The Successes of Volunteer Militaries and the Failures of Conscription

This essay shall demonstrate a direct correspondence between the volunteer nature of a country's military and its effectiveness on the battlefield, as well as a direct relationship between the presence of military conscription and extremely high wartime casualties.

The United States can flaunt the most technologically and strategically developed military in the world, which historically has suffered the smallest amount of casualties on the battlefield than any other major army in history. It is also, however, the most compact.

In an era where precision-guided missiles, tanks, mobile artillery, and aerial bombardments have replaced launching wave after wave of doughboys against entrenched enemy machine guns, it is essential not to produce your rank-and-file privates, but rather to train every serviceperson, be they the operator of a mechanized infantry vehicle or the pilot of a B-2 Stealth Bomber, in the intricacies of the ever-modernizing equipment that they must employ daily throughout their careers.

Training constitutes not days, but years, and even what takes minutes to learn frequently requires a lifetime to master. Focusing a maximum degree of attention on the individual soldier, especially on the willing individual soldier, whose motivation to "be all that he can be" needs no artificial boost, is a surefire means to ensuring American global sovereignty for generations to come.

What of nations who, historically, had employed the draft? One such example is Russia throughout its centuries-long involvement in the military affairs of the Western world. Russian princes, czars, commissars, and bureaucrats, had successively uprooted entire peasant villages to impose twenty years of campaigning duty without rest upon all of their male occupants.