Military Manpower

Abstract

Producing and supplying national security are labor intensive and require different types of manpower: military manpower; civilians, whether performing jobs within the armed forces or in other branches of the defense establishment, and employees in defense industries and elsewhere in the civilian economy, who produce goods and services that defense requires. The military manpower, namely officers and soldiers in uniform, divides into active duty personnel, or the regular forces, and reserve forces. In many countries the regular forces further divide between conscript soldiers drafted by law for a given period of compulsory service, and volunteers recruited in the labor market for relatively longer periods. The different types of manpower serve as substitutes for one another to some extent, and economic analysis may help choose the optimal mix, i.e. the one that produces the desired level of security at the lowest costs. With this end in view, defense economics analyzes theoretical and empirical questions of manpower demands, supply and employment in producing national security.