The military argument against a peacetime draft is more specific to present-day conditions. The simple fact is that our top military commanders have no wish to see a draft reinstated. The American military of today is not a "warm bodies" army. It is a very highly trained force of specialized military professionals. It places exceptional demands on morale and esprit de corps, and depends on a substantial proportion of recruits choosing to make military service a career. The last thing that commanders want today is an army of reluctant or disaffected short-timers. Thus, in addition to the broader arguments against a peacetime draft, its strictly military utility is open to serious doubt.
Let us take each of the three arguments above and consider them. The first argument offered is a philosophical one, that a compulsory draft is a violation of liberty. Yet the argument acknowledges that the violation is not absolute; a draft might still be permitted in a declared war. More broadly, the liberal or republican tradition has always acknowledged that personal liberty is not absolute, but can in some cases take a back seat to public obligations (Marlowe).
A familiar example is jury duty, in which citizens are in effect drafted as members of a jury panel. It wo
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