End the All-Volunteer Force

[wm]

I have not intentionally over-looked your claim, though I wonder on what basis you claim the whole "1940 - 73" time to be sui generis. There are significant differences in today's economy compared to the most recent draft era, a number of which are: increased financialization of the economy, higher concentrations of wealth in the upper echelons of society, and extremely low effective tax rates for the wealthy and corporations (who, as I noted, also have more of society's wealth). These may or may not be relevant to the effects of mass mobilization,though I think putting the 16.7% of youth that are unemployed to work (even if they're just mowing laws in the brigade footprint), is better than having that labor idle.

You have hoisted yourself by your own petard, refuting your own argument from analogy. Rather than showing why the 1940-73 period is not sui generis or, in other words, is similar to the current time, the above quotation by you points out that the economy of today is relevantly dissimilar from the economy that you alleged received such a boost from conscription between 1940 and 1973.

Not that I feel any real need to justify my claim regarding the uniqueness of 1940-73 but as a starting point I will submit that between 1941 and 1945, the US was engaged in a war that was fought on both sides of its ocean borders (Asia and Europe/MENA) with countries boosting armies that were peer competitors of, or better than, any other army in the world at the time. I think the German and Japanese armed forces were substantially better trained and equipped than the US Army until such time as they were attrited by the generally much-lower-tech, mass-produced materiel coming from the "Arsenal of Freedom" that was protected from attack by two major oceans.

By the way, I can tell you from experience as a soldier on casual duty status while awaiting orders, "mowing lawns in the brigade footprint" is far from meaningfiul employment. I suspect it would cause more harm than good to put a number of disaffected, because unemployed, youth to such work. Let's talk about diluting the the fighting strength, as the brigade has to use its troops to watch over the under-employed youth who are acting out in the brigade cantonment area. But I suspect my experience as a troop during those golden years of the draft are just anecdotes to be discounted, as are my subsequent experiences as an officer while the Army moved from a mixed force through VOLAR to the AVF (or all vounteer Army as we called it when I retired).