This article was originally published by Cruz Marquis at The Mises Institute.
Fiscal Year 2025’s National Defense Authorization Act’s Senate version contains an important item that is being ignored—young women between the ages of 18-26 will be automatically registered for the draft.
Previously, the House version of the NDAA passed (217-199) on June 14 and provisioned for the automatic registration of 18-26 year old men for the draft, but there was no item extending the order to women.
As it stands, all men of age are legally required to register for the draft when they turn 18, and most states automatically register them upon getting a driver’s permit, license, renewal of the same, or state ID. Many states also tie registration to access to state largess such as student loans under legislation mirroring the federal Solomon Amendment, or state jobs, similar to the federal Thurmond Amendment.
However, states like California, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Vermont, Washington, and Wyoming which do not have automatic registration policies would have their relatively lenient laws on registration made irrelevant by the federal government. If this bill becomes law, automatic registration for the draft would be the law of the land in every State, not just for men, but for women as well.
Soldiering as Labor
By its very nature, soldiering is resistant to comparisons with other jobs, but for the purpose of analysis, one must look past the unique aspects of the military (i.e., risk of grievous injury or death, camaraderie, etc.) to see it as a position of gainful employment.
When someone is hired as an employee, what does this signal? First, it shows that men are not purely generalists but instead specialists, and that tasks can be better completed when subdivided. Second, it shows that the state after the task is completed is preferable to both parties than before it.
For the employee, this is because he is paid for his efforts, for the employer, because the task was completed. The actual job contract is lastly a voluntary, mutual statement that the situation after the labor is preferable to the one before it, and it regularizes the exchange of labor for money.
Distilling this definition, a job is specialist position that has inherent disutility, but produces an end state which is more highly-valued both because of the employee’s prospective remuneration and the employer’s task completion, in such a way that makes both better off. Thus it is voluntarily assented to by both parties.
How does soldiering fit into this rubric? It has inherent disutility; harsh military discipline and the possibility of death are certainly classed as negatives. The Austrian School insight that value is subjective holds and thus is non-experimental beyond the inference that because some men hire soldiers and some men volunteer to fill the role, he who voluntarily joins a military sees the subsequent state as superior to his current. The place where soldiering can, and often does, diverge from the above analysis of a principal-agent problem has to do with the concept of whether it is voluntary.
When men are drafted into the military, they are still laboring, but unlike a regular job, the labor is not voluntary, making the draft by definition, involuntary labor.
Soldiering as Coercion
Seeing that the draft is involuntary labor, the question becomes how it is enforced and what does this mean. Involuntary labor requires some sort of enforcement mechanism to induce the victim to carry out the labor, otherwise he would balk at the suggestion to act against his own interests.
Only the entities that can use force can make men act against their interests, and this principally refers to the state—nothing else could cast such a wide net and enforce such a draconian policy that could never stand in a stateless society.
Indeed, the draft shows the state in its true form, moving men around like so many chess pieces and disregarding their own visions, preferences, and individual rights. If the state is powerful enough to dragoon men away from their families and career and put them in uniform to fight a foreign war, then the state has grown to be omnipotent.
Is this any way to run a free nation?
The Meaning of the Legislation and its Impact
Conscription deserves to be condemned on the grounds of its implication about the relationship between man and state alone, but this legislation moving through the legislature does something unique which makes it particularly odious. In the past, the specter of conscription hung only over men, but the egalitarian impulse has advanced so far that the taboo against dragooning America’s daughters into the trenches has withered away.
If liberty is to be threatened with destruction as conscription does (a man who perishes in a foreign field has little liberty indeed), it is better that fewer are under threat than more, and this legislation threatens to universalize the Sword of Damocles hanging above the head of every young man in America.
By automatically registering all young people for conscription, the state also deepens its well of manpower and increases its war-making potential for indeed, a state with more manpower to burn in war will be less likely to steward it.
After all, it was Jörg Guido Hülsmann who wrote: “Freed from the need to serve consumers as efficiently as possible, the producers of defense services [the state] now have a bigger margin for wasteful behavior. The institution of conscription has particularly negative effects since it encourages military leaders to expose their troops to unnecessary danger.” Conscription thus makes war more likely and soldiers more disposable.
It is rarely contended that the soldier is unnecessary to the security of a free people while the threat of predation from other states remains so potent, and such could not be farther from the current contention. What is argued is that the draft is fundamentally anti-soldier.
To best support the men and women who choose to be soldiers, one must respect their liberties as humans and not trample them underfoot with conscription. Opponents of the draft have often been seen as hateful towards soldiers, but this is a mischaracterization. The former are the ones who are most concerned for the liberties of all humans, soldiers very much included.
If the military needs manpower, let them attract it the way other employers do—with benefits and good pay, or at least with a sense of purpose—and not resort to 21st-century shanghaiing.
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