On April 18, the evil spy company Palantir made a Twitter post—apparently based on a 2025 book by founder Alex Karp—about their philosophy that the government needs to transform into a “technological Republic.” To channel Marge Simpson, I don’t think our government can afford to hire any company that has a philosophy.
The whole thing is grim; they essentially propose a tech dystopia and justify making any scary weapon the government asks for. In a recent article for the Libertarian Institute, Alan Mosley wrote, “This ‘manifesto’ is a cautionary tale of ideology cloaked in technobabble,” and I would add a fascist ideology at that!
Among the most noticed points was this:
“6. National service should be a universal duty. We should, as a society, seriously consider moving away from an all-volunteer force and only fight the next war if everyone shares in the risk and the cost.”
Our shared cost and their enormous private profit, of course. This call for conscription is phrased as if it is necessary to “share the burden,” but notably does not argue that it would help us win said war. It should be added that we have Selective Service now and it could be used if deemed necessary for World War III without peacetime universal conscription.
Previously, on March 27, comedian and erstwhile “libertarian” Rob Schneider made a post arguing we should bring back mandatory military service to “unite” our nation and in some vague way improve the character of our youth, while also making our government more hesitant to go to war. According to Schneider:
“This would serve many purposes in our society; We would have all of our young men and women put into a rigorous physical training course that they could use for the rest of their lives, we would always have a standing army ready at all times including for domestic problems like natural disasters.”
This is a bizarre because we already have a large standing army, the National Guard has generally proven adept at responding to natural disasters, and these conscripts would have already had twelve or more years of government school wherein PE was mandated. It’s not clear how two in the military—with necessarily lowered physical standards to accommodate them—would be a unique opportunity to build life-long fitness habits. It seems more like what you call a “solution in search of a problem” and that he just likes the idea of taking away the freedom of the young.
Absent from these arguments is any claim that this would make our military better at warfighting, but simply that mandatory military service can be used as a sort of social conditioning tool to improve our nation. Such arguments, increasingly common, are no different than demanding the introduction of trans soldiers or accomodating flight suits for pregnant pilots. They do nothing for military effectiveness but are ridiculous ways to promote personal political agendas. Implementing compulsory military service as a form of social engineering would be an egregious attack on freedom that would make our country poorer, more disunified, and our young people more broken, all while making our military work worse instead of better.
Before getting to their above claims, I want to discuss the draft and the professional military generally. Firstly, while our military has many shortcomings, more or less everyone in the service prefers having a professional, all-volunteer military. The world is not the way it used to be, and almost all trades require a great deal more technical skills than they did when Napoleon was conscripting soldiers. It’s sometimes shown how much people drank in the nineteenth century, and then pointed out they didn’t have to drive cars or operate complex machinery, so you could more or less be drunk all the time. Similarly, these days you can’t just attempt to train men to be calm under fire and hope it is fine; the reality is modern soldiers have highly specialized skills that can’t very well be taught to whomever regardless of willingness and aptitude. I am of the school of thought that our military relies far too much on fancy equipment instead of well-trained “grunts” (and indeed, perhaps the worst part of NATO policy is measuring power by military spending as a percent of GDP, not troops as a percent of population) but nevertheless you want these people to be well trained and motivated. There isn’t a lot of military utility to conscripts, who have always made notoriously bad soldiers even in a prior era where warfighting required substantially less skill.
Regarding conscription as a concept, I don’t want to split hairs about if it is “slavery,” but suffice to say it is a tremendous infringement on the rights of the individual—quite literally taking his freedom for a number of years in service to the state—and should only be considered if there is a dire necessity. In poorer countries, they are commonly used as actual slave labor, digging ditches and that sort of thing, but our economy has moved well past needing forced labor.
Still, perhaps in some situations it is a reasonable policy. I think in a country like America that is large, spread out, and has huge oceans protecting us, any war reasonably worth fighting will get ample volunteers. However, take the example of Singapore; an extremely wealthy, orderly, and fairly authoritarian country with mandatory military service. It does stand to reason not a lot of Singaporeans think the military is their best economic option and wouldn’t volunteer, but the public does seem fine with mandatory service. A big difference is that Singapore is a tiny country surrounded by much higher population countries, and is so wealthy it is the envy of the world. Further, the British considered it an impregnable fortress and it fell to the Japanese quickly, a history every Singaporean is aware of. Finally, not that I believe the Chinese will attack, but in theory if the country was taken over by China then the liberty of the public would be so greatly reduced that one could make at least a passable argument that mandatory military service is a necessary cost to safeguard what liberty the people have—particularly their self-rule. It should also be included that Singapore doesn’t tend to get into pointless conflicts and the military is specifically to resist invasion.
As to the core arguments for universal conscription as a form of unifying social engineering, there is no reason to believe that universal conscription would be unifying. It is mostly a Boomer myth that their activism, caused in part by an active draft, did anything to stop the Vietnam War, and in fact Richard Nixon won overwhelming victories on a platform that could be summarized as “Damn hippies!” The use of conscripts in Vietnam drastically disunified the country so badly our political leaders have been endlessly arguing about the 1960s since the 1960s, something one can never unsee once it’s pointed out (incidentally, 2020 will be that for this generation.) While there is a disconnect between the general public and our professional warrior class, and one hears now and again that it would be good for our public to understand military life better, mandatory service would more likely create a false sense of understanding of our professional military that would be more irritating and divisive for everyone.
Regarding the premise that mandatory service would build character, this is on its face nonsense. I’ve never been in the military and I don’t mean to disparage the men and women of the military, but have you ever heard the way they discuss the behavior of the youngest service members, who are actually screened in a variety of ways? Throwing everyone in their late teens together for a coercive purpose would more likely be morally disastrous. Further, many students barely survive the misery of public school with their character intact, and with no end in sight, one imagines suicides, mass violence, drug use, and every other problem of the young would go up. None of this is to say, supposing they do get used in combat, what impact it might have on their character. Along with this is an argument that these young people need to “give back” to their country—how this is done by basically wasting everyone’s time at taxpayer expense for two years is unclear to me, particularly given that it would push back the start of their careers where the government can tax them. Isn’t that the literal way citizens already “pay back”?
As to the premise that mandatory military service would make the public, and by extension the government, more careful about the use of the military, this probably sounds compelling if you are completely ignorant. Disregarding the open question of whether the government cares what the public thinks at all, these conscripts would not actually be sent to war. If Russia is using all volunteer forces in Ukraine while having mandatory service-—and for that matter, the USSR used only volunteers in Afghanistan for years—the U.S. government could obviously just choose to not use conscripts, their weakest troops which antagonize the public. I am reminded of how Rebecca West, the esteemed twentieth century British journalist, living under German bombardment, made a bizarre argument in the epilogue of Black Lamb and Grey Falcon that the advent of aerial bombardment had saved the morality of the town dwellers, who now have to experience the wars they vote for instead of the weight merely being carried by professional soldiers. The reality is having kids in mandatory non-combat military service is probably the sweet spot for giving the public the most moral cover to support wars, and certainly won’t stop any.
Mandatory military service is a severe violation of human liberty. Nevertheless, in some situations, in some countries, it is perhaps necessary to prevent greater evils. However, its use is limited, and it is nonsensical in a country like ours which is well defended, both by geography and our own military. Universal conscription would do little but make our young people miserable while costing an enormous amount of money. It is absurd and extremely misguided for these freaks—who by the way did not themselves serve in the military—to pretend that mandatory military service is some sort of panacea to cure our national division, build the moral character of the youth, or to make the forever wars stop. It would more likely be counterproductive on all points while wasting vast resources and causing a variety of new problems.
