Ask the Expert: Ben Friedman on Military Service

Carl Barber, a junior at Virginia Commonwealth University asks Ben Friedman:

"In his book Constitutional "Homeland Security", Dr. Edwin Vieira recommends that the U.S. revitalize the old-style mandatory militia system that was in place until the very early twentieth century to protect our republic from all enemies both foreign and domestic. What do you think of this idea? If you disagree, what do you think is the best way for the United States to defend itself?"

Ben Friedman, Research Fellow in Defense and Homeland Security Studies at Cato answers:

I oppose mandatory military service, whether it's in the US military or a militia. Mandatory service is not only bad for liberty but for defense, at least in situations where there is a not conflict that requires a large percentage of available manpower, like World War II. Organizations that draft members will waste a lot of money and effort managing people who don't want to be there. Most of the time, they will have far more manpower than they can use, and therefore will tend to replace technology with labor, which militates against innovation. Americans are unlikely to fight in a conflict that requires all that manpower any time soon, and if we did, you'd want a traditional force with combined arms and all the other stuff a national military gives you. However, if the draft advocates had their way, and it were reintroduced, it would make sense to allow people to fulfill their obligations in the National Guard, which evolved out of state militias. Because Guard service is generally part-time, that would lessen the draft's economic burden.

Local or state militias were a product of a time when warfare was fought on a different scale-less industrialized and less mass. A fragmented militia system would struggle to organize the large scale units typical of modern militaries. Militias would struggle to procure and manage the sorts of platforms needed for modern warfare.

I don't see many useful wars left for Americans to fight, but history shows that these things are hard to predict. The war in Afghanistan was in my view wise at the outset, and up until the 1990s that was basically unpredictable. I don't think you'd want to leave it to state militias to drive the Taliban out of power. So I'm for keeping our current military structure but cutting back on it significantly.