Volunteer Army Supply and Demand

  Strategy Page (emphasis mine):

Now that U.S. Army brass have come out in favor of increasing the size of the force, there is all sorts of chatter about where the recruits are going to come from. Well, they're coming from the same place they've always come from. Today, the military has 2.2 million active duty and reserve troops, out of a population of 300 million. That means, out of every million Americans, 7,334 of them are military. But at the end of the Cold War, fifteen years ago, the military had 3.7 million troops, out of a population of 250 million. That was 14,800 military personnel for every million Americans. Then, and now, the military depended on volunteers. The "shortages of volunteers" the media talks about, does not exist.

In the last fifteen years, the military kept raising its standards (mostly in terms of education, and scores on military aptitude exams) in order to exclude recruits it believed would be less successful as soldiers. Lower the standards back to 1991 levels, and you have all the troops you need. 

But the military, particularly the army, likes the higher standards. This is something that is little discussed, and largely unknown outside the army itself, but those stratospheric recruiting standards has produced the most professional and capable military in American history.

Many senior officers in the army... want to maintain the highest standards. Thus there are now proposals to recruit more foreigners. Not just non-citizens with green cards (which comprise about two percent of the American military now), but foreigners who are not residents of the United States. Historically, the American military has usually had more foreigners in the ranks, than it does now. During the American Civil War, about twenty percent of the Union Army was foreign born troops.

The American military pay and benefits are competitive with U.S. civilian occupations, but to most foreigners, these pay levels are astronomical. The risk is low, as only about one in a thousand foreign born volunteers has died in Iraq or Afghanistan. All that, and you get to become a citizen of the United States after your four year enlistment is up. The only question is, which line would be longer at American embassies, the one for visas, or the one for military recruiting?

Read the whole thing!

Sounds like the basic problem is not a shortage of recruits, but a shortage of well-qualified recruits.  Possible solutions?  Increase pay or recruit foreigners for their ranks.  Either approach should fix the problem.  If we get in a pinch, lower the standards and, as Strategy Page said, you have all the troops you need.

Read more on why a volunteer army is economically superior to a draft here.

David Henderson shares his thoughts on how ending the draft promoted entreprenuership:

Consider Bill Gates, who in 1975 dropped out of Harvard to start Microsoft: during the draft years, young men like him who left college risked being certified as prime military meat. Computer programmers and other IT workers, who often do their best work relatively early in life, regularly drop out of college now because high-paying, interesting jobs beckon. If we still had the draft -- even a peacetime draft -- many wouldn't have that chance. 

People often wonder why today's 20-somethings have such entrepreneurial spirit. One reason, I believe, is that a whole generation has grown up without the draft looming over its head.

Tyler Cowen on another benefit of having an all-volunteer army:

The volunteer army is a natural check and balance on the executive branch. There is nothing about the democratic process that will stop a popular leader from waging wars. Voters, courts and legislatures are willing to cut the executive branch a lot of slack when it comes to war. However, a volunteer army imposes a strict limit on how many wars the President can fight. Ask yourself this: Would Lyndon Johnson have pursued his relentless escalation of the Vietnam war if he had only 400,000 American combat troops to cover the entire world?

I can think of a little moral or economic reason to shift back to a draft (other than in improbable event of a physical invasion of the US, in which case almost every red-blooded American male would take up arms to serve without resorting to one).

(HT Instapundit)