Conscript and Professional Armies: Two Ways to Field a Force

In 1793, the new French Republic was surrounded by enemies and running out of soldiers. The government did something startling: it declared that every unmarried man between 18 and 25 was now in the army. Within a year, France had more than 750,000 men under arms. This was the levée en masse, and it was the first time a modern state had simply reached into its own population and pulled out a vast army by law.

That moment marks one of the two great ways a country can field a force. The first is conscription: the government requires citizens to serve, usually for a fixed term of one to three years. The second is a professional army, sometimes called a volunteer army, made up of people who choose military service as a paid job and often stay for many years.

The two systems produce very different armies. A conscript army is huge and cheap per soldier, because the state does not have to compete with civilian employers on wages. It also reflects the society it comes from. A French conscript in 1914 stood next to a baker, a schoolteacher, and a farmer, all wearing the same uniform. But conscripts only serve for a short time, so their training is limited. A two-year soldier learns to march, shoot, and follow orders, but rarely masters a complex weapon system before going home.

A professional army is the opposite trade. It is smaller and more expensive per soldier, because volunteers have to be paid enough to choose the military over other jobs. In return, the state gets soldiers who stay for years, sometimes decades. They can be trained on equipment that takes a long time to learn, like submarines, fighter jets, or modern tank gunnery. The Roman legions, the British army of the 1800s, and the United States military since 1973 are all examples.

Each system has shown its strengths in different kinds of wars. Conscript armies have been devastating in long, total wars between large states. In both World Wars, the side that could mobilize the most citizens fastest had a real advantage, because casualties were enormous and replacements had to come from somewhere. The Soviet Union fielded more than 34 million people during the Second World War, a number no professional force could match.

Professional armies tend to do better in long-distance wars, in fights against irregular opponents, and in conflicts where the public does not want to send its sons and daughters into danger. The United States ended the draft in 1973, partly because conscription had become politically unbearable during the Vietnam War. Since then, the American military has fought mostly far from home, with smaller numbers of highly trained troops.

This points to something often missed. The choice between conscript and professional armies is not only a military question. It is also a political question about what a country is willing to ask of its citizens, and what kind of war it expects to fight. A state that conscripts is saying that defense is a duty owed by every citizen. A state that hires professionals is saying that defense is a job, and that most citizens can go on with their ordinary lives. Neither answer is obviously right. Each one shapes not only the army, but the country behind it.