End the All-Volunteer Force

[Steve Blair]

I will ignore the Civil War if you can demonstrate that the Confederate Army ignored 168,000 (or 8.5%) men of the Union Army during the war.

You continue to avoid the fact that the BACKBONE of the Union Army was state volunteer regiments. I understand that the 8.5% figure fits in with your pro-conscription position, but it still doesn't square with the military facts of that conflict. To reverse the statistics, 91.5% of the Union Army was NOT conscripted. I don't have the numbers in front of me, but based on strength before the Civil War and the declining Regular enlistments when compared to state units, I would expect that fully 85%-90% of the total Union force was in fact state volunteer units (at the start of the war the Regulars numbered around 23,000).

Has it ever occurred to you that many of the failings that exist in the current force (poor training, personnel system, etc.) exist primarily because they were developed with a conscript force in mind?

What makes the volunteer force unsustainable is the attempt to maintain it at levels more suited to a Cold War, conscription-based force. It seems to me that you're trying to tailor the force to that model rather than looking at a more realistic vision for the force. Volunteer forces are the norm in American military history, not the exception.

[Fuchs]

To reverse the statistics, 91.5% of the Union Army was NOT conscripted.

Well, there was apparently some stop-loss policy regarding some (many?) regiments. That's a very close equivalent to conscription.

[Steve Blair]

Well, there was apparently some stop-loss policy regarding some (many?) regiments. That's a very close equivalent to conscription.

Not that many once you clear the first 90-day volunteers. There were strong attempts to get regiments to reenlist when the first long-term volunteer units reached the end of their enlistments (roughly 1863-64 depending on the unit and when it first entered service), but that was about it as far as I know. Most opted to reenlist, either as a unit or as individuals. Those who did went on extended furloughs and were entitled to add "Veteran" to their regimental title if they extended as a unit. Of course, by that point in the war many regiments were down to a couple of hundred men, since states raised new regiments rather than reconstitute those already in service.