![]() ![]() Activists on both the political Left and libertarian Right protested conscription, leading President Nixon to explore the feasibility of an All-Volunteer Force (AVF). ![]() Anti-war sentiment rose along with draft calls. That all changed with the escalation of the Vietnam conflict in 1965. ![]() The very existence of the draft motivated enough men to enlist voluntarily that all branches of service were able to fill their quotas, often without conscripts. Adlai Stevenson, Barry Goldwater), no one in a policy position advocated discontinuing conscription. The death of conscription changed the calculus of American military engagement by dictating how conflicts would be fought and who would do that fighting.īetween 19, the draft was a fact of life for American men. The end of the Cold War draft in the United States, therefore, is one of the Vietnam War’s most important domestic legacies. In such a context, it is hard to remember that between 19, when a different handful of politicians and pundits called for the end of the draft, their calls were equally met with derision. Memories of the Vietnam-era draft left such scars on the collective American psyche that when a handful of politicians and pundits advocated its reinstatement as a way to staff the War on Terror, their calls were almost universally met with derision. Dr Amy Rutenberg (Dept of History, Iowa State University)ĭr Rutenberg is the author of Rough Draft: Cold War Military Manpower Policy and the Origins of the Vietnam-Era Draft Resistance, (Cornell University Press, 2019). Readers are invited to make their own contributions in the comments section.ġ. ![]()
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