Volunteer Militaries, The Draft, and Support for War

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 dispropor...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inEconomics and politics Vol. 24; no. 3; pp. 227 - 258
Main Author Warren, Patrick L.
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Oxford Blackwell Publishing Ltd 01.11.2012
Subjects
Armed Forces
Decision making
Efficiency
Errors
Labor Supply
Manpower needs
Military and politics
Policy making
Politicians
Politics
Social Class
Studies
Voluntary work
Volunteers
War
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Summary: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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ISSN:0954-1985
1468-0343
DOI:10.1111/j.1468-0343.2012.00401.x