The All-Volunteer Military: Issues and Performance (PDF; 1 MB)
Source: Congressional Budget Office

The U.S. military is currently engaged in its largest and longest operations since the Vietnam War. The deployments associated with those operations have raised concerns about the armed forces’ ability to recruit and retain the personnel they need to carry out those missions. Some observers have also voiced concern that not all segments of U.S. society are fully participating in the fighting. To increase the size of the military and to ensure that it broadly represents the populace, some people have suggested reinstating a military draft.

This Congressional Budget Office (CBO) study–prepared at the request of the Chairman of the Defense Subcommittee of the House Committee on Appropriations–considers some of the arguments made for and against the draft before or since it was replaced by the all-volunteer force (AVF) in 1973. The study also reviews some performance trends of the AVF since its inception and discusses possible effects of returning to a draft. In keeping with CBO’s mandate to provide objective, impartial analysis, this study makes no recommendations.

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 21st, 2007 at 2:03 pm and is filed under Military and defense. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.