Recruiting effective soldiers: Comparing Danish conscripts and volunteers deployed to peace-keeping and peace-enforcing missions

Abstract

Several countries have changed between conscription and volunteer militaries, yet very little is known about the outcomes of conscripts compared with volunteers. Denmark is one of the few countries that recruits conscripts and volunteers for military service and assigns conscripts through a draft lottery—a uniquely informative combination. While deployment to the missions we study was voluntary, we use the initial assignment mechanism to estimate the relationships between recruitment methods and a variety of military and post-military deployment outcomes. We find that conscription improves the deployed intelligence pool compared to a volunteer force. However, the intelligence of deployed conscripts varies more over the business cycle than that of volunteers. Denmark’s mixed recruitment method is able to recruit effective soldiers as we find no other significant associations between recruitment method and outcomes while deployed.