Volunteer Army

Report Outline
Evaluation After Two Years
Experience with Volunteer Forces
Prospects for the Volunteer Army
Special Focus

Evaluation After Two Years

Recruiting Success and Effect of Unemployment

The president's authority to induct young men into the armed forces expired at midnight on June 30, 1973. In fact, conscription had ended almost six months earlier, as Secretary of Defense Melvin R. Laird confirmed on Jan. 27 when he announced, “the armed forces henceforth will depend exclusively on volunteer soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines. The use of the draft has ended.” One of the most divisive national controversies appeared to end with it. Yet even as anxiety over the draft disappeared, there were doubts about the feasibility—and the desirability—of returning to an all-volunteer force.

Two years later, many of these doubts have been allayed. After a slow beginning in 1973, the armed forces met and even exceeded their enlistment goals for 1974 and the first four months of 1975. The Army, which had been the most reliant on draftees and the focus for fears about the all-volunteer concept, has actually had more recruits than it can use. Even Rep. F.Edward Hébert (D La.), former chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, who had always insisted that “the only way to get an all-volunteer army is to draft it,” has changed his mind.

But Hébert and others fear that the current recruiting success may be largely attributable to the nation's economic troubles. Young men may be signing up to escape unemployment. A report prepared by the Brookings Institution for the Senate Armed Services Committee in June 1973 noted: “Possibly one of the least certain—and most important—elements affecting the maintenance of a volunteer force is the impact of unemployment on an individual's inclination to volunteer.” The report suggested that the two did not appear to have a strong relation, pointing out that in 1970 those states with high unemployment did not necessarily have a high volunteer rate. Others feel that the correlation between unemployment and enlistment is reasonably well established.