As Putin seeks a larger army, some see echoes of US in Vietnam

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s recent announcement that Moscow must increase the size of its military was greeted as good news – not by his supporters, but rather by those who are rooting for Ukraine. 

It’s a sign, they say, that Mr. Putin’s war isn’t going well for him. 

This point was driven home by the development this summer that officials from the Wagner Group – the Russian government’s defense contractor of choice – were offering prisoners parole in exchange for fighting on the front lines.

“It’s a sign of desperation,” says retired Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, former commander of the U.S. Army in Europe. “These are not the kind of people who will show up and contribute to the fighting capability of any Russian unit.”

This is not bad news from the perspective of Ukrainian forces, though the use of prisoners also raises the risk of more Russian war crimes, analysts add.

Yet as the war grinds on, it’s clear that Mr. Putin is anxious to avoid bringing the protracted conflict to the attention of the greater Russian public, which has, up to this point, largely been able to continue life as usual. The question is whether he will be able to carry on with this domestic shielding strategy moving forward.

A draft would mean “pulling people from Moscow and St. Petersburg – and they don’t want to have funerals there,” Mr. Hodges says. “Politically, it would be extremely difficult for even the Kremlin to explain all that.”

Vietnam War and classism, racism 

America learned from its own experience that drafts tend to cause political problems – and that conscripts generally don’t make the best soldiers. 

During the Vietnam War, soldiers pressed into service “brought in attitudes and behaviors that were contrary to good order and discipline,” including drug use and insubordination, says Brandon Archuleta, an Army strategist and an adjunct senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security.

That said, these were behaviors often linked to outrage in the face of unfairness in the draft system, including classism and racism, analysts note. 

Indeed, such charges helped serve as catalysts for the anti-war movement. While 12% of the U.S. Army was Black, for example, soldiers of color represented 24% of casualties. 

It was an injustice Martin Luther King Jr. emphasized in meetings with President Lyndon Johnson. “It was the reason [Dr. King] was so concerned about the war,” says Ron Milam, an associate professor of history at Texas Tech University, who served in the Vietnam War.

“He said, ‘What the [heck]? Why are we dying at double the rate?’”

The closest America came to opening up service to prisoners was when young men who burned their draft cards – or predominantly Black men who had committed minor crimes – were given the chance to ship out to Vietnam to avoid jail.

After draft lotteries were put in place in 1969 in an effort to address unfairness in the system, privileged conscripts outraged at their own predicaments also started asking pointed questions about why America was at war in the first place.

Conscription tends to inspire myriad such questions, analysts note, unless the nation sees itself as facing an existential threat, as with the United States in World War II.

A number of zealous armchair Russian commentators are now pushing Mr. Putin to create a draft, arguing that Russia is indeed facing just such a threat in Ukraine – an argument in keeping with the official Kremlin line. 

Mr. Putin, however, is well aware of the political turmoil conscriptions tend to cause. 

Though votes are less a concern for Mr. Putin as a means of retaining power, it is likely not lost on him that “conscripts usually vote against those who conscripted them,” Professor Milam notes.

At the same time, military leaders don’t like drafts either, and in the wake of Vietnam, the top echelons of Pentagon leadership fought to put in place an all-volunteer force, which ultimately happened in 1973.

By the Reagan-era defense buildup, “You see morale, good order, and jumps in the right direction in the Army,” Dr. Archuleta says. 

In an all-volunteer force, there may be “all kinds of reasons for joining – for money, you need a job,” Professor Milam adds. “But at least you raised your hand of your own volition. In a conscript Army, you don’t want to do it – but your country is making you.” 

OK with war, but not wanting to fight

Though figures show that Russian support for war remains high – hovering at around 76% of respondents in favor, according to the Russian independent polling organization Levada – that doesn’t mean that Russians actually want to fight in it.  

When Ukrainian forces struck an air base deep inside enemy lines in Crimea last month, it sent thousands of seemingly surprised Russian tourists in swimsuits rushing from their beach cabanas to their cars, filling jammed roads along the coast.

“They hauled [themselves] out of there while Russian soldiers were dying a few miles away,” Mr. Hodges says. “They weren’t going to the local recruiting office saying, ‘Hey, I want to get into the fight.’”

Though Russia requires all men between ages 18 and 27 to serve one year in the military, the government has promised that these recruits would not be sent to the “special military operation” in Ukraine – though it acknowledged that did indeed happen “by mistake” earlier in the war. 

Still, many educated and connected citizens – not to mention sons of oligarchs – in the cosmopolitan centers manage to get out of this mandatory military service, claiming health exemptions or student deferments. 

A draft that impacts the big cities could prove “terribly embarrassing when the whole world sees that so many people wouldn’t show up” in the face of mass conscription, says Mr. Hodges. 

It would be discomfiting, too, he adds, to establish a draft for a campaign the Kremlin insists is not a war at all. 

At the same time, the Russian military will be hard-pressed to grow its ranks by 137,000, as Mr. Putin says the country intends to do.

While government officials claim to have 900,000 troops, “they don’t have what we call ‘faces in places,’” Mr. Hodges adds, estimating that the Russian military is currently at 60% to 70% of its official capacity. 

“They’ll never get there – they can’t even fill their units now,” Mr. Hodges says. 

Conscription would be a further admission of failure for Mr. Putin.

“The challenge politically that the Russians have is signaling to the Russian populace that the war is going well and as planned – while trying to replenish their depleted forces on the front,” Dr. Archuleta says. “You can’t call up conscripts without leveling with your populace that the war isn’t going well.”

This, analysts say, is what Mr. Putin is trying to avoid at all costs.