I agree, but with the smaller all-volunteer force, there are not nearly as many demobilized soldiers because the force is smaller and many remain in the service as careerists. Just as the draft provides a massive manpower boost to the armed forces, when coupled with generous veterans' programs, it can also lead to significant economic returns. I cited this article earlier:Originally Posted by wm
The impact of the GI Bill would have been drastically weaker, perhaps even insignificant, without the mass demobilization following World War II (where 85% of service members were draftees), and the continued peace-time draft, giving up to one third of the population access to these benefits up until 1973.The authors make it clear that the education benefits of the legislation helped spur postwar economic growth by training legions of professionals. The GI Bill, they write, “made possible the education of fourteen future Nobel laureates, two dozen Pulitzer Prize winners, three Supreme Court justices, [and] three presidents of the United States.’’ It also greatly increased access to higher education for ethnic and religious minorities who had been previously excluded.
I agree, but this benefit is not as great as the opportunity cost of this action:
The article seriously calls into question the efficacy of small wars that have little or unfavorable political outcomes but with extremely high price tags. This other article addresses the same problem:For each million dollars, federal defense spending creates 8.3 jobs both directly and indirectly in the economy. These are jobs not only for the military personnel themselves, but also jobs in vehicle manufacturing, construction, ammunition production, and other industries which supply goods and services to the military. As we see from the figure below, the same million dollars spent in other industries such as healthcare, education, or energy efficiency, creates a greater number of jobs than military spending.
In contrast to the 8.3 jobs created by $1 million in defense spending, that same level of spending would create 15.5 jobs in public education, 14.3 jobs in healthcare, 12 jobs in home weatherization, or about the same number of jobs in various renewable energy technologies. Thus it is a fallacy to claim that we need war spending in order to bolster the economy. We see here that investments in renewable energy such as solar, wind, or biomass, would create just as many jobs as military spending. Efficiency programs such
as weatherization of homes and public buildings would create about 1.5 times as many jobs, and federal support for healthcare and education would create twice as many as the same level of military spending.
This second article emphasizes that the US can receive greater value for its money by taking a serious look at its defense spending habits. I noted before that of the top 20 countries by active-duty end-strength, 13 have more soldiers per 1000 capita than the US. None of those, excluding the US, are in the top 20 of economies by GDP and none of them exceed the US in defense expenditures per capita either. So while we are spending (significantly) more money to field less combat power, we do not have a correlating increase in security that should presumably come along with it. Pentagon watchers in the past have noted that while defense spending increases, military readiness (and consequently effectiveness) is declining because of unexpected cost growth, production cutbacks, shrinking and aging pools of military equipment, and personnel reductions to pay for it all. This is a problem unique to the current defense political economy of the all-volunteer force that, in the last ten years, has consumed up to eight trillion dollars of US wealth. And as noted in the other articles I cited, neither does it produce in an increase in security, it is also a net drain on the economy as well. This is not to argue that defense is unnecessary, but that the current defense structure is coming at the cost of development and living conditions at home.Heintz (2010) found that a 1% increase in investment in ‘core infrastructure’ would increase the productivity of the private sector by up to 0.2%, considering the direct effects of infrastructure investments. These estimates can be used in a hypothetical illustration. If half of the investment which built up the current stock of defense assets had been dedicated to building the core infrastructure of the U.S. economy, this would represent a 13.5% increase in the value of infrastructure assets – and a potential 2.7%
boost to private productivity (worth over $270 billion, based on current levels of private GDP).
This is a good point and I agree that a central consequence of conscription is it's high cost. But we shouldn't be as concerned with our debt as we should be with our ability to pay for it. Much of today's political discourse is about austerity -- in other words, cutting costs to cover expenditures. But this is a failed business and economic model and rarely ever works. The aim should be for growth-based profitability, which may require greater debt to fund government programs (i.e. the interstate project or the GI bill). And as the articles I cited point out, investing in those projects would have higher returns than in defense dollar-for-dollar. So, either the way we maintain our fighting services and how those fighting services prosecute so-called "small wars" need to become more efficient, or we need to start thinking about alternative approaches to the political economy of national security. As it is, the all-volunteer force is not economically sustainable and is increasingly cost ineffective.
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