THE CASE FOR A VOLUNTEER ARMY

THE concept of a volunteer armed force for the U.S. is one of the few national propositions that have scarcely a single enemy. President-elect Richard Nixon is strongly for it. The Department of Defense holds that "reliance upon volunteers is clearly in the interest of the armed forces." Such conservatives as Barry Goldwater and William Buckley back the idea, and so do many liberals, including James Farmer and David Dellinger. Young men under the shadow of the draft want it, and so do their parents. Most of American tradition from the Founding Fathers on down is in favor, as were the untold millions of immigrants who came to America to avoid forced service in the conscript armies of czars and kaisers.

A volunteer armed force would seem to have something for everybody. For the Pentagon, it would provide a careerist body of men staying in the ranks long enough to learn their jobs and do them well; as it is, 93% of drafted soldiers leave the service when their two-year tour of duty ends. For constitutionalists, a volunteer army would affirm the principle that free men should not be forced into involuntary servitude in violation of the 13th Amendment. For philosophers, it would restore freedom of choice; if a man wants to be a soldier, he can do so, and if not, he does not have to. The idea also appeals to all those who have become increasingly aware that the draft weighs unfairly upon the poor and the black, the dropout and the kid who does not get to college.

For all this rare unanimity of opinion, however, it seems hardly likely that the U.S. will soon achieve what Nixon has promised to build toward: "an all-volunteer armed force." A main reason for this is that the Pentagon's basic support for the idea of a volunteer army is heavily qualified by worries that it will not work--while the draft has now delivered the bodies without fail for two decades.

Worries in the Pentagon

Burned into military memories is the hasty dismantlement of the U.S. armed forces after World War II, when the nation returned to its traditional military stance: a small number of voluntary regulars, backed up by reserves and the National Guard. The Army managed to attract 300,000 volunteers, of whom West Point's Colonel Samuel H. Hays wrote: "In an infantry battalion during that period one might find only two or three high school graduates in nearly a thousand men. Technical proficiency was not at a high level; delinquency and court-martial rates were." Getting choosier, the Army raised qualifying scores on aptitude tests from 59 to 70, 80, and finally 90. Simultaneously, it limited recruits to men without dependents and those willing to sign up for a three-year hitch. When the Berlin blockade and the Communist seizure of Czechoslovakia took place in 1948, the Pentagon complained that it was far under strength and that relying on volunteers had failed. Congress was told that the draft was needed to get manpower and show U.S. determination to check Communist aggression. The clumsily titled Universal Military Training and Service Act was passed. After that, proposals for returning to a volunteer army were not heard for years.

The military arguments against the volunteer army nowadays derive from new judgments about the size of the forces needed, the cost, and the necessity of flexibility. Certainly nothing but a draft could have supplied the 2,800,000 doughboys of World War I or the 10 million G.I.s of World War II, and the Pentagon's estimate of its current needs runs to similar magnitudes: 3,454,160 of the present moment, and 2,700,000 when peace returns. To raise the Viet Nam-inflated forces, the Department of Defense has relied on the draft to bring in about one-third of new troops and on the scare power of the draft to induce thousands of others to "volunteer." The draftees go to the Army, mostly to the infantry; the glamorous Air Force never has to draft anyone, and the Navy and Marines only rarely.

The Defense Department's study of the practicability of a volunteer army, made five years ago, proved to the department's satisfaction that it still would not work. Even allowing for growth in military-age population, DOD found that it could not expect to get more than 2,000,000 men, at least 700,000 short of pre-Viet Nam needs. As for the possibilities of increasing incentives, the Pentagon concluded that "pay alone is a less potent factor than might be expected" and that fringe benefits have small appeal for young men not deeply conscious of the value of medical care or retirement pay. On the other hand, Richard Nixon holds to the old American idea that it should be possible to devise incentives--pay among them--that will draw men into service.

The Pentagon's estimates of pay increases sufficient to attract a volunteer army ranged startlingly from $4 billion to $17 billion a year; Nixon says that he has found "authoritative studies" suggesting that a volunteer force could be set up for $5 billion to $7 billion extra. The Pentagon speculates that pensions for a volunteer army might be astronomical, but presumably they would at least partly and eventually replace the $6 billion a year (sixth largest single item in the federal budget) that the nation pays to ex-servicemen who feel that something is their due for having been drafted. Savings in training costs could run to $750 million a year, according to the Department of Defense; another economy would result because the proportion of time spent in training would be smaller in relation to a volunteer's long hitch than to a draftee's quick in-and-out. More basically, the extra cost of a volunteer army would be more apparent than real, because paying servicemen wages lower than they could get in a free market is, in effect, a subsidy for the Department of Defense. "We shift the cost of military service from the well-to-do taxpayer, who benefits by lower taxes, to the impecunious young draftee," explains Economist John Kenneth Galbraith.

A number of military thinkers contend that establishing a volunteer armed force limits the flexibility of response to threats. When Khrushchev got tough with President Kennedy in 1961, for example, the President easily increased U.S. might by authorizing Selective Service to have each of its 4,000 draft boards pull in more men. Presumably war on a big scale could rapidly outrun the capacities of a volunteer army, possibly requiring every able-bodied man. Reserves therefore would have to be maintained--with incentives for reservists instead of the threat of the draft. Even the draft itself probably should be kept on standby, perhaps for use with the permission of Congress or in case of declared wars.

Another reason that military men would hate to see the draft go is that they think it provides them with manpower of greater quality as well as quantity. As Colonel Hays noted, volunteers, unpressured by the draft, tended to be "marginal" when the Army last tried them. But he was speaking of men who had grown up in the pinched and deprived Depression years. With the right inducements, a modern technological army should be able to attract technology-minded volunteers, educated and educable enough to cope with missile guidance, intelligence analysis, computer programming, medical care and other demanding jobs. Given five or ten years in service, volunteers should be trainable to considerable skills, to judge from the experience of Canada and Britain, the only major nations that have volunteer forces. Though these armies are small, not having the great global responsibilities of the American forces, they provide enviable examples of high effectiveness, low turnover and contented officers. Lieut. General A. M. Sharp, Vice Chief of the Defense Staff of Canada, contends that freewill soldiers are "unquestionably going to be better motivated than men who are just serving time."

Phantom Fears

Civilian reservations about volunteer armed forces also focus on some fears that tend to dissolve upon examination. Some critics have raised the specter of well-paid careerists becoming either mercenaries or a "state within a state." Nixon, for one, dismisses the mercenary argument as nonsense. The U.S. already pays soldiers a salary. Why should a rise in pay--which for an enlisted man might go from the present $2,900 a year to as much as $7,300--turn Americans into mercenaries? Said Nixon: "We're talking about the same kind of citizen armed force America has had ever since it began, excepting only in the period when we have relied on the draft." The Pentagon itself rejects the Wehrmacht-type army, in which men spend all their professional lives in service.

Nixon has also addressed himself to the possibility that a careerist army might become a seedbed for future military coups. That danger is probably inherent in any military force, but, as the President-elect points out, a coup would necessarily come from "the top officer ranks, not from the enlisted ranks, and we already have a career-officer corps. It is hard to see how replacing draftees with volunteers would make officers more influential." Nixon might have added that conscript armies have seldom proved any barrier to military coups. Greece's army is made up of conscripts, but in last year's revolution they remained loyal to their officers, not to their King.

Might not the volunteer army become disproportionately black, perhaps a sort of internal Negro Foreign Legion? Labor Leader Gus Tyler is one who holds that view; he says that a volunteer army would be "lowincome and, ultimately, overwhelmingly Negro. These victims of our social order 'prefer' the uniform because of socio-economic compulsions--for the three square meals a day, for the relative egalitarianism of the barracks or the foxhole, for the chance to be promoted." Conceivably, Negroes could flock to the volunteer forces for both a respectable reason, upward mobility, and a deplorable one, to form a domestic revolutionary force.

As a matter of practice rather than theory, powerful factors would work in a volunteer army toward keeping the proportion of blacks about where it is in the draft army--11%, or roughly the same as the nation as a whole. Pay rises would attract whites as much as blacks, just as both are drawn into police forces for similar compensation. The educational magnets, which tend to rule out many Negroes as too poorly schooled and leave many whites in college through deferments, would continue to exert their effect. Black Power militancy would work against Negroes' joining the Army. Ronald V. Dellums, a Marine volunteer 13 years ago and now one of two black councilmen in Berkeley, opposes the whole idea of enlistment as a "way for the black people to get up and out of the ghetto existence. If a black man has to become a paid killer in order to take care of himself and his family economically, there must be something very sick about this society." But even if all qualified Negroes were enrolled, the black proportion of the volunteer army could not top 25%. Nixon holds that fear of a black army is fantasy: "It supposes that raising military pay would in some way slow up or stop the flow of white volunteers, even as it stepped up the flow of black volunteers. Most of our volunteers now are white. Better pay and better conditions would obviously make military service more attractive to black and white alike."

One consideration about the volunteer army is that it could eventually become the only orderly way to raise armed forces. The draft, though it will prevail by law at least through 1971, is under growing attack. In the mid-'50s, most military-age men eventually got drafted, and the inequities of exempting the remainder were not flagrant. Now, despite Viet Nam, military draft needs are dropping, partly because in 1966 Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara started a "project 100,000," which slightly lowered mental and physical standards and drew 70,000 unanticipated volunteers into the forces. Meanwhile, the pool of men in the draftable years is rising, increasingly replenished by the baby boom of the late '40s. Armed forces manpower needs have run at 300,000 a year lately, but they will probably drop to 240,000 this year. On the other hand, the number of men aged 19 to 25 has jumped from 8,000,000 in 1958 to 11.5 million now --and will top 13 million by 1974. The unfairness inherent in the task of arbitrarily determining the few who shall serve and the many who shall be exempt will probably overshadow by far the controversies over college deferments and the morality of the Viet Nam war. In the American conscience, the draft-card burners planted a point: that conscription should be re-examined and not necessarily perpetuated. The blending of war protest with draft protest, plus the ever more apparent inequities of Selective Service, led Richard Nixon to move his proposal for a volunteer army to near the top of his priorities.

Healing Tensions

The position from which to start working for a volunteer army is that, to a large extent, the nation already has one--in the sense that two-thirds of its present troops are enlistees. Neither Nixon nor anyone else visualizes a rapid changeover. The draft will doubtless endure until the war in Viet Nam ends, but it could then be phased out gradually. After that, the draft structure can be kept in stand-by readiness, thinks Nixon, "without leaving 20 million young Americans who will come of age during the next decade in constant uncertainty and apprehension."

If Nixon and his executive staff can move ahead with legislation and the new Secretary of Defense prod and cajole his generals and admirals, the new Administration will go far toward its aim. A volunteer army might help ease racial tensions, perhaps by ending the imbalance that has blacks serving in the front lines at almost three times their proportion in the population and certainly by removing the arbitrariness of the draft that puts them there. The move would also eliminate the need to force men to go to war against their consciences, and end such other distortions as paying soldiers far less than they would get if they were civilians, or forcing other young men into early marriages and profitless studies to avoid the draft. Incentive, substituted for compulsion, could cut waste and motivate pride. Not least, a volunteer army would work substantially toward restoring the national unity so sundered by the present inequalities of the draft.

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