Volunteer Militaries, The Draft, and Support for War

This paper models how a nation’s military manpower system affects the decision to go to war. Manpower systems differ primarily in how they distribute costs: the volunteer system shares the war’s manpower costs broadly, while the draft forces a subset of the population to bear a disproportionate share of the load. This difference affects an officeand policy-motivated politician’s decision to go to war. The draft induces pro-war policymakers to pursue more wars than the volunteer military does, while the volunteer system induces anti-war policymakers to pursue more wars than the draft does. The manpower systems cannot be generically ranked by efficiency, because each makes errors the other avoids, but the volunteer system induces selection of more efficient wars for a large class of plausible preference distributions. JEL Classification: H56, D78