The draft (as was practiced in the US - not anymore) is a very economically sound system. There is no need to maintain a huge standing army which spends most of its time sitting on its arse waiting for something to happen. But when there is a time of war or emergency you can call upon a large civilian army.

The National Guard in the US spends about 1 weekend a month training so in case they are called upon they will not have to be trained from scratch.

I am not providing my point of view on the draft but am merely providing some facts which you have overlooked in your rush to quote Rand.

One of the major problems with the draft system is that you cannot trust an unwilling soldier to save your life, regardles of how convenient it is to pick names out of a hat and draft people into the army. When you have the reserve system, you have people who have volunteered and promised to serve the nation in time of need and therefore, are far more reliable in a battlefield.

Sure none of them liked it (even career soldiers don’t like war) but I don’t think you can make a case that the conscripts were any less willing to fight then regular soldiers. The great armies of the world - The Mongols, the Huns, the Persians, the Greeks and the Romans were all conscript armies and they conquered the world.

If I’m not wrong, Rand’s quote was made when the US had a draft, so she critiqued them as well.

And yes, historically all those great armies you mention had draft. They also had slavery. So?

See Vietnam for an absolute and utter failure of the draft system - that was a war that no one believed in, so the forcing into a draft only made things worse for everybody and that is why you have so many draft-dodgers in that period.

The draft in America was never popular, during the American Civil War, there were draft riots in New York, where new immigrants(mostly from Ireland, Germany and Italy which had seen quite a lot of warfare in the mid 19th century) rioted and lynched rich people who could buy themselves out of the draft, and blacks who were not yet citizens and were not required to conscript. The peace marches during Vietnam are legendary. (Two movies that illustrate these point are “The Gangs of New York” and “Forrest Gump” respectively.)

America lost the Korean and Vietnam Wars despite the draft. Where arguably the urgency of these wars was not eminent to those who were fighting it. There were strong pacifist movements in America during both world wars, which were only quelled after attacks upon America that built the public idea of the eminent threat to their homeland (Lusitania and Pearl Harbour, in the two wars). Ofcourse this can be engineered too, as in the case of the great debate about who sunk the USS Maine, which started the Spanish-American War. The greatest war that America won was the War of Independence where to the best of my knowledge there was no conscription.

Switzerland, the land of milk, chocolate, watches, banks and extreme federalism, has a conscript army. A little less than 1 in every 12 Swiss, are actively serving in the Swiss Army, which by most standars is quite a high ratio.

I think one reason why India and Pakistan for instance do not have conscritption, is because of the great supply of youth, willing to join the army because of the lack of other opportunities. Also in India exposure to para-military outfits like the NCC, RSP, and MCC is a part of curriculums in many schools, which may have some bearing on the large numbers willing to join the Armed Forces.

I don’t know about the practical differences between a volunteer army and conscript army, as in the quality of their service and skills, but I think the point that conscription is bad in itself cannot be denied, and in a large state where motives for state action are other than the immediate defence of its territory and the lives of its citizens, and where politics is played with the lives of men, it is better to have a volunteer army which signs-up with the knowledge of impending danger, rather than a conscripted army, fighting another man’s war. It is easy for old men to consign(or cons’crypt’) young men to their graves.. they have little to lose.

The Confederacy lost for many reasons, including its relative poverty, the unpopularity of Slavery in Europe, which was still the power centre of the world, and ironically on its dependence on the issue of Slavery as a cause for the break, which meant that a large portion of the population was not eligible to fight for its cause.

I hope nothing I have said, is construed as support for Slavery. I don’t support Slavery in any form.

Das Gespest des Pflichtdiensts & Conscription is Slavery. Nichtsdestotrotz ist die Idee der Sozialsklaverei bei vielen Deutschen sehr populär…