Democracy and the Conscript

The use of draftees to fight “little wars”—colonial repressions, police actions, counter-insurgency operations—is relatively new. Before World War II, these sorts of wars were fought by volunteer or mercenary armies, often recruited from foreign or colonial populations. The French Foreign Legion and the British Gurkha regiments are the most obvious examples. Even after World War II, the Foreign Legion bore the brunt of the fighting in Indo-China and the Gurkhas in Malaya. But increasingly the Western democracies have found it necessary, or thought it necessary, to use drafted troops, if only in supportive roles—the English first in Malaya and later in Cyprus, the French in Algeria, the U.S. in Korea and Vietnam. This necessity is not only a matter of manpower, though the use of national troops clearly had to be stepped up as the colonies won independence and enlisted or drafted their own citizens for their own armies. But draftees have another purpose: they have be...