Abstract
This study models how a nation's military manpower system affects the decision to go to war. Manpower systems differ primarily in how they distribute costs: the volunteer system shares the war's manpower costs broadly, whereas the draft forces a subset of the population to bear a disproportionate share of the load. This difference affects an office‐ and policy‐motivated politician's decision to go to war. The draft induces prowar policy‐makers to pursue more wars than the volunteer military does, whereas the volunteer system induces antiwar policy‐makers to pursue more wars than the draft does. The manpower systems cannot be generically ranked by efficiency because each makes errors the other avoids, but the volunteer system induces selection of more efficient wars for a large class of plausible preference distributions.
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