That “bring back the draft” thing again

Joseph Epstein writes in The Atlantic that he really wishes that the federal government would restart the draft again. A draftee himself, Joseph, writes that his experience justifies the return to conscription that disappeared in 1973;

Under the draft, the American social fabric would change—and, judging from my experience, for the better. I write as a former draftee who served in the Army from 1958 to 1960. I was, in other words, a Cold War soldier, and never for a moment in danger. Much of my time in the military—I worked on the post newspaper at Fort Hood, in Texas, and later as a clerk, typing up physicals, in a recruiting station in Little Rock, Arkansas—was excruciatingly boring.

Yet I am grateful for having served. Doing so took me out of my own social class and ethnic milieu—big-city, middle-class, Jewish—and gave me a vivid sense of the social breadth of my country. I slept in barracks and shared all my meals with American Indians, African Americans from Detroit, white Appalachians, Christian Scientists from Kansas, and discovered myself befriending and being befriended by young men I would not otherwise have met. I have never felt more American than when I was in the Army.

I guess that Mr. Epstein hasn’t been watching the news lately – the military is trying to downsize. There is no shortage of volunteers and there’s no need to force people into uniform at this point. The only reason to reconstitute the draft, with no real national emergency on the horizon, would be if the government intended to make military service unattractive, as the Washington Post suggests in the previous post.

As a private in the Army, I’m sure Mr. Epstein didn’t experience the downside of trying to lead soldiers who didn’t want to participate in the daily drudgery of training – and since he served in non-war years, he certainly didn’t get to witness conscripts involved in combat operations.

Since the Pentagon is wringing it’s hands over the fact that 75% of military-age men and women are ineligible for service for various reasons. How would a draft fix that? It actually means that it would probably be too costly to screen the number of candidates to get to the numbers that would justify conscription.

It was probably the Joseph Epsteins in the country that ended the draft in the early 70s and now they think it’s a good way to spread the misery of defending the country from the vast array of enemies facing the country. It was Richard Nixon who ended the draft and it was Jimmy Carter who brought back draft registration when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan out of fear that he had destroyed the sense of military service so badly that he’d have to force Americans to serve if the Soviets didn’t stop there. You know, after he gave amnesty to draft dodgers on his first day in office insuring that no one would take the draft seriously again.

Of the 2.7 million Americans who served in Vietnam, less than 700k were draftees (out of the 1.7 million total draftees during that war), but judging by the news of the day, one would think that all of the troops in Vietnam were draftees. Less than 18,000 of those draftees were killed in combat there out of the 58,000 total casualties. One might argue that we didn’t need the draft during Vietnam. So why would we need it now, unless, like I said, the Left wants to make military service so miserable that no one wants to join voluntarily.

Thanks to Chock Block for the link.

Category: Military issues