by Thomas R. Wells
Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has reminded everyone of how dangerous a world we live in. As rich countries scramble to rebuild militaries dismantled by post-Cold war complacency, one of the other problems of national success has become apparent: young people have better things to do than play soldier.
My solution: conscript the old instead
Armies have a recruitment problem: they can’t get enough healthy young men to join. Young men have traditionally been the best recruits for fighting wars. They can carry lots of equipment over long distances without getting too tired to fight afterwards. They generally lack a visceral awareness of their own mortality, so they can be ordered to do insanely dangerous things. Indeed, many of them rather enjoy the excitement, intense camaraderie, and sense of shared purpose that accompanies war-fighting, and the survivors look back on it fondly when they have grown old and boring. As only partially formed adults, young men conveniently also lack the self-confidence and resources to question orders and hierarchies.
Most crucially, until very recently young men have been cheap, plentiful and easily replaced. The death of an 18 year old man was no great loss to a pre-industrial society, since it didn’t represent any great stock of human capital. (It did represent a stock of muscle power, but subsistence economies were generally constrained by the available land rather than the labour supply to work it.) Fertility rates were high so lost men could easily be replaced as long as plenty of fertile women remained. Altogether then, the cost of using up vast numbers of young men’s lives in warfare was quite affordable and hence commonplace. (Archaeological estimates for male mortality rates by violence in the hunter-gatherer societies that my students like to romanticise range from a terrifying 5% to a scarcely imaginable 35%, and sometimes even higher – see e.g. the research summarised by Azar Gat.)
Young men are still the ideal recruits for war-fighting. But their lives are far more valuable than they used to be, thanks to demographic and economic changes over the last 200 years (the drivers and consequences of the rise of capitalism). Most of the world’s countries have significantly lower than replacement fertility, so there are far fewer young men around. Moreover, young men’s lives have greater economic value: in a non-subsistence economy there are far more profitable alternative uses to their lives than fighting other groups in zero-sum contests over territory. So of course it has become harder to recruit enough young men to fight big wars anymore. (Both Ukraine’s and Russia’s militaries are reported to have an average age above 40.)
Hence the renewed interest in compulsory ‘national service’ around the world. Conscripting 18 year olds into the army for a year or so appears an attractive solution to the military manpower shortage, even in democracies. It seems politically easier since it extracts a great sacrifice from a group of people before they are old enough to vote and object. And it seems economically cheaper than offering young men wages and conditions at least more attractive than working in an Amazon fulfilment center. But these advantages are an illusion.
Politically, it is simply illegitimate for a democracy to use the state’s coercive power to force people to kill and die to advance the policies of a government they never had a say in deciding. It is almost the definition of an unfair social contract. Economically, it may be cheap in terms of government revenues to force young people to work for practically nothing, but the real cost to the wider economy and national prosperity of misusing such a valuable resource is huge.
Fortunately there is an alternative: We have a huge number of retired old people these days who have benefited greatly from the social contract and from whom it is only fair to expect something back.
First, old people are obviously not as good at soldiering as the young, but there are vastly more of them available (e.g. 18.6% of the UK population and growing are over 65). Moreover the lives of the retired – by definition – have very little economic value, in contrast to those of young people, who are either already working for the rest of us (via the capitalist economy) or investing in their human capital to be of more value later. Indeed, the working age population is already being taxed at high rates to pay the old to sit around doing nothing (for around 20 years at present life-expectancy). If society really needs more soldiers for the good of all, then we must have them, but we should do so in a way that does not impose any more costs on our society than necessary (because this is also for the good of all). So it makes sense to draw from the enormous and currently under-used resource of retired people rather than removing even more young people from the productive economy that pays for everything a society wants to do, including war-fighting and pensions.
Conscripting the old is also more practical than it might at first seem (if one can get over the political hurdle of them voting against it! But, then, being able to get over that hurdle is what would make this policy legitimate, unlike conscripting 18 year-olds). Of course, it is true that retirees are not as fit as 18 year olds, and are more likely to have significant disabilities. But many of them are in fine health and the focus would be on the first few years of retirement. Certainly, lots of old people are fit enough to carry out many military roles, especially if one takes the effort to adapt the roles and equipment they will work with, and staff them at higher levels. (After all, women have shown that they can do most military roles despite their comparatively weaker physiques.) Moreover, the aim is not to fill all the ‘jumping out of helicopters’ jobs or the ‘carrying heavy machine guns over mountains’ jobs with old people, but to fill the manpower needs that keeps a modern military operating successfully: logistics, maintenance, fire-support, and so on.
Second, conscripting the old into the military would be fairer than conscripting the young. The old have been the greatest beneficiaries of the peace and order our society has achieved. For example, British pensioners have higher disposable income than working age people, thanks to their guaranteed basic income (state pension) and well-timed home ownership. It is only fair (in the sense of reciprocity) that they should give society something back.
Moreover, if there are life-threatening risks that must be undertaken, it is far fairer (in the sense of respecting everyone equally) that the old who have already had the chance to live a long life for themselves should take those risks rather than the 18 year olds who have barely begun to live. If the most precious thing a person possesses – their life – is to be taken away from them, it should better be taken when that life is nearly over than at its beginning.
Finally, there are additional benefits to national service that are always trotted out, such as giving young people a sense of purpose and connection to others and society as a whole. But many of these benefits would also apply – perhaps even more strongly – to retirees, who often suffer greatly in their transition from respected senior employee and colleague. A great many people look forward to the peace and tranquility of retirement, only to discover how unpleasant it is to be no longer seen as a creator of value to others. They also often find their social circles collapsing as their life-worlds reduce. National service could save them from that and help them transition to their next phase of life. In fact, these benefits would also support extending old-age national service to all sorts of non-military work that would also benefit society but which we can’t afford because workers are too scarce and expensive, such as social work, care-work, public art, education, maintaining public gardens, and so on.
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Thomas Wells teaches philosophy in the Netherlands and blogs at The Philosopher’s Beard