These observations are seriously flawed. There may be no
historical precedent for the professionalism and success, within
their missions, of the all-volunteer U.S. forces since their
creation. The most important problems have arisen from policies
of stop-loss (effectively an unofficial selective draft) and the
abuse of reservists, who did not expect to spend prolonged
periods in combat. These problems are partly attributable to the
size and scale of the armed forces, which were dictated by the
economics of a volunteer force. Such criticism assumes that with
a draft we could have maintained a much larger force, but that
is not the case. The economics of training and equipping a much
larger military would have been as challenging, compounded by
the famous problems of morale and efficiency with conscripted
soldiers — lessons we supposedly learned in Vietnam. The truth
is that missions must correspond to capabilities, not that we
can redesign capabilities for ever-expanding missions. Another
flawed rationale in c