Population and percentage in military

[atpollard]

In this week in military history, we explore the New York City draft riots of the summer of 1863.

Funny how both sides of an argument can be right.

• Non-citizens should not be subject to a draft.
• The 1863 Draft system was unjust to those rioting.

The flaw in forced service (compelled not necessarily mandatory - that is a "culture" issue) is like the old joke ... "Military Surplus Rifles For Sale - Only Dropped Once". Troops that don't want to be there tend to fight like they don't want to be there. I believe that an analysis of WW2 combat revealed that something like only 10% of the soldiers (I may have the wrong exact percentage, but it was astonishingly small) actually contributed to the outcome of a battle (shot an enemy soldier or destroyed an object of strategic value). Most draftees just kept their heads down and tried to not get shot.

 

[Enoki]

Where conscription ends in terms of a useful method for raising an army is when technology becomes sufficiently complex that just not anybody can operate it. There's no point to conscripting large numbers of warm bodies if they are incapable of being trained in a timely manner to perform the duties and tasks necessary to make them useful.

Take an industrial age (or earlier) factory. The tasks any one person was given were relatively simple and repetitive. Learning was fairly quick, almost anyone could manage it, and once learned proficiency could be obtained in a short period of time. Going to an electronics age factory where all the simple, repetitive, tasks are done by machines, you only need a relative handful of highly skilled workers who have been trained over years, to do complex tasks that machines can't do or to supervise the operation of the machines. Hiring a mass of unskilled or marginally skilled workers does nothing for you.

That would mean that starting about TL 8 or so, the need for mass conscription steadily decreases for military operations.

On the other hand, given that some worlds in the Traveller setting are definitely overpopulated, and others are headed there, I'd say one of the likely things for conscription would be colonization and expansion of territory by various space fairing polities. Build a basic ship, pack it with your excess population, and send it off to system X that has had just the most basic survey done to know that there's a planet there they can survive on. Wash, rinse, repeat, until the excess population is no more.

Here, you--the government--doesn't have to particularly care if the "colonists" are suitable for this purpose or not. They're surplus to the government's needs and the cheapest way to get rid of them in some useful fashion is to ship them off to some god forsaken, unclaimed, system to colonize it. You could send criminals, religious zealots, revolutionaries, the disgruntled, persons that don't measure up in terms of productivity or intellect, etc., to do this. They succeed, great! They fail, send another ship load and try again.

 

[Spinward Flow]

Here, you--the government--doesn't have to particularly care if the "colonists" are suitable for this purpose or not. They're surplus to the government's needs and the cheapest way to get rid of them in some useful fashion is to ship them off to some god forsaken, unclaimed, system to colonize it. You could send criminals, religious zealots, revolutionaries, the disgruntled, persons that don't measure up in terms of productivity or intellect, etc., to do this.

 

[Enoki]

Just remember, when you do get drafted the Sargent in change of your group is going to introduce himself by saying...

The stupid looks upon your foolish faces tells me that you will make crack troops!

 

[Condottiere]

We keep relearning the same lessons every generation.

If you make the assumption that giving your general manpower pool a viable level of competence to easily slip back into military service within forty eight hours or a week, then you have to arrange to train them before the projected conflict.

Serves as a great deterrence, if the other side fears attritional warfare, because their opponents can rapidly ramp up with their military; this would have to be balanced by having sufficient equipment and materiel for all those called up troops.

Even if the invader doesn't doctrinally fear attritional warfare, their unpreparedness and questionable quality of their troops in the initial assaults, would get overwhelmed and wiped out.

 

[chipla]

Where conscription ends in terms of a useful method for raising an army is when technology becomes sufficiently complex that just not anybody can operate it. There's no point to conscripting large numbers of warm bodies if they are incapable of being trained in a timely manner to perform the duties and tasks necessary to make them useful.
…
That would mean that starting about TL 8 or so, the need for mass conscription steadily decreases for military operations.

Despite being English I live in Korea and part of my work here is with the ROK Army (I teach English for the government). I think they actually have a pretty decent solution to the issues related with a conscript army in a technologically advanced military.

As you may or may not know every able bodied male Korean is required to do military service with some severe social and political consequences for failure to do so. Their basic enlistment period is really the equivalent of basic training and technical schooling. The more technical branches (navy and air force) require a longer enlistment period because their personnel require more training.

This basic technical training is reinforced with mandatory call backs that refresh the training. While these call backs are not as intensive and in-depth as the Swedish military’s version they work well enough for the current threat. (Some of the older Koreans I’ve talked to say that in the seventies when the north was sending infiltrators fairly regularly the call back training was more intense.)


On a planetary scale I could see planets on the Zho border making sure every citizen has at least a year and a half’s training so they can operate a rifle and/or an anti-air or anti-tank weapon in case they need to fight a protracted guerrilla war against an occupying force. The bulk of the planets COAC could also be provided and trained this way. This training would be reinforced with call backs throughout their life. Obviously your manpower reserve in this case is greater in a defensive war but your day to day military duties can still be performed by your active conscript component.

 

[kilemall]

There is a major issue with mass universal call up forces- after initial training the men go to jobs where they are hopefully productive in industry, ag or finance/admin. You call up all the men without regard to what they do and you kneecap the industries at the moment of maximum danger.

 

[Marcatlas]

The % of pop needed in the military is also going to vary by TL. The higher the TL the less people are going to be directly fighting & needed. Autonomous fighting vehicles and robots. Swarms of drones linked to a central craft controlled by a sophont, etc.

 

[atpollard]

TL 1-2: The army of Ancient Sparta never exceeded 8000 men out of about 35,000 citizens (men and women) and a total population of 175,000 (80% slaves). That places the Peak Wartime Army of the preeminent Military City-State of c.500 BC at 4% of the total population of Sparta.

TL 5: "Over 36.5 million draft cards were issued during the time the U.S. fought in World War II; 10.1 million men were inducted between 1940 and 1947, which represented about 7.6% of the national population, according to estimates from the 1940 census."

TL 7: "2,709,918 Americans served in Vietnam, this number represents 9.7% of their generation."


I do not think that TL reduces the demand for soldiers.

 

[Marcatlas]

TL 1-2: The army of Ancient Sparta never exceeded 8000 men out of about 35,000 citizens (men and women) and a total population of 175,000 (80% slaves). That places the Peak Wartime Army of the preeminent Military City-State of c.500 BC at 4% of the total population of Sparta.

TL 5: "Over 36.5 million draft cards were issued during the time the U.S. fought in World War II; 10.1 million men were inducted between 1940 and 1947, which represented about 7.6% of the national population, according to estimates from the 1940 census."

TL 7: "2,709,918 Americans served in Vietnam, this number represents 9.7% of their generation."


I do not think that TL reduces the demand for soldiers.

Well, when the TL allows robots instead of soldiers it sure will. There no logical reason to use people when machines can do the dirty job. Already military pilots in the fight are being replaced by unmanned aerial vehicles.

 

[atpollard]

Well, when the TL allows robots instead of soldiers it sure will. There no logical reason to use people when machines can do the dirty job. Already military pilots in the fight are being replaced by unmanned aerial vehicles.

That smacks of the same thinking that predicted that aircraft would not need Guns any more because dog fights were a relic of WW2 Propeller thinking and Jet duels would all be fought with missiles at long range ... that lasted until our planes started getting shot down in alarming numbers.

Time will tell whether pilots disappear ... however, in Traveller, we have the rules and at TL 15 "PILOT" is still a skill and "FIGHTER" is still a Spacecraft Type and every "Fighter" in the Traveller Books has a sophont "Pilot". Thus the issue is decided in the Third Imperium.

IYTU ... you are free to relegate people to bystanders in proxy robo-wars if that "floats your boat", but that sounds like the opposite of "fun" to me.
[Dying of dysentery in a Medieval Fantasy is realistic ... yet most people opt out of that realism in their games, too.]

 

[Marcatlas]

That smacks of the same thinking that predicted that aircraft would not need Guns

No it "smacks" of reality. Like in WW 2 it took 200 planes and a couple thousand airmen to bomb one building. Today it takes 1 or zero airmen in the line of battle to do destroy the same building. REALITY

 

[Condottiere]

Spartan military had a very strong internal security aspect, and utilized allied forces to make up the numbers.

Communistic states' internal security apparatus tends to outstrip their military.

 

[Timerover51]

No it "smacks" of reality. Like in WW 2 it took 200 planes and a couple thousand airmen to bomb one building. Today it takes 1 or zero airmen in the line of battle to do destroy the same building. REALITY

That was if you were bombing from high altitude. There were cases of very low-level strikes were only a few aircraft were used, and part of them were back-up in case of problems with the primary attackers.

That also does rely on your intelligence targeting the correct building. In the bombing campaign against Serbia and the First Gulf War, there were some major mistakes in targeting the wrong building or structure.

 

[Condottiere]

I hear the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade had pieces of the Nighthawk that was shot down.

So maybe not.

 

[aramis]

Not all jurisdictions are easy to leave. Leaving can have other consequences, such as leaving your family behind.

Or being shot in the attempt. See also the Berlin Wall and the Korean DMZ.
Or, as noted, your family being punished or even executed. See N. Korea and the Khmer Rouge period of Cambodia.

Technically, the US has universal eligibility for conscription, but hasn't used conscription since the war in Vietnam. It could, but the morale is low enough already with an all-volunteer force.

And as for conscription... lets not forget that a number of nations conscripted for the police, too...
And a few conscript jurors for a significant time. Technically, Jury service in the states I've lived in is a form of conscription: mandatory government service. (I've been called up for jury duty in both states, at that. Served on one jury.)

 

[aramis]

Funny how both sides of an argument can be right.

• Non-citizens should not be subject to a draft.
• The 1863 Draft system was unjust to those rioting.

The flaw in forced service (compelled not necessarily mandatory - that is a "culture" issue) is like the old joke ... "Military Surplus Rifles For Sale - Only Dropped Once". Troops that don't want to be there tend to fight like they don't want to be there. I believe that an analysis of WW2 combat revealed that something like only 10% of the soldiers (I may have the wrong exact percentage, but it was astonishingly small) actually contributed to the outcome of a battle (shot an enemy soldier or destroyed an object of strategic value). Most draftees just kept their heads down and tried to not get shot.

TraDoc's numbers as of 2008 (when I last looked them up) were 1 in 20 still never drops a round, and only 3 in 20 fired effectively in a given engagement — a 50% improvement over WW2's 1 in 10 — but the number actually firing in any given enagement was over 10 in 20. Over the course of study, the ones firing for effect in the recent wars were not always the same few, either... IIRC it was 3 of 20 never fired for effect, including the one who simply never fired. 1 in 20 always fires for effect - which is worse than WW 2's 1 in 10, but that may be an artifact of TraDoc changing the way they recorded the results.
Also important: that 1 in 20 never firing quite possibly is the medics. Medics were not stated to have been excluded.

Overall takeaway? Troops are more likely to engage now, but in a given engagement, it's still only a core few who always pur rounds on target; more lead downrange, however, is still an improvement, and that lead's more likely now to be aimed at the enemy (fired for effect).

Here's the rub: the US Army Training and Doctrine Command (TraDoc) has been focused upon how troops are trained, but ignoring the change from mixed conscript & volunteer to all volunteer. It's a potential confounding factor that's simply ignored in the papers I've read and the officers I've discussed it with.

Also worth noting for the historical context: The WW2 Red Army (USSR) was so short of weapons that the average soldier's first time touching a real rifle was when they picked it off the corpse of the prior user. (Source: Avrich, Paul, 1995. Based upon documents in the Kremlin archive.)

 

[Condottiere]

That meme still persists, in a variant form.

Russian recruit (t)rusty rifle.

 

[chipla]

There is a major issue with mass universal call up forces- after initial training the men go to jobs where they are hopefully productive in industry, ag or finance/admin. You call up all the men without regard to what they do and you kneecap the industries at the moment of maximum danger.

I think it’s worth noting that the scenarios in which total mobilisation would be required probably exclude the likelyhood of normalised industry in some cases.

In the case of Korea they’re mostly worried about a horde of communists descending from the North and pushing them back to Busan again. Given that the last time the peninsula went to war basically everything was flattened there is a feeling that there (at least in the provinces closest to the border) won’t be enough industry to man.

I’d expect if such an invasion were to happen they’d activate first at the si (city but actually equivalent to a county in some cases) level and then at the provincial level. Northern si would be activated earlier than southern si to keep the industrial wheels turning for as long as possible.

In my fictional Zho invasion scenario for a frontier planet, industrial nodes are likely secondary targets for node warfare and planetary invasions. Having the workers in these areas able to act as a defensive militia allows the node to remain in allied hands for as long as possible.

 

[Condottiere]

Question tends to be what you'd expect them to do.

In terms of demographics, interstellar naval personnel requirements are minuscule.

Interstellar armies are likely volunteer and technically educated.

It's militias where you soak up all that extra manpower.