Russian president Vladimir Putin has yet to call for universal conscription, although he recently announced mobilisation of 300,000 reservists. The reason why the Kremlin has not introduced a wider policy may lie in the history of conscription and its impact on public support for war.
In recent research, my colleague Doug Atkinson and I analysed a dataset of everyone serving in the US army during the second world war. Although there are a number of obvious differences between the US of the 1940s and present-day Russia, both countries used selective – rather than universal – conscription to staff their military.
The way the US conscripted its military was deliberately hard to understand. It also helped shield certain voters who were crucial to electoral success of the Democratic Party at the next election.
In December 1941, the US faced Germany and Japan with their massive modern military forces. It had to quickly convert its industrial output to a wartime footing, modernise its own military and conduct offensive operations on four continents. Victory would require a military staffed by millions of soldiers, engineers, technicians and administrators, backed up by the full agricultural, industrial and intellectual power of the civilian workforce.
