Suboptimal Selective Service: An Analysis of the Obstacles to Selective Service Reform in American Political Institutions

Expanding mandatory selective service registration in the United States to include women would seem to be good public policy that increases national security and reduces gender bias. Despite the recent recommendation of a congressionally-mandated commission, recent efforts to implement this important reform have repeatedly stalled. Why? In this article, we explain the failure of selective service reform through the lens of American political institutions. Neither the composition of the Supreme Court, nor the institutional incentives facing legislators, are conducive to movement on this issue. Building on the legislative entrepreneurship literature, we argue that recent trends in congressional representation and the adoption of new issue framings are the most likely factors that will increase the probability of selective service reform. The absence of selective service reform in the United States reveals important facts about agenda-setting in defense policy and how political institutions shape the relationship between the public and the military.

Ted Studebaker

Already registered with the Selective Service as a conscientious objector due to his long-held religious convictions, Ted Studebaker volunteered to serve for 2 years in Vietnam, where he coordinated community organization projects in a small village of Di Linh. Toward the end of his 2-year tour of duty, in 1979 he was killed by Viet Cong troops who broke into his house. Although decidedly antiwar, Studebaker volunteered to fulfill his duties as a citizen of the United States, a country he loved. Studebaker made his choices based upon his religious beliefs. His efforts were a small counterbalance to the immense resources devoted to waging war. Studebaker’s life and death as a civilian social worker in a combat zone during active war illustrates an alternative path for social workers who brave dangerous conditions to serve others.

Civilian public sector employment as a long-run outcome of military conscription

Since at least T. H. Marshall, scholars have recognized military service as a form of sacrifice that warrants compensation from the state. War-widow pensions, expansion of the franchise, and subsidized higher education are all examples of rights and benefits “bestowed” in return for wartime mobilization. Similarly, in the United States, governments have hired veterans preferentially for civilian public jobs as recompense for active military service. Although oft overlooked, those policies seem influential: the percentage of job holders identifying as veterans in the civilian US executive branch exceeds the proportion in the wider population by several multiples. This century-old pattern suggests another way that wartime mobilization has influenced the state. Yet, efforts to understand it have struggled to rule out the possibility that those who serve in the armed forces are predisposed to work for the state in both military and civilian capacities. Here, we rule out this possibility by examining whether birthdates randomly called for induction in the Vietnam-Era Selective Service Lotteries (VSSL) appear disproportionately in the population of nonsensitive personnel records of the civilian US executive branch. We find that birthdates called for induction appear with unusually high frequency among employees who were draft eligible and at risk for induction but not among other employees. This finding suggests a treatment effect from military service, thus dovetailing with the hypothesis that wartime mobilization has substantially and continually influenced who works in the contemporary administrative state.

Rough Draft

This book argues that policy makers’ idealized conceptions of middle-class masculinity directly affected who they targeted for conscription during the Cold War. Along with much of the American population, federal officials, including those within the Selective Service System, believed college educated men could better protect the nation from the threat of communism as civilians than as soldiers. The availability of deferments for these men grew rapidly between 1945 and 1965, militarizing their occupations and making it less and less likely that middle-class white men would serve in the Cold War military. Meanwhile, officials used the War on Poverty to target poorer men for conscription in the hopes that military service would offer them skills they could use in civilian life. Therefore, while some men resisted military service in Vietnam for reasons of political conscience, most of those who avoided military service did so because manpower polices made it possible. By protecting middle-class breadwinners in the name of national security, policy planners militarized certain civilian roles, a move that, ironically, separated military service from the obligations of masculine citizenship and, ultimately, helped kill the draft in the United States.

“Really First-Class Men”

Chapter four focuses on the development of the Selective Service’s decision to channel men into certain occupations and domestic arrangements. Under its policy of manpower channeling, the Selective Service used deferments to bribe men to pursue jobs deemed to be in the national interest and to marry and have children. In granting these deferments, the Selective Service altered its mission – defining itself as a civil defense agency as well as a procurer of military manpower – and the definition of service to the state. Not only did it accept civilian pursuits as national service as it had during the Korean War, but by the late 1950s, it explicitly encouraged certain men to fight communism and fulfill their citizenship obligations by remaining civilians. Through this policy, the Selective Service made social engineering one of its main priorities.