Sorry, but I respectfully disagree. I’ve seen first-hand the difference between draftees and volunteers. And frankly I have little patience for false-consciousness arguments of any shape or shade, whether it’s denying women or minorities their agency, or denying soldiers their decisions. It’s a function of privilege to be able to tell someone their decision isn’t a real choice.
If you’re anti-military then by all means be anti-military. I’m for small military myself. It’s perfectly valid to be anti-military and tell people they’re making a mistake by joining up. But the fact is that military service is not so cut and dried. For some it becomes a springboard, while others who join end up bitterly hating it. And institutional military bias towards gays, women and minorities contributes many more dispossessed soldiers than the profoundly misguided and sometimes corrupt policies they’re called upon by political leadership to implement.
IMHO, the people who flourish in the military are those who yearn to serve others. Sometimes they find what they’re looking for and sometimes they find their own personal hell on Earth. Which of the two it is boils down to is a mixture of both circumstance and mindset. There are absolutely people who join who don’t belong in military service.
And once again I believe it comes back to politics. Politicians who support foreign policies of casus belli in perpetuum create a demand that a reasonable republic’s people simply cannot fill, so they resort to dubious recruitment standards and practices. A small defense force ready to grow in the face of a real existential threat to individual sovereignty would be turning applicants away, not marketing to anyone who walks into a recruitment office.
So yes, please advocate for more honest recruitment practices, strict standards and, above all, rational foreign policy. But when you deny the agency of volunteers qua volunteers because you disagree with what they’re volunteering to do (as I too mostly disagree), you deny their agency.
TL;DR – Conscription into and volunteering for a stupid cause are not the same thing, and rose-tinted marketing is not the same thing as impressment.
Anyway, just my 2¢. No antagonism intended.
