Junto Boys

DO WE NEED A DRAFT?

Charlie Rangel wrote a bill and couldn't even bring himself to support it. MTV is trying to scare youngsters about the possibility. John Kerry's campaign has been trying to use draft scares get into office. I remember the immature me in college during the first Gulf War somewhat worried that I would get called up for duty. Having people shoot at you is no fun thought, but my libertarian personality was just as worried to have some Louis Gossett Sergeant yelling at me during training like in the Richard Gere movie. Sure Gere became the better person as a result of the Gossett ass-kicking, but I would have rather been the sleeping-to-noon guy, a job I was excelling at. I was living in soft America and wasn't ready to leave it.

They didn’t need me it turned out and they don’t need today’s soft Americans either. The military is staffed with professionals who choose to make it a career, career training or a means to a free college education. This has been used to claim that poor people are forced to join the military to get the benefits that other Americans get from their parents. Why can’t it be a positive that poorer people have a way to do it for themselves? My dad was drafted into the Army and he and my mother got nothing out of it but two years of living at the poverty level. Reagan’s pay raises in the 1980s made the military a middle class career or at least a decent internship.

I remember a particular liberal girl in college complaining that we spend too much on defense and it was easy with headlines of $500 toilet seats, but the largest single expenditure in the military is for salaries. She’d rather have seen the money spent to cure age-old societal ills. By cutting defense you either cut the pay of people serving to give money to people who don’t serve, or you decrease the number of people. We chose the latter in the 1990s and it has resulted in a current war of reservists and guardsmen. I did a story on a manager at work that spent 10 months in Kuwait during the current war. He’s been in the reserves for 18 years having been deployed for the first Gulf War, Bosnia before this one. He’s got four kids and good job and was hoping to transfer to an outfit in Georgia where he could spend the rest of his service training others. Instead, he was called back to duty in September. He’s a supplies guy and hasn’t been put into the line of fire, but he does get tired of being called up so many times. But he also told me that his military service made him grow up and he’s become a better man for it, much like Gere in the movie.

While a draft would have made me grow up quicker and would probably do the same to today’s kids, it’s inefficient. The Army spent who knows how many thousands sending Dad to basic and MP training and would have spent even more had he took their offer to go to Officer Candidate School. Despite the expensive training, the Army only got two years service out of Dad before he was gone. After two years of living near poverty in a foreign country there was very little reason for him to consider re-enlisting. So the government first had to force him at the point of a gun to join and then they lost him about the time he was becoming most valuable.

It’s Democrats that want a draft or the fear of one. The fear might be enough to put John Kerry in the White House, but an actual draft helps them even more. The suspension of college deferments during the Vietnam draft led to the anti-war movement. When Nixon ended the draft in the early 1970s the anti-war rallies dwindled to a few socialists and hippies and the occasional political opportunist like John Kerry. A new draft would make it impossible to fight any kind of offensive war because no President could take such a political chance. Look at how easy it would have been for Bush to coast to re-election this time by ignoring Iraq and patting himself on the back for our actions in Afghanistan. Taking the offensive has given him a political fight. Had his actions resulted in a draft, he wouldn’t stand a chance in this race.

A new draft would all but ensure that future wars will be fought strictly on the defensive. No Republican neo-con would want that. They’d rather have the best force that money can buy. The more we spend on the military the less likely we’ll ever have a draft which would suit most people just fine. The Democrats are the only ones who benefit from the draft and the only ones likely to impose one in the future. They’d love to have their hands tied because of negative public opinion associated with sending random 18 year olds into battle.