Conscription: Encyclopedia II - Conscription - Arguments against conscription

Conscription - Arguments against conscription

Conscription - Conscription and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights

Many arguments opposed to conscription, or opposed to gender-discriminated conscription, arise from its violation of the principles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of the United Nations. In particular:

• Art.1: All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. (...)
• Art.2: Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as (...) sex (...)
• Art.3: Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person.
• Art.4: No one shall be held in (...) servitude (...)
• Art.13: (1)Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each state. (2) Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country.
• Art.20: (...) No one may be compelled to belong to an association.
• Art.23: Everyone has the right (...) to free choice of employment (...)

In addition, many Constitutions do provide similar rights in Countries where there is or has been some form of conscription after World War II or that mantain a possibility of conscription in time of war.

Conscription - The draft as slavery

Some groups, such as libertarians, say that the draft constitutes slavery, since it is mandatory work. Under the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, slavery or indentured servitude is not allowed unless it is part of punishment for a crime. They therefore see the draft as unconstitutional (at least in the U.S.) and immoral. In 1918, the Supreme Court ruled that the World War I draft did not violate the United States Constitution. Arver v. United States, 245 U.S. 366 (1918) ([4]). The Court detailed its conclusion that the limited powers of the federal government included conscription. Its only statement on the Thirteenth Amendment issue was based on a "supreme and noble duty" argument from nationalism and not legal reasoning:

In the USSR, most of the conscripts received only very basic training and were used for forced labor unrelated to actual military service - usually digging up potatoes in the field with zero wage cost. The Soviet planned economy system thus had no incentive to produce better combined harvesting machines and Soviet agriculture remained low-tech.

In Soviet-bloc Hungary, more than half of pre-1989 conscripts received a mere few weeks of rifle training and were swiftly assigned to "working squadrons" which usually hand-built rail tracks "for free", and in very poor quality. At the same time, railway tracks in Western Europe were being built to high-quality standards by semi-automatic, rail-rolling factories operated by a professional workforce.

These are examples of a "military" draft used to obtain involuntary labour.They also illustrate one key theme of Adam Smith and other liberal economists that Liberty is the key method of social improvement. When compulsion takes the place of free markets and free Labour the efficiency of the economy is reduced. Compulsion also means that the Wages and working conditions of the Workers is inferior. David Hume points out that this was illustrated by the press gang. The legalised abduction of citizens by the state makes for military inefficiency as well as economic inefficiency and a denial of Constitutional freedom. When Labour is too cheap it will be wasted as other commodities are and this is one reason for the collapse of Communism in the USSR.

Conscription - Discipline problems

No army can work without discipline. The discipline can either arise from the esprit de corps, motivation of the soldiers or be imposed and pressed on the troops. Volunteers seldom have disciplinary problems, but people pressed in the service against their will have little other motivation to serve than personal survival, and perhaps change to get to rape and loot enemy civilians. As motivation is based on coercion, the discipline on conscript armies is often harsh, and punishments severe. Capital punishment, usually by firing squad, is used almost universally to maintain discipline on conscription armies during the wartime. It is estimated the executions covered some 1% to 5% of all conscript losses in WWII. This can be best summarized by statement of Leon Trotsky: An army cannot be built without reprisals. Masses of men cannot be led to death unless the army command has the death penalty in its arsenal. So long as those malicious tailless apes that are so proud of their technical achievements — the animals that we call men — will build armies and wage wars, the command will always be obliged to place the soldiers between the possible death in the front and the inevitable one in the rear. As result, conscript armies are more likely to mutiny than all-volunteer forces, and like the Vlasov army, can in extreme cases turn against their own.

Conscription - The draft as nationalism

The military draft is predicated on the assumption that nations have rights that supersede those of the individual. In the words of Einstein and Gandhi's Anti-Conscription Manifesto, "The State which thinks itself entitled to force its citizens to go to war will never pay proper regard to the value and happiness of their lives in peace." The building of large conscript armies coincided with the rise of virulent nationalism in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Draftees can object being conscripted if they are separatists and do not want to support the armies of the state they oppose. On the other hand, some separatist fighters acquire their military skills in the army they will later fight against.

Conscription - The draft as justification for attacks on civilians

Conscription is a component of "total war," and can also be used as an example of established policy to justify a government's demand that other sacrifices be required of civilians. Once a draft is allowed, Justice Louis Brandeis argued, “all bets are off". Arguably this results in a blurring of the moral distinction between civilians and the military as legitimate military targets, leading to attacks on civilians. Examples would include the indiscriminate bombing of cities conducted by both sides during World War II, or the assertion by terrorist groups that civilians are legitimate targets.

Conscription - Questions of conscript quality

One of the objections raised is a conscripted force would be of lower quality than a volunteer army. First, short periods of service do not allow for much skill building. Second, there is a possibility of a morale drop in units with conscripts, leading to a reduction in quality as officers and NCO's work to alleviate those problems.

The biggest problem is that the pace of training has to be adjusted to the level of the lowest quality manpower. Combined with the short tour of duty, this renders the skills of the conscripts very low. Certain individuals with poor military and social skills may prove loose cannons in wartime, proving more a liability than an asset to the unit and perhaps risking the destruction of the whole unit. Therefore the elite units of all armies which have conscription, are composed entirely of selected volunteers, such as Parachute Rangers in the Finnish army.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Arguments against conscription", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki