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The article presents the authors' reply to the criticism of their paper "Notes on the Color of the Volunteer Army," published in the December 1969 issue of the journal "Social Science Quarterly." In their paper they argued that a predominantly black army would probably not result from the shift to an all volunteer military system (AVMS). They also argued that the shift to the AVMS might actually have detrimental effects on the employment prospects of African Americans and other disadvantaged groups. The criticism of the demand side of their analysis is based on an implausible assumption that if conscription is abolished, it seems likely that the price of human capital will rise relative to the price of nonhuman capital and labor. What is dubious is the additional implicit assumption that the wages of human capital will also rise relative to the wages of unskilled labor. In fact the opposite assumption seems far more plausible. If one takes the remuneration of officers as indicative of the salaries paid to educated or skilled military employees, and the salaries paid to low ranking enlisted men as indicative of pay scales for unskilled military labor, it can be argued that the salaries of officers currently approximate the free market more closely than the wages of low ranking enlisted personnel.

The article presents comments on the paper "Notes on the Color of the Volunteer Army," published in the December 1969 issue of the journal "Social Science Quarterly," written by William Freithaler Ford and Robert Tollison. Ford and Tollison concluded that the assertion that an "all black" army will emerge from the abolition of the draft is implausible. The purpose of this comment is to show that, if their analysis is carried far enough, it implies that a "blacker" army, far from being an unlikely outcome, is to be expected as one consequence of substituting the free market for conscription. On the demand side, Ford and Tollison argue that abolition of the draft will raise the cost of "labor" to the armed forces and induce substitution of capital for labor. Increased utilization of capital will increase the military's demand for skilled labor relative to that for unskilled labor, and, since whites make up relatively more of the more skilled portions of the labor force, increase the relative demand for whites. On the supply side, the writers argue that a greater proportion of draft-age Whites are currently volunteering than African Americans.