Why There Won't Be a Draft
The US government has required men, off and on, to register for selective service ever since it was first established in 1863. And men have been drafted into military service for all the wars we've been involved in before and since. During the Vietnam war conscription rose from 100,000 in 1964 to 400,000 in 1966.
But even before Vietnam, the draft was unpopular, as it tended to fall disproportionately on poor and working-class youths. The US stopped drafting people at the end of the Vietnam war in 1973, and President Ford suspended draft registration in 1975. But President Carter resumed registration in1980 as tensions mounted when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. Reagan extended registration and even prosecuted some half a million who refused to register.
One of the side benefits (if you want to call it that) of the draft during the Vietnam war was that it accelerated its conclusion. A common characteristic of a draftee was that he did not volunteer; he was compelled into service. As a result, discontent in the ranks grew alarmingly. Unhappy soldiers complained about the things they witnessed, and refused to obey orders they disagreed with.
Today, there are about 1.4 million people on active military duty and another 865,000 in the National Guard and Reserves. And they are all volunteers. An all-volunteer military is essentially a closed system, and the Bush administration wants to keep it that way.
The incriminating photographs of abuse at Abu Ghraib were not taken by malcontents trying to stir up trouble. They were mostly taken by the participants for their own entertainment. The official reaction was to prohibit the troops from having cameras.
Two weeks ago an embedded NBC news camera taped a Marine apparently murdering an unarmed injured insurgent. This week Republican lawmakers are urging the President to eliminate the embedded journalist program.
The less we know or see about the conduct of the war, the less we'll complain.
So the preferred method of retaining personnel to fill out the military's ranks is through recruitment. One part of Bush's "No Child Left Behind" policy is a rule that if a high school wants to get federal funds, it has to give recruiters access to the campus, and to its enrollment lists. Recruiters are offering big inducements to enlist, especially enticing to young people from poor and minority areas.
I went to a talk last week in which a young man spoke about his experience with recruitment. Coming from a relatively poor background, he responded to a recruiter's bait - an offer of some $40,000 in cash in exchange for joining an elite corps of Amercia's few, the proud - the Marines. He was attracted to the spirit, the regimented order and seeming intelligence of the Marine Corps, and he signed up. After going through boot camp he became completely disillusioned. Far from being well-organized, he said it seemd to be run and populated by people who "didn't know their asses from their elbows."
In desperation, he contacted a lawyer, who directed him to an anti-war advocate, who helped him void his contract. During the process, he was visited at home, unannounced, one day by the sergeant who had recruited him, accompanied by the brother of a local man who recently lost his life in Iraq. They came over to guilt-trip him. The recruiter told him that his quitting the military has gotten him, the recruiter, in trouble with his superiors, and cost him a considerable amount of money. The brother told him how his refusal to serve dishonored his brother and his country.
Fortunately for the young man, he was counseled to expect this tactic, and simply replied, "No, I'm not going."
One of the reasons the war in Iraq is so expensive is the cost of an all-volunteer military. And to continue to grow its ranks, the cost is likely to go up.
3:37:47 PM 
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