The Draft

[jfschultz]

I was surprised to find that I argeed with Rangel on something, but for different reasons.

Several years ago there was a mention in The Proceedings of the U.S. Naval Institute about the tendency of this country to get into foriegn adventures. Going back to 1812, the less the Washington leadership was personally tied to the military the more we went off to fight. You can count the number of representatives, senators, and upper executive people with children in the military on one hand with fingers left over.

Yes, much has been said about Kerry in relation to Vietnam. But back then the general population didn't care that much as long as it was volunteers that came back in those body bags. Things changed when it was that nice kid down the block who got drafted and killed.

A draft, would change the equation for the cabinet and congress. It would no longer be whether it is worth sending those guys into harms way, but is it worth sending thier own son or daughter into harms way. (Rangel's point is that "those guys" are too often poor and not white.)

This would requre closing loopholes that were there in the past. The only exemptions allowed would be for active participation in training programs that lead to active duty (sush as service academy or ROTC). Also, as long as combatant policy is gender neutral, spouses of one on active duty can have an exemption. And the only way to get into the National Guard is as a reserve duty option after active duty.

[TonyPSchaefer]

Yeah, I should stay out of this one because I have no basis for my thoughts, but I'm just not that bright.

One of the high-up tech support guys told me this story:
Our CEO was concerned about the presence of illegally obtained MP3s on company computers. He told my friend to set up the Desktop Management software to automatically remove all MP3s found on company hard drives.

The next day, my friend walked into the CEO's office with a printout. It was a list of song files, all in MP3 format. He said, "these will be the first ones to go." The CEO scanned the document and realized that my friend had remotely scanned his computer, printing all the MP3s. He quickly realized that if he was going to pass a law through the company, he was going to be held to that standard. Needless to say, all MP3s stayed.

It's funny how one's decisions and opinions change when there is skin in the game.

[VARedDevil]

Obviously, by my avatar, you would think that I'm going to be biased in my opinion about the draft. But surprisingly, I'm neither for or against the draft. I don't feel that there is a need for a draft in relative peacetime, or even at the level of deployment we're at right now. Someone had mentioned in another thread what if we get into another conflict with say Korea then we'd have to do the draft. That is a possibility. We could pull out of Iraq and put all of our assets into the Pacific Theater for a very tough battle with the Koreans. However, because of the fact that Korea does have conscripts and an army of well over a million soldiers, I don't think it would be a very conventional war. I'm not talking nukes here folks. Non-conventional in the sense that the even if we threw every foot soldier we have at them, they would wear us down just through attrition. So it would be more of a high tech battle. At the end of the cold war, the military was pared down, right-sized, as it was called, because of the large financial drain it had on the budget, and the belief that there wasn't a need for that large of an active duty force. When you pare the military down to a peacetime level, you have to have a strong reserve force. Nobody expects that they will go to war when they join the reserves, but when they do, they have to understand, that's exactly what the reserves are for, to augment the active forces. Without a draft, the active forces must be augmented. Even with a draft you still have to retain a highly trained reserve force. Many countries around the world, including smaller European countries require their young men and women to spend a minimum of two years as conscripts...the draft is alive and well through out the world. I don't believe, unless we do get into two major theaters of operations, that there will be a draft. How you get around the draft, is to gradually build up the active force end-strength, but that requires more funding ... and then what do you do with all the active personnel when they're not needed. So it's a rough decision as to when to implement a draft. We all would complain if the military was at a multi-theater wartime level...it would be very, very expensive to maintain that level. But yet we don't want a draft. It's a vicious circle. The problem with congress is that very few of them have any military experience at all, so they don't understand the intricacies of maintaining the proper balance.