Ending the Draft in 1973 Was a Conservative Idea, and It Worked

Here is a policy that began as a conservative argument, was adopted by a Republican president, and succeeded so completely that most Americans now assume it was always obvious. Nobody remembers who proposed it. Success has that effect on ideas: the more thoroughly they work, the faster their authors are forgotten.

The policy is the end of the military draft. The argument for it was made by economists and conservatives who believed that a free people should not be compelled to serve, that the market price of labor is better than the government's price, and that an army of volunteers would fight better than an army of the conscripted. The record since 1973 says they were right on all three. It is worth looking closely at how they argued it, what the other side said, and what the hard years that followed teach.

Defining the terms

Let me define what is at stake, because the argument depends on precision.

Conscription is a legal obligation to serve in the armed forces, enforced by criminal penalty, imposed on citizens selected by the government. An all-volunteer force is a military whose members enlist by choice, paid at rates and under conditions that the government sets to attract enough people. The Selective Service System is the machinery that registers young men and, if Congress so directs, selects them for induction. The draft is the use of that machinery.

The Supreme Court held in the Selective Draft Law Cases of 1918 that Congress's power to raise and support armies under Article I, Section 8, Clauses 12 and 13, includes the power to compel service, and that the Thirteenth Amendment is no obstacle. That is the law, and I do not dispute it. The question is whether Congress should use the power in peacetime, or in a war that the country has not fully committed to, when volunteers can be found at a fair price. And that is a question about policy, values and economics.

The conservative case

The argument had four premises. State them plainly.

One. Conscription is a tax. A draftee is paid less than he would need to be paid to volunteer. The difference between what he is paid and what the market would require is a payment that he is forced to make to the government, in kind, out of his own earnings and years. Friedman called it a tax in kind, and it falls on a small group of young people, in the years when their futures are being set, rather than on all citizens. The Department of Defense's budget looked smaller because it did not count that cost.

Two. The draft distorts choices. Because the draftee costs the government less than the volunteer, the services have less reason to use their people efficiently. A system that treats labor as free wastes it. The draft encouraged enormous training and administrative overhead to cycle through short-term conscripts, and it discouraged the retention of experienced professionals.

Three. It is unfair in practice, even when it is not meant to be. Every draft in American history has come with deferments, exemptions and loopholes, and those who knew how to use them were not randomly distributed. Students, men with connections, and those who could find a medical or occupational exemption escaped. The burden fell on those who could not. The Vietnam draft, with its student deferments, became a classic case.

Four. A volunteer force is better. Soldiers who chose to serve can be trained for longer, trusted with more complex equipment and kept in the service when they have the skills to lead. A professional is more valuable than a draftee, and the military pays the price of the churn.

These premises were not the conclusions of a pacifist or a radical. They came from people who believed in a strong defense, and who judged that a strong defense could be built more cheaply and effectively on a foundation of consent.

Nixon's commission

Richard Nixon had campaigned in 1968 on ending the draft. In 1969, soon after taking office, he appointed an Advisory Commission on an All-Volunteer Armed Force, chaired by Thomas S. Gates Jr., who had been Secretary of Defense under Eisenhower. Its fifteen members included Milton Friedman, the University of Chicago economist, and a university president, along with representatives of different views, among them many members who began as skeptics.

The commission reported in February 1970. Its conclusion was unanimous: "the nation's interests will be better served by an all-volunteer force, supported by an effective stand-by draft." The country, it said, could meet its military needs with volunteers, provided it raised pay and improved conditions to market levels. It recommended a substantial increase in basic pay for first-term service members, improved recruiting, and a reserve component built around volunteers. The commission also made a moral argument, saying that the draft imposed an unfair burden on the young and was not consistent with a free society. It acknowledged risks, including the possibility that a volunteer force might become isolated from the society it served, and answered them with measures to keep the military open to all.

Friedman and Westmoreland

The exchange that people remember is not in the final report. It was at a hearing of the commission, where General William Westmoreland, who had commanded American forces in Vietnam and was then Army Chief of Staff, testified against the volunteer force. Westmoreland said he did not want to command an army of mercenaries. According to Friedman's own telling of the story, he replied by asking whether the general would rather command an army of slaves, and when Westmoreland protested at the word, Friedman pointed out that he did not like hearing volunteer soldiers called mercenaries any more than the general liked hearing draftees called slaves. He added that if the soldiers who volunteered were mercenaries, then so were the professor who taught for a salary and the general who served for pay.

I am paraphrasing, because the exchange is known mostly through Friedman's recollection and I want you to know which parts are the record and which are the retelling. The substance is not in doubt. It was the central philosophical argument of the debate. The word "mercenary" refers to someone who fights for a foreign power for money, and American volunteers fight for their own country and are paid, as every public servant is paid. The idea that being paid disqualifies a person from honorable service would condemn every police officer, every firefighter and every judge. The idea that conscripts are more patriotic than volunteers is a compliment to the draftees that insults the volunteers, and it is not borne out by what either did.

The steelman

Now the other side, in the best form its defenders would accept.

One. A citizen's obligation to defend the country is not a market transaction. Republics, from Rome through the French Revolution, relied on citizen-soldiers, and a nation that hires its defenders may forget that defense is everyone's duty. Two. A draft spreads the burden, and a military made of volunteers will draw disproportionately from those with the fewest other options, so that the privileged may never serve and never have a stake in the decision to go to war. Three. A draft makes it harder to wage war lightly, because if the sons of the powerful are subject to it, the powerful will think harder before sending them. Four. A volunteer force might become a separate caste, increasingly detached from civilian society.

These are real arguments, and the fourth in particular has an honorable pedigree: the Founders feared standing armies, and said so. Federalist No. 8 warned that a nation always in danger of invasion would be driven to build up its military establishment and would pay for it in liberty. The same fear lies behind the Second Amendment's reference to a well-regulated militia and the Third Amendment's ban on quartering soldiers. Anyone who dismisses the objection has not read the Founders.

The rebuttal

Here is the answer, point by point.

One. On the duty point: a duty and a draft are different things. Citizens have a duty to defend the republic, and the great majority of volunteers act on exactly that sense of duty. The duty does not require the government to compel the unwilling when enough willing people exist. And in a genuine national emergency the power to conscript remains, as it should; the Selective Service registration requirement was kept precisely so that the machinery can be restarted. Ending the draft removed the peacetime use, not the power.

Two. On fairness: the draft was never the equalizer its defenders claim. The record of the Vietnam years, with its deferments, shows how the burden was shifted to those with the least influence. And the volunteer force, whatever its flaws, is a force of people who chose their work, who are paid for it, and who can leave when their terms end. That is a fairer arrangement than conscription's lottery. As for the claim that the privileged do not serve, that is a problem of recruiting and culture, not of the pay system, and the remedy is to make service attractive across the society, including through the ROTC programs and the service academies discussed in How to Win a Nomination to a Service Academy, a Family's Step-by-Step Guide.

Three. On restraint: the idea that a draft stops wars is contradicted by the history of the draft. Vietnam was fought by a force that included roughly 1.8 million draftees, and it went on for years. The truth is that the draft made a long and unpopular war politically possible by supplying it with manpower at a low direct price, until the protest it provoked brought the whole enterprise down. A nation's willingness to fight is better checked by the Constitution's allocation of the war power to Congress than by a conscription system. See Commander in Chief Means Less Than Presidents Claim and More Than Critics Say.

Four. On isolation: this is the one that needs vigilance, and I will not wave it away. A professional military should be kept close to the civilians it serves, through the reserves, the National Guard, the academies, ROTC on civilian campuses and a culture that honors service without separating from it. The right response to the risk of a caste is to work against it, not to give up the benefits of a professional force.

The last call and the first years

The practical end came quickly. The last draft call went out in December 1972. In January 1973, Defense Secretary Melvin Laird announced that the draft had ended, and the authority to induct expired on June 30, 1973. The Selective Service registration requirement was suspended in 1975.

The first years of the all-volunteer force were hard, and a fair account has to say so. The late 1970s were a period of trouble for the military: recruiting standards slipped, discipline problems rose, and a scoring error on the armed forces' aptitude test in the second half of the decade meant that thousands of recruits who would otherwise have been rejected were let in. Pay had not kept pace with inflation. The Army Chief of Staff in 1980, General Edward Meyer, spoke publicly of a "hollow army." Critics seized on this as the proof that Friedman and the commission had been wrong. They pointed to the quality of the recruits and the strains on the force.

But look at what the problems were. They were not failures of the principle. They were failures of execution. The commission had said that pay must be raised to market levels and kept there. In the 1970s Congress and the administrations let pay lag. The aptitude-test error was a mistake in the scoring, not an inherent flaw in volunteering. Registration was restored in 1980 when President Carter reinstated it after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, as a precaution, not as a return to the draft.

When pay was raised and standards enforced in the early 1980s, the force improved quickly. Recruits were better educated, retention improved, and the leadership development that comes from a long-term professional career began to pay off.

The proof

The proof came in the Gulf War. In the winter of 1991 an American-led coalition, with a force built on the all-volunteer model, liberated Kuwait in a ground campaign that lasted about a hundred hours after weeks of air attack. The force that fought it was the most professional that the United States had ever put in the field: its soldiers had trained for years, its sergeants were career professionals, and the equipment worked because the people operating it knew it. The pre-war experts who feared a bloody slog were wrong.

This is not an argument that the volunteer force is without problems. It has strains of its own, which were exposed in two decades of continuous deployments, and the question of how to keep it connected to the country is a live one. But in the sense that matters to the original debate, whether free men and women paid fairly could build a better force than conscripts, the answer is yes. For a sense of what the military looked like when its share of the economy was bigger and the draft was in place, see Defense Spending as a Share of the Economy, From Korea to the 2010s. And for the quality of the force's leadership in the years since, a story told in Desert One and the 1980 Disaster That Built Special Operations Command, the volunteers have continued to improve.

What it means for the family

For the individual, a volunteer force changes one thing: service is a choice made on its merits. A young person weighing military service against college or a trade can look at the pay, the training, the education benefits and the obligation, and decide. That is the same kind of decision the market economy asks of everyone else, and it respects the dignity of the person making it. It also changes the choice available to the family: instead of waiting for a lottery number, parents and young people can plan, whether by pursuing an academy appointment or an ROTC scholarship or a skilled trade in uniform. There is a long conversation to be had about how well the military's job training translates to civilian careers, and the answer is better than most Americans assume.

The conservative principle underneath it all is simple: the government should not take what it can buy at a fair price. A free society does not need to compel what it can persuade. When the Gates Commission wrote that, it was making a claim about both liberty and efficiency, and the half-century since has supplied the evidence.

The case in brief

1. Conscription is a hidden tax on the young, distorts the use of labor, and has never been applied fairly in practice.
2. The Gates Commission of 1969 and 1970, with Milton Friedman among its members, concluded that a volunteer force was feasible if pay and conditions reached market levels.
3. The best objections, that duty is not a market transaction and that a volunteer force may drift from civilian society, deserve respect and are answered by keeping Selective Service registration, a strong Guard and reserve, and open pathways to service.
4. The hard years of the 1970s resulted from poor execution, with pay allowed to lag and testing errors, and were corrected, and the Gulf War of 1991 showed the volunteer force at its best.

What you can do: Read the Selective Service registration rules, then ask your representative at the my-representatives page whether military pay and benefits in the next defense bill keep pace with the cost of living.