About Face? The U.S. Army and the Draft

Abstract

Conventional wisdom holds that the cold war draft, which ended on 30 June 1973, was a casualty of the Vietnam conflict. Further, most observers of the history of the draft accept that the demise of peacetime conscription occurred only after President Nixon ordered it over the protests of the armed forces. Certainly the services, which depended on selectees and draft-motivated volunteers for much of their manpower, preferred continuing it. The Army, which supported peacetime conscription in 1940 strictly as an emergency measure-and accepted its revival in 1948 as a necessary but less-than-perfect alternative to universal military training-had become utterly dependent on the draft by 1968. Nevertheless, Army Chief of Staff General William C. Westmoreland ordered a feasibility study on ending the draft before Richard Nixon's major campaign speech on the subject in the fall of that year. The findings and recommendations of that study and a more thorough follow on study conducted in 1969 shaped the way the Army implemented they AVF far more than the proposals of the President's Commission on an All-Volunteer Armed Force. Like most of the Army's leadership, Westmoreland hardly was keen on ending the draft; indeed, he never agreed with ending induction authority. But he and others in key positions at the time recognized that the draft was doomed, and they sought ways to shape the transition to the Army's advantage. How the Army's leadership came to accept the concept of the AVF is an instructive case study in institutional adaptation and self-preservation.