[Mb-civic] The return of the draft

[Michael Butler]

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From: Hawaiipolo at cs.com
Date: Sun, 13 Feb 2005 23:01:08 EST



The Return of the Draft
By Tim Dickinson 
Rolling Stone 

Thursday 27 January 2005


> With the army desperate for recruits, should college students be packing
> their bags for Canada?
 
Uncle Sam wants you. He needs you. He'll bribe you to sign up. He'll
strong-arm you to re-enlist. And if that's not enough, he's got a plan to
draft you. 
In the three decades since the Vietnam War, the "all-volunteer Army" has
become a bedrock principle of the American military. "It's a magnificent
force," 
Vice President Dick Cheney declared during the election campaign last fall,
"because those serving are ones who signed up to serve." But with the Army
and 
Marines perilously overextended by the war in Iraq, that volunteer
foundation is 
starting to crack. The "weekend warriors" of the Army Reserve and the
National Guard now make up almost half the fighting force on the front
lines, and 
young officers in the Reserve are retiring in droves. The Pentagon, which
can 
barely attract enough recruits to maintain current troop levels, has
involuntarily extended the enlistments of as many as 100,000 soldiers.
Desperate for 
troops, the Army has lowered its standards to let in twenty-five percent
more high 
school dropouts, and the Marines are now offering as much as $30,000 to
anyone 
who re-enlists. To understand the scope of the crisis, consider this: The
United States is pouring nearly as much money into incentives for new
recruits - 
almost $300 million - as it is into international tsunami relief.
"The Army's maxed out here," says retired Gen. Merrill McPeak, who served as
Air Force chief of staff under the first President Bush. "The Defense
Department and the president seem to be still operating off the rosy
scenario that 
this will be over soon, that this pain is temporary and therefore we'll just
grit 
our teeth, hunker down and get out on the other side of this. That's a bad
assumption." The Bush administration has sworn up and down that it will
never 
reinstate a draft. During the campaign last year, the president dismissed
the 
idea as nothing more than "rumors on the Internets" and declared, "We're not
going to have a draft - period." Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, in an
Op-Ed 
blaming "conspiracy mongers" for "attempting to scare and mislead young
Americans," insisted that "the idea of reinstating the draft has never been
debated, 
endorsed, discussed, theorized, pondered or even whispered by anyone in the
Bush administration."
That assertion is demonstrably false. According to an internal Selective
Service memo made public under the Freedom of Information Act, the agency's
acting 
director met with two of Rumsfeld's undersecretaries in February 2003
precisely to debate, discuss and ponder a return to the draft. The memo duly
notes 
the administration's aversion to a draft but adds, "Defense manpower
officials 
concede there are critical shortages of military personnel with certain
special 
skills, such as medical personnel, linguists, computer network engineers,
etc." The potentially prohibitive cost of "attracting and retaining such
personnel for military service," the memo adds, has led "some officials to
conclude 
that, while a conventional draft may never be needed, a draft of men and
women 
possessing these critical skills may be warranted in a future crisis." This
new 
draft, it suggests, could be invoked to meet the needs of both the Pentagon
and the Department of Homeland Security.
The memo then proposes, in detail, that the Selective Service be
"re-engineered" to cover all Americans - "men and (for the first time)
women" - ages 
eighteen to thirty-four. In addition to name, date of birth and Social
Security 
number, young adults would have to provide the agency with details of their
specialized skills on an ongoing basis until they passed out of draft
jeopardy at 
age thirty-five. Testifying before Congress two weeks after the meeting,
acting 
director of Selective Service Lewis Brodsky acknowledged that "consultations
with senior Defense manpower officials" have spurred the agency to shift its
preparations away from a full-scale, Vietnam-style draft of untrained men
"to a 
draft of smaller numbers of critical-skills personnel."
Richard Flahavan, spokesman for Selective Service, tells Rolling Stone that
preparing for a skills-based draft is "in fact what we have been doing." For
starters, the agency has updated a plan to draft nurses and doctors. But
that's 
not all. "Our thinking was that if we could run a health-care draft in the
future," Flahavan says, "then with some very slight tinkering we could
change 
that skill to plumbers or linguists or electrical engineers or whatever the
military was short." In other words, if Uncle Sam decides he needs people
with your 
skills, Selective Service has the means to draft you - and quick.
But experts on military manpower say the focus on drafting personnel with
special skills misses the larger point. The Army needs more soldiers, not
just 
more doctors and linguists. "What you've got now is a real shortage of
grunts - 
guys who can actually carry bayonets," says McPeak. A wholesale draft may be
necessary, he adds, "to deal with the situation we've got ourselves into.
We've 
got to have a bigger Army."
Michael O'Hanlon, a military-manpower scholar at the Brookings Institute,
believes a return to a full-blown draft will become "unavoidable" if the
United 
States is forced into another war. "Let's say North Korea strikes a deal
with 
Al Qaeda to sell them a nuclear weapon or something," he says. "I frankly
don't 
see how you could fight two wars at the same time with the all-volunteer
approach." If a second Korean War should break out, the United States has
reportedly committed to deploying a force of nearly 700,000 to defend South
Korea - 
almost half of America's entire military.
The politics of the draft are radioactive: Polls show that less than twenty
percent of Americans favor forced military service. But conscription has
some 
unlikely champions, including veterans and critics of the administration who
are opposed to Bush's war in Iraq. Reinstating the draft, they say, would
force 
every level of society to participate in military service, rather than
placing 
a disproportionate burden on minorities and the working class.
African-Americans, who make up roughly thirteen percent of the civilian
population, account
for twenty-two percent of the armed forces. And the Defense Department
acknowledges that recruits are drawn "primarily from families in the middle
and 
lower-middle socioeconomic strata."
A societywide draft would also make it more difficult for politicians to
commit troops to battle without popular approval. "The folks making the
decisions 
are committing other people's lives to a war effort that they're not making
any sacrifices for," says Charles Sheehan-Miles, who fought in the first
Gulf 
War and now serves as director of Veterans for Common Sense. Under the
current 
all-volunteer system, fewer than a dozen members of Congress have children
in 
the military. 
Charlie Moskos, a professor of military sociology at Northwestern
University, 
says the volunteer system also limits the political fallout of unpopular
wars. "Without a draft, there's really no antiwar movement," Moskos says.
Nearly 
sixty percent of Americans believe the war in Iraq was a mistake, he notes,
but 
they have no immediate self-interest in taking to the streets because "we're
willing to pay people to die for us. It doesn't reflect very well on the
character of our society."
Even military recruiters agree that the only way to persuade average
Americans to make long-term sacrifices in war is for the children of the
elite to put 
their lives on the line. In a recent meeting with military recruiters,
Moskos 
discussed the crisis in enlistment. "I asked them would they prefer to have
their advertising budget tripled or have Jenna Bush join the Army," he says.
"They unanimously chose the Jenna option."
One of the few politicians willing to openly advocate a return to the draft
is Rep. Charles Rangel, a Democrat from New York, who argues that the
current 
system places an immoral burden on America's underprivileged. "It shouldn't
be 
just the poor and the working poor who find their way into harm's way," he
says. In the days leading up to the Iraq war, Rangel introduced a bill to
reinstate the draft - with absolutely no deferments. "If the kids and
grandkids of 
the president and the Cabinet and the Pentagon were vulnerable to going to
Iraq, 
we never would have gone - no question in my mind," he says. "The closer
this 
thing comes home to Americans, the quicker we'll be out of Iraq."
But instead of exploring how to share the burden more fairly, the military
is 
cooking up new ways to take advantage of the economically disadvantaged.
Rangel says military recruiters have confided in him that they're targeting
inner 
cities and rural areas with high unemployment. In December, the National
Guard 
nearly doubled its enlistment bonus to $10,000, and the Army is trying to
attract urban youth with a marketing campaign called "Taking It to the
Streets," 
which features a pimped-out yellow Hummer and a basketball exhibition
replete 
with free throwback jerseys. President Bush has also signed an executive
order 
allowing legal immigrants to apply for citizenship immediately - rather than
wait five years - if they volunteer for active duty.
"It's so completely unethical and immoral to induce people that have limited
education and limited job ability to have to put themselves in harm's way
for 
ten, twenty or thirty thousand dollars," Rangel says. "Just how broke do you
have to be to take advantage of these incentives?" Seducing soldiers with
cold 
cash also unnerves military commanders. "We must consider the point at which
we confuse 'volunteer to become an American soldier' with 'mercenary,' " Lt.
Gen. James Helmly, the commander of the Army Reserve, wrote in a memo to
senior 
Army leadership in December.
The Reserve, Helmly warns, "is rapidly degenerating into a broken force."
The 
Army National Guard is also in trouble: It missed its recruitment goals of
56,000 by more than 5,000 in fiscal year 2004 and is already 2,000 soldiers
short in fiscal 2005. To keep enough boots on the ground, the Pentagon has
stopped 
asking volunteer soldiers to extend their service - and started demanding
it. 
Using a little-known provision called "stop loss," the military is forcing
reservists and guardsmen to remain on active duty indefinitely. "This is an
'all-volunteer Army' with footnotes," says McPeak. "And it's the footnotes
that 
are being held in Iraq against their wishes. If that's not a back-door
draft, 
tell me what is." 
David Qualls, who joined the Arkansas National Guard for a year, is one of
40,000 troops in Iraq who have been informed that their enlistment has been
extended until December 24th, 2031. "I've served five months past my
one-year 
obligation," says Qualls, the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit challenging the
military 
with breach of contract. "It's time to let me go back to my life. It's a
question of fairness, and not only for myself. This is for the thousands of
other 
people that are involuntarily extended in Iraq. Let us go home."
The Army insists that most "stop-lossed" soldiers will be held on the front
lines for no longer than eighteen months. But Jules Lobel, an attorney with
the 
Center for Constitutional Rights who is representing eight National
Guardsmen 
in a lawsuit challenging the extensions, says the 2031 date is being used to
strong-arm volunteers into re-enlisting. According to Lobel, the military is
telling soldiers, "We're giving you a chance to voluntarily re-enlist - and
if 
you don't do it, we'll screw you. And the first way we'll screw you is to
put 
you in until 2031."
But threatening volunteers, military experts warn, could be the quickest way
to ensure a return to the draft. According to O'Hanlon at the Brookings
Institute, such "callousness" may make it impossible to recruit new soldiers
- no 
matter how much money you throw at them. And if bigger sign-up bonuses and
more 
aggressive recruitment tactics don't do the trick, says Helmly of the Army
Reserve, it could "force the nation into an argument" about reinstating the
draft. 
In the end, it may simply come down to a matter of math. In January, Bush
told America's soldiers that "much more will be asked of you" in his second
term, 
even as he openly threatened Iran with military action. Another war, critics
warn, would push the all-volunteer force to its breaking point. "This damn
thing is just an explosion that's about to happen," says Rangel. Bush
officials 
"can say all they want that they don't want the draft, but there's not going
to 
be that many more buttons to push."
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