[Mb-civic] The return of the draft

[richard haase]

f___ the draft alexander
ill go to canada first
but someone will have to pt me in the right direction
cause my eyes are going
lol
all my love to you and your family buddy
youre a real gentleman alexander
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Alexander Harper" <harperalexander at mail.com>
To: <mb-civic at islandlists.com>
Sent: Monday, February 14, 2005 4:02 PM
Subject: Re: [Mb-civic] The return of the draft


Well the draft would certainly be fairer in the sense that it would
theoretically involve every american, not just the economically
marginalised, in America's wars, but of course it would not be fair
and if you ask why I would suggest that you look no further than
the record of your very own Dear Leader, who was able to go AWOL
during the Vietnam War with complete and enduring impunity. Nor
actually does conscription lead in general to high quality
soldiers. I agree though that it would make it harder for the
politicians to embroil your country in any more Iraqi type embroglios.

I wonder if they have considered starting up a couple of divisions
along the lines of the French Foreign Legion, the Gurkha regiments
or - in its day - the Waffen SS, all outstandingly successful
military units. The selection process would have to be stringent
enough to avoid recruiting Al Qaeda sleepers for instance but you
would hope to end up with well motivated, tough troops who would be
well paid and end up after 12-15(?) years with US citizenship. They
would have professional American officers. You may all be wrinkling
your noses at the thought but it could hardly be more distasteful and would
much less hypocritical than the current use in Iraq, Afghanistan and
elsewhere of 'contractors',who are making fortunes for their PMC employers
and not doing too badly for themselves either - or they wouldn't be there.

Have I earned a a heaped dish of opprobrium?

AL Baraka----- Original Message
-----
From: "Michael Butler" <michael at michaelbutler.com>
To: Civic <mb-civic at islandlists.com>
Subject: [Mb-civic] The return of the draft
Date: Sun, 13 Feb 2005 20:42:49 -0800

>
>
> ------ Forwarded Message
> 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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