A few weeks ago there was a flurry of concern over the possibility of daughters being drafted for combat roles. Now that women have been cleared for combat duty by the Pentagon, all that is now necessary for that monstrosity to happen is for us to abandon our commitment to an all-volunteer military.
But this naturally stirs up another question. What about conscription for sons? What does Scripture teach about that? I grew up in Annapolis, Maryland, and I came from a Navy family, so the idea of joining another service had never even occurred to me. I was Navy bound. But Vietnam was hot and heavy, and I was fresh meat. I still recall my draft number was 19. You know how it is — cream rises.
If we look to Scripture to see how a free army ought to be raised, we have to remember that such freedom does not exist outside the confines of the law of liberty, which is of course the Word of God. A nation of slaves will get their armies the same place they get their pyramid builders — an official will reach into the populace cauldron and take ’em.
So what I am sketching here will not happen unless we experience a massive reformation and revival. All civic freedom depends upon virtue, and virtue depends upon forgiveness from sin, and that depends on Jesus.
But in a free nation, all the able-bodied men, twenty-years-old and up, may be mustered for war (Num. 1:45). The muster was compulsory, but having to fight was not (Dt. 20:5-8). A man could opt out of the war for good and godly reasons (Dt. 20:7), or he could opt out simply because he was a coward (Dt. 20:8). Reasoning by analogy, he could even opt out because he had read one too many articles by Noam Chomsky, and thought that the war was just over oil. It was actually over milk and honey, but he could not be dissuaded, and so home he goes. In a modern setting, I would say registration, yes, and compulsory service, no.
Gideon winnows down his army by various means. He lets the fearful go first (Judg. 7:3), which is one of the standards from Deuteronomy. He lets the next group go because they were not trained to drink water “on the alert” like a soldier should (Judg. 7:6-7), a standard given to him by the Lord at that time. So a requisite amount of training could be required before service was allowed.
Conscription is antithetical to the defense of a free nation. You don’t defend freedom by enslaving those who are going to fight to defend it. If there really were a genuine military threat to our borders, our freedoms, etc. we should be able to raise a sufficient number of men to defend ourselves. And if we were not able to do that, then the choice between our old regime and the incoming regime would probably comme ci comme ça kind of thing. If there is no free defense, then is there anything still there worth defending?
One other question. An all-volunteer military is still a professional military. What about that? Assuming that we are not engaged in dubious activities like nation-building, or building up drug cartels, I believe that a professional military is necessary. But the model should be to have enough professionals around to be able to train and organize a major influx of man-power in the case of a real war. You don’t want a real war to break out and have to do everything from scratch. I served in the submarine service, and I can tell you right off that I wouldn’t want to serve on a submarine put together by the Idaho militia.
Now somebody is going to say that their abstract idea of freedom requires no professional army at all. I think this is unrealistic, and yet I think the legitimate concerns about excessive militarization need to be addressed. During the constitutional debates, one delegate proposed that we not be allowed to have a standing army of over 10,000 men. I don’t recall the exact numbers — I think it was 10,000. George Washington was serving as the chair, so he wasn’t participating in the debate, but he did whisper to someone that the motion needed a rider, providing that the country would never be invaded by a force of over 25,000 men.
The point is that military necessities are not decided by you or your ideology — they are decided by your enemies and their ideologies.