Milton Friedman on the draft

32 passages for “the draft”, 29 checked against the source. Page 1 of 4.

1. “The end of the draft has not ended controversy about the draft. In recent months the news media have carried story after story alleging that the volunteer armed force is a failure. Volunteers, it is said, are too few and of poor quality, despite substantial pay raises for first-termers.”

2. “A military draft is undesirable and unnecessary. We can and should man our armed forces with volunteers—as the United States has traditionally done except in major wars.”

3. “The draft was ended despite the opposition of the military. I have wondered whether the military, encouraged by Watergate and Laird’s departure from Defense, may not have been feeding the stories to the media in an attempt to reverse the decision.”

4. “The often hysterical claims that an all-volunteer force is undesirable because it would be all black or all this or all that or because it would strengthen militarism or because . . . all these claims are contradicted by one simple yet overwhelmingly important fact: our armed forces today consist predominantly of true volunteers.”

5. “An all-volunteer force of equal effectiveness has less turnover and uses manpower more efficiently. As a result, it requires recruiting each year about 325,000 enlisted men, or only 75,000 in addition to the present number of true volunteers.”

6. “Compel 190,000 men per year to serve. Or improve pay and conditions of service to attract an additional 75,000 volunteers out of the 1.5 million who each year turn 19. These are the real alternatives.”

7. “As a member of the President’s commission, I was much impressed by the emergence of unanimity out of initial disagreement. As our deliberations proceeded, and especially as our knowledgeable staff developed a growing body of factual evidence, it became ever clearer to all of us how superficial are most arguments in favor of conscription and how inefficient conscription is both as a method of taxation and as a method of recruiting manpower.”

8. “As a longtime proponent of an all-volunteer armed force, I regard the end of the draft as one of President Nixon’s and then-Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird’s finest hours. No other measure has done so much to end the divisions that were threatening to tear this nation apart. No other measure has done so much to reduce the real cost of defending the nation.”

9. “The tax is not only unfair, it is also inefficient. Every tax involves costs in addition to the amount of the tax itself. For conscription, these indirect costs are the heavy burdens imposed on actual and potential draftees, their families, universities, employers—and most important, on all of us through the weakening of the political fabric of society.”

10. “Whatever the extra amount, we are now paying a larger sum in concealed form. Conscription is a tax in kind—forced labor exacted from the men who serve involuntarily. The amount of the tax is the difference between the sum for which they would voluntarily serve and the sum we now pay them—if Joe Namath were drafted, his tax might well run into hundreds of thousands of dollars.”