military labor in defense of whatever Lord or power offered them broader protection. We can trace conflict over whether or not there should be essentially a professional army or conscripted troops called to fight at time of threat back to some of the earlier conversations about any form of

organized warfare. Does that mean we go all the way back as far as the Romans or? People cite passages in the Bible that talk about essentially conscripted forces fighting. So yeah, it goes all the way back. And the debate over what people owe in terms of such conscription goes all the way back to, although it's usually on the part of those who are worried about what is the best force for fighting. It's later when people start making arguments about whether or not. not principles of liberty allow the state to conscript their labor for military use. Because originally there was, forgive my general ignorance of ancient history, but there was an idea that you were levying, people were part of the land that they were on.

And so if you were defending that land, you were just using the resource that was on it to defend it, correct? Yeah. And again, I do recent U.S. history. My take on medieval Europe is pretty much like yours. But yeah, the notion was that in a feudal system, people could be levied as part of the resources of the land. And so as the king or our Lord gave an estate to someone, that person owed the king, his labor, his response in defending that land. And then he, for all the people who he granted land or resources to owed him that labor.

And so it was fairly fast for a king. king or a lord to be able to mobilize some kind of force. The question is whether or not those people were sufficient and well trained. And so that became a debate increasingly as warfare became, you know, more complicated and there were increasingly state-to-state kinds of battles for resources within Western Europe. And I know that in the Napoleonic Wars, they were very famous for conscription, Leve en masse, I think they called it. And that gets us actually around also contemporarily to the United States, because there was a United States at that point. And I was wondering about how often the draft has been used in the United States and when it was

first used, going back as far as you can. In the United States, the draft conscription is really an anomaly. In general, the United States relied on volunteer forces. And it built as colonies, the colonies built the colonies built. their military defense around the British system. And each town would have a militia which joined into a larger common militia for the colony and state. And in general, the expectation was that citizens owed the state their military labor, although that really translated into free white men of a certain age. And people who were well positioned economically or otherwise could

often buy their way out or get exemptions from expectations of service. There was conscription sometimes when there were not enough volunteers for active militia duty from this common militia or the town and local county militias. But in general, the notion was that this was voluntary defense. And the idea was that the citizens owed, it was an obligation of citizenship to defend against threatening foes. Of course, who was a threatening foe was complicated because these were state-level militias, and Connecticut might not think that a threat to Massachusetts was a threatening foe. And so there was a great deal of controversy even then about whether or not there was a need for some kind of federally managed standing army. President Washington wanted one, and he didn't win in that

debate. But in general, the United States, the idea was that it would summon troops as necessary. And there was only the first real federal level draft during the Civil War. And partly it was just because of kinds of threats that were perceived. The United States was this minor power, minor nation, rag-tag collection of colonies and then states separated from the European powers by distance. And so it was the outpost of European powers and the indigenous nations that were the threat perceived by most of these colonies. And they didn't perceive a need for a large standing army. In the Revolutionary War, was there conscription in various states? or was it all an entirely volunteer effort?

But the notion was that it was volunteer. The notion, it wasn't so much that people thought of it as we're going to have an all-volunteer force or a draft. The notion was that it was the responsibility of the citizens to defend against threatening foes. There were bounties paid to get people to fight. But again, our notion of the draft versus conscription is a historical anachronism looking back. Can you tell us a little bit about the draft riots during the Civil War? And was that the only form of resistance to conscription in the Civil War?

So the first effort at essentially a national or federal level to conscript people actually came from the Confederate states at the beginning of the war. And it was extremely unpopular. And Lincoln moved to a federal system of conscription after that. and it was extremely unpopular as well. And in fact, it was a fairly small number of people who were conscripted during the Civil War federally. Most people served as volunteers, although they served as volunteers having often been paid a substantial bounty to enlist. The draft riots began in New York City when the first federal inductees were announced

just days after the massive slaughter of troops at Gettie. And so the timing, as people read in the newspapers, about people lying, dying and mutilated on fields and screaming in pain. And then they're getting these draft announcements. There was a huge uprising, mainly working class white men, left more than 100 people dead. There was attacks on African Americans who lived in the region with the notion that it was somehow their fault that the nation was fighting over slavery. And it was very clear that the draft was not a popular mechanism. There was a lot of resistance to it.

But it also was a means to move states and to up their game and trying to secure volunteers. It's important to also understand that in the North, you could purchase a substitute if you were conscripted. And in the South, slaveholders were exempted service. Was the next instance of resistance to conscription Vietnam? Because I think in modern perception, Vietnam is where draft resistance really is the big story of the war. Yeah, the large-scale resistance was Vietnam. Although there were conscientious objectors in previous wars, and there was draft resistance during World War II. Vietnam was the next time there was substantial resistance, and it was in part due to the nature

and the illegitimacy in many ways of that war, and in part it was due to the failings and fairness of the draft. So to understand Vietnam war resistance, it's important to look back to World War I and World War II when the service was much more widespread. Vietnam, part of the problem was, that it didn't really require that many people. And conscription was and was perceived as unfair. Whereas in World War II, in 1942, 93% of Americans in 1942 thought that the draft was fair. And by the end of the war, it was still, I think, well, 79% thought the draft was fair in 1945. Nothing like that was true in Vietnam.

And the fairness was also, it wasn't fair in Vietnam. Can you get into the specifics of that a little bit? Because I know that we had, there was a system for conscience of subjectors during Vietnam, but in practice, a certain class of person in America was actually going to serve. Yeah. But once again, it goes back to decisions made in World War II. So the United States comes out of World War II in the growing Cold War as a superpower and has positioned itself to be intervening and acting in world affairs and has been also found itself in a position in this Cold War where it needed a standing army, quite a different range than it had needed before World War II.

But there were so many people that didn't need everybody. So when you have a draft during the war, it's one thing, right? because people are called to serve, to fight a threat. To maintain a fairly large standing army outside of time of active war, it's different. So the way the United States have done this essentially is there would be a small standing volunteer force and then there would be a war and people would be called to service, the Civil War, World War I, World War II. But then conscription would go away and it would go back to a small standing army.

The United States was so poorly prepared for World War II. It had a tiny army. It was the 40th largest army in the world at the beginning of World War II. That wasn't going to happen after the war. And it ended up maintaining conscription throughout this time. But there were too many people. And so they came up with forms of deferment. The reason that deferments took the forms they did was because of the technological shift. We were in not only a race, for economic and cultural supremacy, but technology was key. So the notion was you defer the people who are studying things and developing techniques and technologies that will give the United States privacy, which meant deferring people who studied science and engineering, which turned into deferring people who went to college, which turned in by the time we get to Vietnam to an extremely class-based system, where those people who are able to go to college for whatever reasons, and often in economic circumstances were critical,

they had a much greater, they were deferred unless they were going into the officer court. And that's where we started Vietnam with deferrals freely given to people of higher economic status and people of higher economic status more able to access the resources that allowed them to get other kinds of deferments. And so it became a very class-based working class war. I don't know that it's taught that way enough. I know that I've heard of deferments. I'm actually old enough. I was born right before the draft ended in 73. But it's interesting. I think a lot of the stories we tell ourselves are that it was more fair than it was. Would you say that's accurate or was it just me? We tell ourselves that the Vietnam draft was more fair. Historians don't. I don't know. I don't know what. what other people do. One of the main things that, one of the main points historians tend to make about Vietnam

is that the draft was unfair and that the burden fell very heavily on the working class men. There's some interesting stories about the ways in which race factors into that as well, because this was the first military, the U.S. military that began as oddly integrated force. So there were racial divisions in conflicts as well as African Americans had demanded their right to fight, demanded their right to be full participants in the military, but then end up in a war where the burden is falling disproportionately on those people without economic resources, and it's a failing war, and this was not the war to gain full equality in. Let me just say it that way. Yeah, I don't think we, I don't think that we claim that the draft

was fair in Vietnam. I think that part of the explanation for the problems of Vietnam is the lack of public support in the ways in which people reacted to both the perceptions and the reality of a draft that wasn't fair. All right, Angry Planet listeners, we're going to pause there for a break. We were talking about the draft in its history. We will be right back. All right, Angry Planet listeners, thank you for hanging in there. We were talking about the draft.

Welcome back. What effect did that draft system during Vietnam have on the fighting force? What do historians think about that? What kind of army do, what kind of military do you create when you have this? unbalanced draft system? When you have a draft system that is perceived and as unfair, you end up with people who are frustrated and often alienated and angry. Many more people in World War II were drafted proportionally than in the Vietnam War, but the draft reached broadly. President Roosevelt's sons served in the military. It was a broad reach that. It was a broad reach.

it felt fair. In Vietnam, it didn't feel fair. And at the same time, the public was losing confidence in the legitimacy of the war, and the military was losing confidence that it was going to be able to win the war. And people were rotating in and out on your service in country. And those people who enlisted were much more able to gain assignments to Germany or to other service sites, where they wouldn't be under threat and in combat. And so the infantry and the army was becoming very heavily draftees who were becoming increasingly alienated. So it created a cycle of problems and concern. Morale by post-tet in Vietnam was critically bad.

And what had begun as probably the best trained, best resource military in U.S. history was in crisis by the late 1960s. Does that represent in any way what happens with conscripted forces more generally? You were saying that during World War II, since it was broad and fair, people perceived it that way for sure. Does that mean, just to make it completely plain, does that make for a better military? I wouldn't say that a conscripted military is by definition a problem. A lot of it has to do with the perceived legitimacy of the war. So while there were certainly people who objected to the U.S. participation in World War II due to religious beliefs and pacifist understandings and such, in general, there was a sense that this was a necessary war. Increasing numbers of Americans, including those people who were drafted, including some people who had joined the military not intending to be sent to Vietnam, did not see this as the war in Vietnam as a legitimate war.

and they questioned the ability of the U.S. government to conscript them and force them to fight against people they perceived as offering no threat to themselves, their families, and the United States. So some of it is the question of whether or not it's felt as fair, and some of it is a question historically what people are being asked to do. I wouldn't say that conscription necessarily produces a worst force. I don't think that's actually necessarily. sincerely true. But I do think that conscription in historical circumstances like the Vietnam War certainly wasn't an advantage. But I also don't think that they would have found sufficient volunteers to go and fight a war that was increasingly perceived as illegitimate. So why did the draft end? Oh, the draft ended through, it was a perfect storm. Part of it was Vietnam. Some of it was the recognition of the problem of fairness, the problems that drafted Vietnam, the impact on the troops.

And some of it was Richard Nixon, who was, for whatever else you want to say about him, a master politician, who saw an opportunity to gain political support and credibility by announcing the end of the draft as he was running for president in 1968. He went on the radio just a month before the election and it's been half an hour explaining how he was going to end the draft. And he was trying to think outside the box and he was trying to get some credit with the youth vote. So, you know, that was a piece of it. And part of it was a longstanding effort on the part of free market conservatives in the United States who emphasized liberty and who had long questioned the validity of the draft. long question the right of the federal government to require its citizens to serve in the military

because it impeded on individual liberty. They weren't thinking about the Vietnam War. This was a broader ideological critique. And so you have anti-war protest, anti-draft protest, Richard Nixon's political savvy and opportunism, and this longstanding critique coming from free market economists and conservatives who emphasize liberty over equality, that all came together in the wake of this national crisis around the war in Vietnam, the U.S. War in Vietnam. And so that's what happened. What comes after? How do you get people to join the military after Vietnam?

It was a mess. It was such a mess. I mean, the military didn't want to end the draft because they had no clue how they were going to this. So the Army, which is the branch that I really study, in the wake of Vietnam at the end of the draft in 1973, needed 20 to 30,000 young people to join the military every month. And now we're struggling to get 60 or 70,000 people a year to join the military. The military was at the lowest point of respect in the history of the country after Vietnam. Its own leaders talked about the ways in which it was failing. There were investigating.

into military leadership, how in the world are you going to convince 20 to 30 people, 1,000 people a month to join the Army? And that's the task that they were assigned. And there they go. They say, okay, we said we don't want to do this. We're under civilian control. We have been ordered to do this. How are we going to make it happen? And part of it was, okay, we've got to take a hard look at the Army and see what's wrong with it and see what we can do to make it better, especially in the wake of this crisis that we're facing at the end of the war. And the other thing they said is we have to use whatever tools we can find in American society. And that means marketing and that means advertising.

And so we're going to throw ourselves wholeheartedly into the expertise of people who can try and find out what young people want and then sell it back to them in the form of the Army. Does that mean there were no be-all-you-can-be ads during the Vietnam War? Is that marketing effort in just post-war? Yeah, there was always marketing because people volunteered. And so the military branches were advertising against one another, why you'd want to join the Marine Corps versus the Army. And there were a lot of people who joined the military because they were draft motivated. They wanted to better control their terms of service by joining.

And they were arguing among one another for that. And then there were always the people who just wanted to serve in the military because they were patriotic or because it was a family tradition or whatever. It was advertising, but it was low-level. It wasn't a big account. And NW.A.R. had the Army account. And they were called to the Pentagon and said, okay, you basically have two weeks come up with an ad account that's going to transform enlistment into the military. Did it work? I mean, not right away. They really struggled for a long time. But when you would look back, it wasn't that long. The first account was the U.S. Army wants to join you, which was a turnabout on I Want You for the U.S. Army.

One of the ad campaigns that the advertising agency considered was chicken and dog tags that said, bye, by, by birdie, which was playing on all sorts of popular culture. But what it meant is that they were going to get rid of the chicken shit and the military. and joining the military you no longer have to put up with a chicken shit. And some people pointed out that maybe advertising the U.S. Army with a chicken wasn't the best idea. We never promised you a Rose Garden, which was laughing at the Army because the Army kept saying, we'll give you all sorts of nice stuff. And the Marines are saying, hey, we're real men.

We don't need nice stuff. So there was still all that kind of thing going on. But, yeah, they started doing serious marketing research to figure out what it was that young people wanted. And what they found is that young people wanted individualism. They didn't want to be told what to do. And so the U.S. Army started marketing itself as a site that respects individualism, which, if you think about it, is pretty weird. And then people said, wait a second, you promised me, we didn't really mean it. Army of One, right?

It was one of the ad campaigns that came out of that. It was, you know, way on the other side. These were ads with lots of words. and you want to serve your country. You want travel and adventure, but you don't want to sacrifice your individualism. We won't make you sacrifice your individualism. The Army needs men, but some of the best of them are women.

Lots of ads like that. We don't get to the really high production stuff until much later in the century. Be all you can be is the one that really worked first, and that was the 1980s. Yeah, I can hear it in my head. It's funny. When I think about this stuff, Jason, you're a different generation than I am.

And I'm wondering, do you have a cultural memory of when you were a kid, like seeing these ads? Because be all that you can be in the army. I can hear the jingle in my head. I remember the Marine advertisement where he's fighting the giant lava monster vividly and will forever, I think. Is there anything like that for you? Jason? Yeah. That's interesting.

I don't remember the earlier ads. I have to say. Oh, there was, we do more before 6 a.m. than most people do all day. I don't know, Matthew, if that predates you, but I definitely remember that one. So I do want to, this is, we're getting into areas where now I've done some recent reporting on, so I'm kind of interested what your take is. Are you following what's going on with recruiting now in like the efforts that they've been doubling down on since, COVID has happened, Beth?

I haven't really been, no. I'm working on a book about how the Army tried to manage the problem of race during Vietnam, and so I've stepped away a bit from recruiting. Fair. Then can we ask you something, all right, something I'm interested in then that's tangentially related to this, is how different communities react to recruitment post-Vietnam? As I feel like it's been this constant negotiation between the public and the military. What's the history of allowing recruiters on to high school and college campuses and what kind of fights have happened to there?

Again, as in so much an American society, the conflicts have varied a great deal based on socioeconomic class and on race. And the access to high schools often is granted in communities where the families have fewer economic resources. more so than wealthier suburbs and private schools. The military has worked hard in various ways to figure out how to maintain that access. And recruiters are trained in sales techniques. I had a friend, a close friend who died recently, who was a recruiter, had been Lurped in Vietnam and came back. It was a recruiter for a decade and a half.

And he said that the sales techniques that they taught them were that they can be given lessons to use car salesmen. They really worked hard to figure out how to get an individual to join and how to get a community invested in the efforts of the military recruiters. And access to high schools was one of the things that they deemed most critical because they, the recruiters could then mentor and make. friends, friends with potential recruits, and to enlist adult influencers. So what recent research discovered during the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is that the biggest impediment for a young person, male or female, joining the military, was a mother. And so what they really needed to do was to figure out how to get parents to sign on and to see this as a positive step. They discovered much earlier in the 1980s that parents tended to think of joining

the military as a sign that their children had not succeeded. And so one of the things that they really fostered was an association with joining the military in college, in part by offering college benefits, but also by advertising college benefits. So it was no longer, oh, yeah, your daughter's going to college. My daughter joined the military. It was my daughter joined the military and she's paying for college by doing it and I'm really proud of her. The other thing that research has found and there's a ton of research is that it depends. People are much more likely to join not simply because they live in places where they're not great economic opportunities, but they live in places where military is a common presence.

So it may be a family tradition, but it also may be just that they live in a place that's near a post-survase. and it just seems like a normal part of life, or that the people who are beloved teachers or community members have served in the military and they model that. And there's a lot of effort to try and get these adults on board, more so in some ways than reaching the 18-year-old who decides that this is what they're going to do for the next three or five years. Has anything changed since in terms of,

of strategies since 9-11, and we've had these ramp-ups in Afghanistan and Iraq and North Africa. It changes constantly in the sense that they're looking to recruit young people, and the culture of youth changes. It's malleable. And so they are saying, okay, we need X number of people. We need X number of people for this specific mission, and we have to reach cohorts that are comprised in a changing fashion. The demographics of the United States are changing. Latinos previously had low rates of enlistment, and it was in part because 20 years ago, the rate of high school graduation was really low, and that's changed. And so now the U.S. military focuses heavily on Latinos. because they are enlisting in relatively high numbers and now meet the criteria.

I mean, one thing that's important to understand is that only one out of seven young people in the United States qualifies to join the military. The regulations for joining are pretty high. The criteria are pretty strict. They tend to get lowered a little bit when there's a struggle to get enough bodies, enough people to fill the boots during times of conflict. but nonetheless, the criteria are pretty strict. And there's a real sense that they're having to seek people who are qualified in a world where there are a lot of other options.

And so they're constantly trying to think about how to do that. That one in seven statistic, I think, is really important. It's something I've reported on before. Can you get into the specifics of what that criteria is that makes it so selective and what makes it hard to get in? Yeah. There are various specific physical regulations. about weight and levels of obesity. There are regulations governing what kinds of medication one can it take, what kind of

conditions one can have. But more than that, the goal of the branches of the military, and it varies a little bit, the Air Force is the strictest. The Army is a little bit. They want people with earned high school diplomas, and they want people who score in the top of the admissions exam that is given. And those people are placed in categories based on how they score. And so they want people that are 3A and above.

And the Army is much higher than the peer civilian population in terms of the level of high school graduation and the level of these what are called sometimes mental categories. Obviously, everybody understands that tests like that are not fully determinative. But what they understand is that if you're trying to think about how to most efficiently manage large numbers of people, it's not so much whether or not a test is fair to the one individual who just doesn't test well, but is in fact very capable, as opposed to the fact that if you allow people who fall into category four, the lowest allowable category, you're likely to lose. If you admit 1,400, you're likely to come out with 1,000, whereas if you only take 3.8,000, and above, if you admit 1,400, you're going to lose less than 100 of them, maybe 50 of them.

So in terms of efficiency, it makes sense. We still have selective service, which I guess it's a precursor to the draft. If they needed a draft, you got lots of people all over the country all signed up. Yeah. The initial idea was that the all-volunteer force was just going to be the core. And if we went to war, we would implement the draft again. But the U.S., the Congress did get rid of draft registration in 1973, and President Carter re-implemented it in the late 70s with the Iran hostage crisis and the Russians moving into Afghanistan. There was a sense that the United States faced potentially imminent threat and needed to be able to more rapidly mobilize troops.

It's not really clear that would allow for more rapid mobilization, but we have persisted. And the Supreme Court is getting ready to consider the case as to whether or not women should be required to register, which is one of the stranger things in American society is that women are exempted from registration for the draft. Most people who serve in the military are not in the combat arms. And women are now allowed to serve in the combat arms as well. But that was the reason that the Supreme Court, you know, back in the early 80s said that women were not going to be required to register. I had, and Matthew may have a couple more questions, but there's one in specific that comes up right now because of what happened in January 6th. They keep finding extremists as part of the military, ex-military extremists as part of the group who stormed the capital. Is there anything you can say or that you think about how an all-volunteer force and extremism go together?

Or is that something that would be weeded out otherwise? Or is there a connection or is it just coincidence? I don't see any connection to the all-volunteer force per se. do think that extremist groups target veterans because they have skills that are valuable to those people who wish to engage in violent insurrection or revolution. And I think certainly that there are members of the U.S. military who belong to white supremacist groups and that there probably isn't sufficient effort to try and scream people for such beliefs. some of that goes back to decisions made about dissent in the U.S. military during the Vietnam era. And so the question was at that point, how much could people who belong to the military participate in civil rights demonstrations and demands and how much could they participate

in anti-war demonstrations and demands? And of course, our sympathy now is with those people who were making those demands, right? And so military regulations were meant to try and walk that fine line of allowing individual expressions of ideological dissent and practical dissent while not in uniform. But those are the regulations now that are coming into play as they're trying to figure out what to do about white supremacist and people who, you know, endorse the violent overthrow of the United States government. So they're quite different understandings, but the policy, that's the thing about the military is that there are policies that are set. And so they have to re-examine how they're going to manage those policies that were crafted in a different era to a different purpose. But yeah, I don't think that there's a huge upswelling of if there aren't units in the U.S. military that are devoted to white supremacy. But there are people that are.

What's more concerning probably is the National Guard where people normally live external to those units in their own communities and may at times find themselves. primarily living within that world, as opposed to people who are full-time military, who are largely pulled away from that world in their day-to-day lives. Professor Bailey, thank you so much for joining us today and explaining all of us to us. I hope it was helpful in some way. I enjoy talking with you. And good luck getting that be all you can be song out of your head. That's all for this week, Angry Planet listeners.

Angry Planet is me. Matthew Galt, Jason Fields, and Kevin O'Dell is prayed to. by myself and Jason Fields. If you like the show, please find us online in all those faces. We're on Facebook. We are on Twitter. And, of course, if you really like the show for $9 a month, you can subscribe to our substack at angry planetpod.com.

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