The Military Obligation of Citizens Since Vietnam

Abstract

On the eve of the Persian Gulf War, as President George Bush worked to win public support for his policy to liberate Kuwait, he made it plain that his war plans included no plan to restore the military draft. He would call up the National Guard and Army Reserve. By taking these steps, Bush distanced himself as far as possible from the manpower policies pursued in 1965 by President Lyndon Johnson. After deciding to escalate the war in Vietnam, Johnson refused to call up the National Guard or Army Reserve and chose instead to rely solely on the draft. These different approaches to raising an army for war did not simply reflect different policy preferences of the two administrations. While it was politically possible for Johnson to rely on the draft alone, President Bush knew that he could not restore the draft even if he wanted to. The Vietnam War and the rise of the all-volunteer had moved the country away from an toward a limited conception of the citizen's obligation to perform military s ervice. That movement in political culture, which this article explores, can be traced through three related trends. First, widespread doubt about the legitimacy of the Vietnam War increased public tolerance of opposition to the draft and refusal to perform military service by conscientious objectors. It also intensified citizen distrust of strong central government, making it possible to argue that citizens should not be coerced by the state to assume the burdens of military service, that they are better off when they are voluntarily attracted to the task by the rewards of the marketplace. Second, reconfiguring the armed forces in the wake of the Vietnam War to create a force carried on the citizen-soldier tradition in a way that the draft never could. The total integrated reserve units more closely into the warfighting capacities of the active-duty and made any deployment as large as Vietnam impossible unless the President took the political risk to call up the reserves. Such a step requires substantial justification accepted by the public whose lives would be disrupted by the call to arms. Third, government attempts to define and impose the scope and content of the military obligation of citizens have been sharply contested during the all-volunteer era, especially when the use of compulsion is involved. One result of these contests was to make the military more accepting of the diversity in the population of citizens willing to serve. This, in turn, redefined the character of military service in ways that are controversial in part because they mark a sharp break with traditional military culture. Another result was to extend the application of citizen rights within the military. Put generally, citizens have played a more active role than previously in determining what the citizen's military obligation should be. To examine these trends more closely, I rely for evidence on critical cases decided by the Supreme Court that bear on the citizen's military obligation and on more traditional sources common to institutional studies of change in the military. My aim, however, is not fixed on a study of the military in American society. It is fixed rather on explaining how the military obligation has changed since Vietnam. To begin, let us consider some background about the military obligation of citizens before Vietnam. Historical Background During the world war era, the legitimacy of the draft was based on a belief, widely accepted, that citizens had an unlimited liability to perform military service when required by the state. The end of the draft after Vietnam suggests there was weakening of this belief; doubts grew about the compulsory character of the duty to serve. Even before the war in Vietnam, there had been discussions among leaders of both parties about the feasibility of ending the draft. Following the Korean War, the proportion of draft-eligible men actually drafted shrunk dramatically, with draftees declining from roughly 58 percent of all men entering the military in 1954 to just 22 percent in 1961. …