If everyone in a given society attempted to be a solider all at once, that society would quickly find itself without bullets, sans shoes, lacking food. A soldier consumes a great deal of resources—and is useful in keeping those resources productive—but does not add to a society’s productivity**…
Let’s take it one step further. Let us acknowledge that a smart soldier is significantly more effective than a dumb one. I read a study recently (can’t seem to find it, damnit) which showed that an artillery piece crewed by soldiers with high IQs was able to fire more accurately and something like 2-4X faster than one crewed by soldiers with lower IQs…
My question then is: (and I grant that I’ve not given all the data needed to answer it): how large a percent of its population can a society send into its military before that society starts to have a significant drag on it’s economy? I’d think that you could send only about .5%-1% of the entire population. Anyone have thoughts?
*It’s tough to have an economy when your nation has just been taken over!
** let’s gloss over arguments about military R&D. They’re important, but not wholly relevant to my point.
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Define “significant drain”.
With no conscription, and with no strong social pressure to volunteer, % of GDP on military spending is probably the best measure (since you have to pay more to get the best people, and since this way you also capture civilian defense contractors, etc).
The US currently spends 3-4% of GDP on the military:
(source)
Which is a bit above average by world standards:
(color-coded map)
I think it depends on the economy in question, and in how the army operates.
The Roman Republic was able to field an enormous army, percentage wise, because its soldiers were also farmers and generally didn’t fight during the season that they needed to be farming in.
I admit that it’s a tough thing to measure. When you start taking people out of the productivity pool, you make the pie expand less rapidly. it’s that less-rapid expansion that I’m trying to capture.
It also doesn’t take into account the things that the intelligent soldiers might do when given access to military tech that might be useful outside of military life. Take medicine, for example: while I’m pretty sure that the high-quality local anasthetic that they’ve been trying out on the battlefields was developed outside of the military, its application in the prevention of ghost pain in amputated limbs (by stopping the nerve pain before the signal is removed entirely and thus unable to reverse) might not have been discovered under civilian circumstances.
Or take the example of a medical military guy who takes the lessons he learned from combat to develop a highly portable hospital such as the one designed by a guy who used it post-Katrina. Maybe such a person would come up with different things out of the military; maybe they’d come up with nothing at all.
Or even take aerospace engineering. We’ve learned a lot about flight and microgravity flight from the experience of military vessels both in the building and in combat conditions. Maybe the pilot would have been an engineer outside of the military, but the engineers can do nothing if the pilots are dumb.
In alternate universes, Hitler’s a mediocre painter, Einstein’s a janitor, and Patton is a CEO. In other words, it’s impossible to tell what someone would have done, given a different path, so it’s not easy to measure the effects.
It’s kind of a weird question. Every person drafted out of the regular economy and put into military service means that the economy represents a loss of utility exactly equal to what you would have had to pay them to get them to join the military. But if you pay them, then the loss is not of their utility, but of the cost of the taxation to pay for it as well as the difference between whatever that tax money would have been spent on and what uses the soldier is put to.
So your question depends a lot on what the soldiers are doing and how worth it is to taxpayers.
If what you are asking is “how many people can we pull out of productive capacities in the non-military part of the economy before there are significant economic problems” then the question is even more weird, because that’s such an extremely esoteric question. I guess the argument would depend on whether you pull people out that are irreplaceable. But still, it’s a very odd question.
What would you consider to be a “drag” per se?
Yeah, I admit the question of phrased oddly. I guess what I want to get at is “how many people can be pulled out of a mature civilian economy before that economy will start to slow”. “slow” in this sense meaning that the GDP grows at (say) 1% under it’s hypothetical potential…
B. Durbin, you’ve overlooked another factor, one I think is hugely important (which is not to say that I find your points unimportant by any means). When you take that soldier “out of the economy”, what you put back at the end of his or her term is a much more disciplined, productive, and mature worker — far moreso than most individuals will become on their own. And if that soldier advances to have some sort of command responsibilities, you get someone with hard management expertise that they might never get in the civilian sector.
It’s entirely possible that all these factors lead to a net gain for the economy.
But what I think is far more likely is that the question is all but unanswerable, because the answer you get out will depend too much on the preconceptions you bring in.
South Korea does it.
Andrew, I hope you new job in a San Francisco book store will give you enough time to study the vast, well-organized and highly mobile armies of Genghiz Khan and his immediate successors.
It gets better. Back in the 4th century BCE, the Sarmatians used women as well as men as horse-mounted light and heavy cavalry.
(The Sarmatian cavalry, or at least the men among them, were later incorporated into the roman imperial forces as federated cavalry. The story — backed up by some real history — shows that a unit of them were stationed at the far western end of the roman world, in Britannia, from the reign of Marcus Aurelius until the empire broke up.
—
Robert, you are indeed correct about the small roman armied of the centuries of the republic. But after the decisive battle of Zama that broke the back of Carthage in 201 BCE, the roman republic began having need for permanent larger-scale forces as they conquered lands outside Italy all around the mediterranean basin. And even at their level of warfare, it became a more specialized business required specialized professional troops. Even so, the roman citizen-soldier concept took a long time to die away, which was exactly why the roman empire of the 2nd century CE hired federated cavalry armies from among peoples such as the Sarmatians, as described above.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
Some researchers — including not a few outside of movieland — think a number of these sarmatian romanized cavalry were none other than king Arthur’s horsemen. In short, his knights.
It’s not a logical question. You haven’t taken them out of the economy. You’ve moved the ordinary citizen from the private sector to the military sector. They’ve, essentially, switched jobs, not become unemployed.
Wars benefit economies. Consumption/replacement = economic increase. It doesn’t matter what you are consuming/replacing as long as it is sustainable*. The replacement matériel used in war boosts economies, as long as the government is buying from private contractors and has the infrastructure to support it (ie, buying it, not stealing it).
*Sustainability (access to a constant supply of resources) is probably the most important factor, not the number of boots on the ground.
Unless the ratio has changed, the figure used to be quoted as 7:1. For every soldier in uniform (supplied and equipped) 7 jobs are created. That’s 7 people who are paying taxes (and subsidizing the war effort with the taxes they pay).
If you don’t have the 7 still in civvies, then you’d have a problem with supply chain (and you can’t sustain a war without supply chain), but I would imagine that you could sustain a 6:1 ratio for a short (5 to 10 years) period, without seeing a downside. So I would guess that 5% to 10% of the population could be in active duty status without anything but a positive on the economy.
The problem occurs when the war effort ends and you have to retool factories and lay off workers, because of the decrease in consumption in that particular sector. Fortunately, most countries continue to replenish their war matériel for years after a war (and rebuilding becomes the largest sector for a time), which does give the economy a time to adjust.
Kim:
Bingo! that’t the number I was looking for. An economy can have roughly (assuming your number is correct) 12.5% it’s population in uniform– assuming that the economy starts becoming totally dedicated to war…
Andrew,
Just to clarify…
I’m not Kim. Kim is the Mister of the family. I’m “The Mrs.”
(psst: That’s Mrs. duToit, not Mr. Kim is the Mr.)
I dunno, Andrew. I would consider that 12.5% figure an extreme upper limit. Mrs. doToit said (emphasis added):
And as you said:
I would say that, unless it’s a last-ditch total war, the economy “totally dedicated to war” would be highly unlikely. And your question is:
I would have to say that we would see that a lost sooner than the total war scenario. So while I don’t know what your answer is, I think it has to be significantly less than 12.5%.
The question is the percentage of the productive population. Retirees may, in case of total war, become somewhat productive. Slackers and losers and kids are not productive.
So this means we need to look at the demographics.
Communist China is famously reported to have not only a large number of young people, but about 25 million more young men than young women. Young men without women or the prospect of having a female partner, are not particularly productive, except in one field.
China could, presumably expend a quarter of these guys and the only result would be a reduction in social unrest.
In France, on the other hand, a large plurality of the men of fighting age are Muslim.
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