Rumors US plans to reinstate the draft are unfounded

According to the New York Times the rumours that US residents will be drafted into the armed forces again are unfounded. Although the government is talking about a "surge" in forces and a "permanent" increase in the size of the Army, it won't be accomplished by impressing people into service against their will.

The NY Times article

Flurry of Calls about Draft, and a Day of Denials

Eric Lichtblau

Dec 23,2006

states

What prompted all this was a Hearst wire service article noting that the Selective Service was making plans for a “mock” draft exercise that would use computerized models to determine how, if necessary, the government would get some 100,000 young adults to report to their local draft boards.

The mock computer exercise, last carried out in 1998, is strictly routine, Selective Service officials said...

And goes on,

With President Bush saying that he wants to increase the size of the Army and the Marine Corps, the military strained near the breaking point and the secretary of veterans affairs suggesting publicly this week that a reconstituted draft could “benefit” the country, even the notion of a mock exercise seemed to strike a nerve.

The phrasing "get young adults to report" instead of "get young men to report" in the announcement reflects the fact that, unlike the Vietnam draft, a new draft would tend to be "equal opportunity" - at least for heterosexuals.

It would present some problems if declared homosexuality was accepted as a legitimate reason for a deferment, or if the draft pool was limited to Christians.

Also, "young adults" goes well beyond 18 year olds, because, with a new very high-tech military, a college degree is almost a requirement for many positions.

Still, it's not clear this addresses the right problem. The military did its job extraordinarily well in toppling Saddam Hussein and declaring military victory in a few short weeks. They won!

At that point this became a non-military problem of nation building and unification, which is what has been a disaster.

So, shouldn't we be talking about increasing the size and skill level of the peacefare force, not the warfare force?

How about the government paying for a new course in Mideast Studies to be taught to every college student so we all understand the issues more completely?

How about putting out a DoD request for proposals for "weapons of unification" that would allow Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman and Haliburton to get multibillion dollar contracts in various congressional districts for development of concepts and tools that actually increase our ability on the nation-building and infrastructure-management front?

It seems that equal time should be given to discussing that question.

And, the next time we have a Katrina-level natural disaster, we can try out those tools and see if FEMA, so equipped, can do a better job. That is to say, investment in such tools is "dual purpose" in the good sense, that we can use these tools at home and perfect them in practice.

If we had spent as much on development of nation-building tools as we spent on infrastructure destruction tools, wouldn't we be in a much better position today, or maybe already done and out of there with a clear "victory"?

technorati tags:draft, military, army, war