With the slow waning of the perceived perils of the Cold War, both Italy and the U.S. took the decision to end military conscription, to replace the politically-unpopular draft with a grand military euphemism: the “all-volunteer army.”

Changed military technology was supposed to have made large troop totals less valuable and, because of its complexity, to be more suited to the “professional” soldier than to the amateur inductee. The flaw in this reasoning was soon apparent: the volunteers would not come from the best-educated, but from the most-poorly educated sectors of the population (even granting the military’s ability to be choosy when the number of volunteers was at flood tide).
Both countries are now reaping the fruits of their decisions—and the figure lurking in the background here is Niccolò Machiavelli, who insisted that healthy republics must have citizen armies.
First, while conscription, if working well and fairly, distributes the burden throughout the population, its absence means the hiring of mercenaries, even if home-grown mercenaries, from those sectors who have the fewest alternatives, i.e., the disadvantaged, those from economically depressed areas, those with the worst education and therefore the worst employment prospects, those, in short, with the lowest levels of hope. We know that U.S. military recruiters fan out with special intensity through those neighborhoods of failed cities where idle young men loiter in greatest numbers (as Michael Moore’s film showed dramatically). Those sent to die for us are from Spanish Harlem and Flint, Michigan, not the Hamptons. And who can doubt that the Italian South and islands will be over-represented in tomorrow’s military, as they have always been in special voluntary military units and law-enforcement?
We are speaking, of course, of a far larger population of young people, in both countries, than the military currently needs (although Washington, stretched very thin to meet its Iraq needs, has had to draw down forces in Europe and Korea and, worse, to break its promises regularly to National Guard members about the length of their Iraq tour). A lottery that takes some is just as fair as a conscription that takes everybody. But we know, from Roosevelt’s massively beneficial reforestation projects, that there are some important tasks in a country’s infrastructure that need heavy manpower. Can a country whose earthquake victims never seem to leave their tents and containers, and whose deforested hills create ever-more-devastating floods, really say that there is nothing to be done?
But there is a second reason to distrust the abandoning of the draft, one that Machiavelli recognized. If the sons and daughters of its citizens are not going to be involved (unless driven to try to escape hopelessness by putting on a uniform), especially not those of its leading citizens (and parliamentarians), it is far easier for a republic’s leaders to be rash. Could President Bush have garnered the same initial support for an Iraq adventure if it meant sending citizen draftees, whose mothers and fathers came from the Vietnam era? It’s unimaginable. This may be a more serious problem for a country with greater ability to trigger international trouble, but it doesn’t exclude a glance toward the ease with which Berlusconi made his initial commitment to support Bush in Iraq.
Next week, before returning to our main path, we’ll look at the most currently-poignant, for Italy, of our awful-autumn considerations: the use of primary elections to choose candidates.