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On the Draft
In response to this editorial: Go ahead, read it. It's short, I'll wait here. We don't need a draft. The current US military is not broken. Some small number of its people are broken (see SSG Bales, others), but the military, its systems, and overall, its personnel are not broken. Tired, sure (see my previous post), but we do not need to start pulling unsuspecting young men (and women, but we'll get to that later) out of their homes and into our various wars. I will refer throughout the following two posts largely to the US Army, but much of what I speak of will refer to the entire US Military. The Army's strength is in its values. Many of those values are held by a large section of America, but the Army is better for having people self-select into it. For having people who enter the Army understanding and sharing those values. Most importantly, people who want to be in the Army. A professional, competent engaged military is not built by compelling people at random into it, training them a minimum amount (because you only have them for a limited time), and sending them, unwilling, into combat. When I was a Platoon leader, I had any number of soldiers who were looking forward to getting out. Who had not anticipated getting extended into a 15-month deployment. But I never had to worry that any of them were there at (what amounts to) gunpoint. We all chose to get into our predicament, and that choice, that fellowship helped us get through and accomplish what we had to do. The last remaining draftee retired from the Army last year in 2011 after 39 years of service. He was the senior enlisted advisor for an Army Corps - that's a big damn deal. He proves that there is no inherent corelation between draftees and bad Soldiers. He was forced into the Army, but he stayed in and rose to his position by choice - and it is that choice that makes the Army stronger. The following sentence from the editorial,"Sergeant Bales would not have served more than two tours in Iraq and certainly would not have been sent to Afghanistan." is patently false. SSG Bales was still in the Army because he made the decision, likely two or three times, to stay in it. Sure, that decision was likely affected by economics, as well personal choice and the inputs of his family, but it was a decision he was allowed to make, knowing the consequences and benefits. Of course, nothing in this post is meant to argue against the utility, and potential necessity of a draft. Were the Chinese to take Alaska and start marching south across the Yukon, we would need to, and should, reenstate a draft. But the draft should only be used when needed - when the man-power needs of the military cannot be met another way. Generally, against an existential threat, or at least in a situation that warrents it. We didn't need (nor can we afford) a standing Army of 1 million to fight the wars in Afghanistan and (previously) Iraq. We increased the size of the Army (slightly) by recruiting to meet our needs. And we met them. A couple of the editorialists argue that we ought to use the draft to make sure that the entire US population feel the effects of our wars, and that this would make our leaders think twice before they engaged in Iraq II-like vanity invasions. They're wrong. We don't need forcing functions to make wars hurt more. We have a strong professional military. We need compentent civilian leadership that tries to avoid unnecessary wars. The second issue I'll address, in my next post, is only tangentially related to the editorial. Why don't women have to register with Selective Service when they turn 18?
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2 Comments:
"Sergeant Bales would not have served more than two tours in Iraq and certainly would not have been sent to Afghanistan." is patently false.
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We increased the size of the Army (slightly) by recruiting to meet our needs. And we met them.
I must respectfully disagree with both of these statements. Yes, the military has achieved it's objectives quite impressively without significantly scaling up to confront those problems. That said, the fact that people like SSG Bales were driven from sanity, the fact that we have now (I believe) lost more of our armed men & women to their own hands than to enemy fire means that while we (or, to give credit where it's due, you) have met our Military needs, we (and I as a citizen of this nation take some blame here) have not been meeting our personnel needs.
It appears to me that there's a shortage of chaplains & counselors to keep our people sane, and an insufficiency of time at home to reinforce their sanity after the insanity of a war zone.
So yes, military objectives have been achieved, and no, the draft is not a good way to solve the problems such as that which sent SSG Bales and so many other good people into bad psychological places, those problems still exist, and more personnel to distribute the load over is one, valid way to help with them.
tl;dr: draft bad, but while it would present some problems, it could also mitigate those that already exist on the volunteer side. Problems that could be solved better by increased membership and/or decreased demands on our military.
I met a man who served in the Korean War and then did 5 deployments to Vietnam. He volunteered for all the Vietnam deployments so to say that SSG Bales would not have served more than 2 tours is false. Had he volunteered he would have done as many as he wanted to.
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