Military Conscription Is a Tool for Centralization, State Building, and Despotism
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11/10/2021Ryan McMaken
The US Senate continues to debate legislation potentially adding women to the military draft in the United States. This week, for instance, Senator Josh Hawley attempted to remove from the 2021 National Defense Authorization Act provisions requiring that “all Americans” (aged 18-25) register for the draft.
We shouldn’t be surprised to find that Washington politicians are nearly all in agreement that at least half of America’s young adults ought to be coerced at de facto gunpoint into military service—presumably to fight for “freedom”. The only debate at hand apparently is whether or not the other half ought to be forced into temporary slavery as well.
Although most Americans now seem to treat potential conscription as just a fact of life, it’s important to note that the idea of a nationwide mass draft as we know is a strictly modern invention. More broadly, conscription is a relic and result of state building-efforts by European regimes of recent centuries when these regimes began to build large standing armies at a size previously unknown in Europe. The movement arose side by side with the spread of strong centralized states and the decline of political decentralization.
https://mises.org/wire/military-conscription-tool-centralization-state-building-and-despotism
