> if there was a war so bad, the US reinstituted the draft
US has something better than the draft: poverty. As long as there's a large enough pool of young people without options, there's no problem. A draft generally can only be minimally discriminatory for PR reasons, so poverty as enlistment incentive works much better.
Though, talking about US military running out of manpower is a far, far fetch, isn't? It surpasses or is extremely competitive with any other military by any measure [0][1].
According to Blind Man's Bluff, which covers submarine warfare during the cold war from the US perspective, right up to the nineties, atomic subs had 3 main roles: espionage and intelligence gathering, preserving second strike ability, shadowing enemy subs to have a chance of thwarting their strikes in case of crisis. What submarine warfare was during the cold war, right up to the end, was largely defined by the technical superiority of US subs, especially their ability to remain undetected. By the collapse of USSR, Soviet subs were about to catch up in terms of essential technology. I would be intrigued to learn what sub warfare is like now.
Currently most military recruits come from the middle classes. Youths in poverty typically fail to meet enlistment standards due to health problems, low standardized test scores, criminal record, drug use, etc. Of course there are many exceptions but that's the general rule.
> An important predictor to military service in the general population is family income. Those with lower family income are more likely to join the military than those with higher family income. Thus the military may indeed be a career option for those for whom there are few better opportunities.
Now that we have a volunteer army, there are differences between how the wars of today are fought compared to the Viet Nam war. The Viet Nam war had literally an order of magnitude more deaths than our current wars. Having a volunteer force means the soldiers have to treated better and paid more than a draftee. These wars have been a waste of lives and money but things would have been much worse if there were millions of draftees serving in the middle east and Afghanistan. Having a volunteer force in the 1960s would have meant that if the Viet Nam war would have been fought, there would have been with a lot more concern for the loss of life of the solders - it likely wouldn't have been fought anything like it was fought.
The USA should use this opportunity to step back and re-think whether registering for the draft is needed in this age. The whole draft registration program is simply a waste of millions of dollars a year.
I don't (off the top of my head) remember my sources for claims about poverty being a mechanism for manning the US military, so I won't push the point. I'll leave it at saying that I wish you were right.
You're definitely right that it's a recruiting pressure - that and the free college and the path to naturalisation. But that only holds as long as the casualties are relatively low. And the ~4k dead and ~30k wounded of Iraq was relatively low compared to the ~58k dead of Vietnam. It's not clear what kind of non-nuclear war would bring that level of dead again, but I reckon restarting the Korean war would do it.
US has something better than the draft: poverty. As long as there's a large enough pool of young people without options, there's no problem. A draft generally can only be minimally discriminatory for PR reasons, so poverty as enlistment incentive works much better.
Though, talking about US military running out of manpower is a far, far fetch, isn't? It surpasses or is extremely competitive with any other military by any measure [0][1].
According to Blind Man's Bluff, which covers submarine warfare during the cold war from the US perspective, right up to the nineties, atomic subs had 3 main roles: espionage and intelligence gathering, preserving second strike ability, shadowing enemy subs to have a chance of thwarting their strikes in case of crisis. What submarine warfare was during the cold war, right up to the end, was largely defined by the technical superiority of US subs, especially their ability to remain undetected. By the collapse of USSR, Soviet subs were about to catch up in terms of essential technology. I would be intrigued to learn what sub warfare is like now.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_military_...