Recruitment (from Old Fr.

: recrute) originally meant reinforcement, but came to mean any enlistment of

personnel for military purposes. This is one of the few immutable factors in warfare. To initiate any type
of large-scale conflict, be it on the basis of ideology, religion, nationality, or even financial gain, a leader
must first muster a force sufficient to execute his plans. When an armed force is divided according to
how its personnel was recruited, we may expect to find career soldiers, volunteers, and conscripts, while
the proportions of each may be expected to vary greatly depending upon the purposes, nature, and
scale of a war.

The success of any campaign to induce volunteers or force conscripts into an army will be decided, to a
large extent, by circumstances. The recruitment of professional soldiers is less variable. The factors
involved have changed very little since the medieval mercenaries, and centre on pay. Yet this alone has
rarely been enough, other than to attract those seeking to escape destitution. Beyond this, the recruit
may hope to develop a career within the armed forces, or he may expect to enjoy the lifestyle provided.
It is not uncommon to read of young men joining the army or navy in the hope of seeing the world. The
case for those receiving a commission has generally been a little different. Career development is a
common goal for professional officers, and this has often been closely linked to social standing. The
practice of purchasing commissions, which was widespread in the 18th and early 19th centuries, was
very much a reflection of this link.

The distinction between career soldiers and volunteers is not always clear. After all, most professionals
choose their career; they act under their own volition. Moreover, in some cases, soldiers have
volunteered on the understanding that they will share in whatever spoils are won before returning to
civilian life. The Vikings are perhaps the best example of this volunteer mercenary. More recently
volunteers have joined the colours for more altruistic reasons than plunder and booty, although
‘proffing’ remains an attraction. This kind of recruitment is often at its height in the first months of a
war, particularly if men feel their nation, ideology, or community is threatened. Such motivations are,
nevertheless, further exploited in most cases. Before more technologically oriented media became
available, those attempting to recruit soldiers might make inspiring, patriotic speeches in a town square.
In the medieval period the church was sometimes used as a means both to transmit information on
political developments and to direct the response of the population to those developments. The
Crusades are the most obvious example of this, but the link between Church and State was often
sufficiently close that the Church became involved in national wars.

As technology has become more advanced, more avenues of recruitment have opened up. In the 20th
century newspapers, radio, television, and posters have all served to aid recruitment. Perhaps the most
famous single image in this regard is the poster featuring the face and pointing finger of Kitchener,
which invited British civilians to enlist in 1915-16, with the words ‘Your country needs you.’ News
coverage supplemented such propaganda with details of alleged atrocities and aggression. Posters and
newspapers have effectively advertised modern wars in the opening months of a conflict, and induced
thousands to enlist. Such recruitment plays upon existing motivations in the minds of recruits, primarily,
nationalism, patriotism, and certain ideologies. During the Cold War these factors blended together in
support of recruitment to the armed forces of both sides.
Whatever the motivation that brings a volunteer into the ranks, the military authorities must be
prepared to deal with the practicalities of recruitment. The authorities are expected not only to accept
those who have agreed to fight, but also to provide uniforms, equipment, and training facilities. Since
these cannot be created immediately, the actual recruitment process commonly stretches over several
weeks, the volunteer being ordered to report at a certain place and time when facilities will be available
to begin the process of training him as a soldier. From the point of view of the authorities, mobilization
involves very much more than simply inviting men to join up, but even the recruitment side of it involves
a great deal of logistical work to provide the volunteers with uniforms and equipment, to feed them,
and to move them to training camps.

In prolonged wars, such as the world wars or Vietnam, the early willingness to volunteer eventually dries
up or, a particular problem during the US wars of the 19th century, they fulfil their term of enlistment
and wish to return home. This leaves any armed force with a major shortage in personnel, particularly if
the war expands. It is at this point that even those governments who have shunned it in peacetime
resort to the third method of recruitment, conscription.

Conscription, defined as the forced recruitment of men into the military, has long been established as a
means of supplying troops. The Roman army included large numbers of auxiliares, men drawn from
conquered territories. In order to promote loyalty among such troops, the promise of promotion and
possibly even Roman citizenship was provided as an incentive, thus blurring the distinction between
conscription and professional soldiering. Such blurring may be found in other periods in history. For
example, feudal recruitment depended upon the relationship between suzerain and vassal. Thus a
monarch might ask his leading nobles, who held land from the Crown in return for providing military
service, to furnish him with troops; these noblemen would then require knights, who held land from
them, to provide military service, usually for a specified period. At the local level landowners might
effectively coerce their tenants to join them in arms. The element of outright coercion was often
intermingled with ties of loyalty and obligation and, increasingly, reinforced by the prospect of pay and
plunder. Even in 17th-century England these old bonds still proved enormously strong. In 1642 the
Royalist Sir Bevil Grenvile raised a fine regiment of foot (whose men wore the Grenvile blue and silver
and fought beneath colours emblazoned with the family's griffin badge) from his hardy Cornish tenantry.
He made it clear, however, that any tenant who chose not to follow the griffin would have no roof over
his head.

Conscription became more formalized in modern armies. Frederick ‘the Great’ conscripted a proportion
of the Prussian male population (and made wide use of mercenaries) in order to offset the numerical
advantages held by his enemies and diminish the demographic cost of the war. The French
Revolutionary government, and later Napoleon, conscripted vast numbers of unwilling troops when
volunteers became scarce. Indeed, the levée en masse introduced by the French Revolutionary
government in August 1793 established the practice of large-scale conscription which set the stage for
the large scale of warfare in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Conscription appeared again during the American civil war. Both sides conscripted a significant
proportion of their armies despite the antipathy for conscription among both soldiers and civilians. In
the South, where manpower problems were acute, the government was forced to conscript men to war-
related industries as well as to the army, and by the latter stages of the conflict the Confederacy was
moving towards some form of national mobilization. Conscripts were often reluctant soldiers, of course,
and desertion rates climbed following the introduction of conscription in both North and South, just as it
had done in France. The North was able to introduce conscription while exempting those involved in
vital economic activities (or with the money to hire a substitute), but for the South, even with slaves to
perform much of the agricultural work, there was a trade-off involved that was never satisfactorily
resolved. The highly divisive issue of exempt status in wars involving conscription continues to dog the
heels of today's US politicians, many of whom found some way of not being sent to Vietnam.

In the generation before 1914 large, conscript armies had replaced smaller, professional forces in most
of Europe. Since 1870 France, Russia, Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy had collectively doubled the
strength of their forces through short-term, mandatory military service for adult males. We can see the
emergence of a symbiosis between war planning and mass conscription in the development of the
Schlieffen plan, both made conceivable by greater numbers and at the same time demanding more.
Schlieffen's fulcrum was that the German armies ‘would have to secure a quick victory and would
therefore have to attack. Otherwise the absence of so many able-bodied men from productive
occupation … would cause economic collapse’. Events proved him wrong, but by then the damage
arising from this false postulate was done.

Of the major European powers, only Britain did not maintain a large conscript army in the years leading
up to WW I—primarily because the British did not expect to become involved in a continental war and
were prepared for colonial conflicts instead. Yet the expansion of the war in its first two years, and the
horrific casualties taken by both the British Expeditionary Force and the French army in 1914-15,
prompted Britain to introduce conscription in 1916. The last two years of the war then saw manpower
being stretched between domestic and military demands in all of the major European nations. The
difficulty of balancing manpower resources gave a tremendous fillip to those who believed in central
planning, which indeed proved necessary for full mobilization during the world wars. Men were
subtracted or added to industry, agriculture, or the armed forces on the basis of skills and experience.
Oddly, even at the very end it cannot be said that Nazi Germany was fully mobilized: for example, the
Nazis failed to mobilize women to anything like the extent that the Allies did, and in terms of quality
control or outright sabotage their use of slave labour may well have substantially diminished overall
productivity.

What is likely to remain as the clearest example of how mass recruitment—for all purposes—can enable
a smaller nation to defeat one that, on paper, should crush it flat, was the Vietnam war. The North
Vietnamese, having already defeated the French, developed into a true nation in arms, in which there
was no line between volunteer and conscript because even small children had war work to do. By
contrast the US ‘draft’, riddled with classist and political exemptions, divided the nation, while by
refusing to declare, still less mobilize, for war, Pres Johnson unleashed major inflation. The contrast
between the morale of the even more corruptly conscripted South Vietnamese army and the all-
volunteer Vietcong guerrillas was stark enough, but when the former came up against the North
Vietnamese army without overwhelming US air support, the results were predictably humiliating. That
the dedicated and ruthless Marxists who won the war subsequently proved unable to deliver prosperity
to their long-suffering people by using the same methods is another matter. For the singular purpose of
waging total war, their doctrine was the stronger.