Mark R. Stoneman

Russia’s war against Ukraine has been marked by an effort to avoid universal (manhood) conscription. It is the regime’s war, so to speak (a “special military operation”), not a people’s war.

On the other side, Ukraine uses conscription because it is indeed a national or people’s war for them. It is a fight for their very survival. Russia is even treating each and every Ukrainian as a “legitimate” target. But even Ukraine has avoided calling up younger men. It seems they lack the political consensus to do so.

I thought about this again when Vance made his historically ignorant accusation in the White House that Ukraine’s military manpower situation was so bad that they had to force men into the army. It’s as if Vance had never heard of the draft in the United States. Or he doesn’t know that “conscription” means “draft” in modern U.S. military history. Regardless, conscription is what countries do when they believe the national stakes are extremely high. If Vance had read any histories of war over the past couple centuries, he would know this.

One notable exception to conscription in national or total wars: Britain tried to fight the First World War with only volunteers, and they succeeded up to a point. By 1916, however, they had to institute conscription as well (“Military Service”). Little wonder. That war in particular had a ravenous appetite for men.

I’ve been thinking about the issue of conscription for another reason. Western leaders have spent the first three years of the Russo-Ukrainian War trying to prevent average citizens from feeling any pain. They’ve avoided spending the money necessary to mobilize our defense industries sufficiently to support a Ukrainian victory and form a credible deterrent to Russia (and China).

This avoidance points to one or all of the following developments in democracies and authoritarian kleptocracies alike:

1. The relationship between nation states and their peoples has changed substantially. Are people less patriotic? Maybe they are less willing to follow their leaders’s calls to war?
2. Do nation states care more about consent than they used to? Or have they grown more timid? Perhaps they are acting on an everyday awareness of popular opinion gleaned from social media, for example.
3. Are contemporary leaders more likely to follow popular opinion than lead it? Even Putin and Trump are hardly leading, unless one thinks gaslighting their nations and the world counts.

I have no answer here. It just feels like the post–Cold War era of increasingly volunteer armies and neoliberal economic policies is being challenged by the demands of Mars and his acolytes, even if few have come to accept the consequences of this shift.