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Came across this here article:
Made me think of th next generation of WASP Aggressors.
Time
September 10, 2007
Would National Service Be Better Than the Draft?
By Mark Thompson
Soldiers hate friendly fire, especially when it comes from the White House. Yet that's just what happened late Friday, August 10, when Army Lieutenant General Douglas Lute, President Bush's deputy national security adviser for Iraq and Afghanistan, suggested it was time for the nation to consider resuming the draft. "It makes sense to certainly consider it," he told National Public Radio. The counterattack was intense. "There is absolutely no consideration being given to reinstituting a draft," Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said early the following Monday morning. General George Casey, the Army's top officer, also tossed a grenade Lute's way, 24 hours after Whitman, during an appearance at the National Press Club. While conceding today's Army is "out of balance" — making the woes afflicting the world's most potent fighting force sound like a wobbly Firestone 500 —Casey too tried to extinguish such talk. "Right now there is absolutely no consideration — at least within the Army — being given to reinstituting the draft," he said.
Casey's qualification — "at least within the Army" — is significant. For while his view is shared by Robert Gates, the current defense secretary, it runs counter to the recommendation of the first Secretary Gates. At his confirmation hearing last December, Bob Gates called the Army's personnel woes "a transitory problem" that didn't warrant renewed conscription. Yet Thomas Gates, who served as defense secretary from 1959 to 1961, chaired a commission created by President Nixon in 1970 to consider doing away with the draft. While the panel recommended doing away with conscription — just as Nixon wanted — it also called on the nation to maintain a "standby draft" that would resume if there were "an emergency requiring a major increase in force over an extended period," which certainly fits today's sitrep. The commission pointedly noted that the draft's resurrection should be ordered by Congress, and not the President. "If a consensus sufficient to induce Congress to activate the draft cannot be mustered," it said, "the President would see the depth of national division before, rather than after, committing U.S. military power."
Yet since the draft's end in 1973, it has become obvious that the nation has little stomach for its resumption, even as part of a bigger package mandating national service. While some military experts — including those who have worn the uniform — think national service, with a military option, makes sense, more are opposed to the notion. But it's also plain that the U.S. military's increasing isolation from U.S. society is not a good thing.
Those who favor national service, including a military element, argue that it is a simple responsibility of citizenship that young people should incur in exchange for the fortune of being an American. George Washington and the 1918 Supreme Court embraced this view. Today's backers say it would help knit the various cliques of the nation together, they maintain, and help deal with a wide variety of problems — a lack of soldiers and inner-city teachers among them — at the same time.
Opponents — among them Ronald Reagan and economist Milton Friedman —have maintained that such mandatory service has no place in the democracy. Many experts say that the sharp edge of today's volunteer military, honed over 35 years after initial opposition from the Pentagon, can only be dulled by adding draftees to the force. Most agree that any military obligation could be made more palatable if it were part of a bigger national-service program. Ideally, that would mean that even those fulfilling their national-service obligation by enlisting would do so, at least to some degree, voluntarily (because they could always have opted to have fulfilled that requirement by serving in some non-military slot).
But much of this debate remains fuzzy: if there were a national-service requirement, might some be forced into the military against their will if all the civilian options were already filled? The Air Force, Marines and Navy haven't had much trouble filling their ranks, so would draftees all be funneled into the Army — and more specifically, into the blood-and-mud ground combat units? Beyond such concerns, military officers say, there plainly aren't sufficient jobs — or sufficient money — to employ the entire cohort (as of July 1, there were 4.3 million American 18-year-olds, and 4.4 million American 17-year-olds, according to the Census Bureau). So just as draft deferments poisoned the Vietnam-era draft, how would a new national-service program fairly choose among those eligible (the draft lottery, used for awhile at the end of the Vietnam war to select those who had to serve, has been replaced by state lotteries seeking to fund social programs on the backs of those least able to afford it. Perhaps it could be brought back to life, along with the draft). Would women be included, or exempt? Why include them when current law bars them from the combat forces most in need of personnel?
Charles Moskos, the nation's pre-eminent military sociologist and a long-time professor at Northwestern University, has supported national service, including a military option, for the past half-century. "My drafted contemporary was Elvis Presley — just imagine how it would be if Justin Timberlake were serving today," he says. "I addressed a group of recruiters last year and I asked them if they'd prefer to have their advertising budget tripled or have Jenna Bush join the Army. They unanimously chose the Jenna option. If you get privileged youth serving," he adds, "it makes recruiting a lot easier." Moskos, who has spent decades visiting U.S. troops in various hotspots around the globe, likes to speak of his alma mater to show how times have changed. "In my Princeton class of 1956, out of 750 males, some 450 served, including Pete Du Pont and Johnny Apple," he says. "Last June's graduates — out of a class of 1,100, both men and women now — nine are serving."
Rep. Charles Rangel, a New York Democrat, has pushed unsuccessfully since 2002 for a wartime-only draft. The Korean War veteran (he served in the Army from 1948 to 1952) and Bronze Star and Purple Heart winner unabashedly declares that his legislation would reduce the number of wars the nation fights. But he also adds that it would inspire a greater sense of citizenship among young people. "Shouldn't young Americans be given an opportunity to know and serve their country for two years?" he asks, recalling his own service. "There was something about that flag, something about the march, something about the music," he said in an interview with Time. "I know every son-of-a-***** who got out with me felt patriotic."
Many in the military brush off Rangel's call because they think it is more of an anti-war proposal cloaked in civic-responsibility garb. They particularly disliked his original claim that minorities are over-represented in the all-volunteer military (after it became clear that was not the case, Rangel shifted his argument to focus on how the military's current makeup allegedly relies heavily on the poor. In a June report, the Congressional Budget Office said the scant available data on socio-economic status of the families of military members "suggest that individuals from all income groups are represented roughly proportionately in the enlisted ranks of the AVF.")
Now chairman of the ways and means committee, Rangel unveiled a retooled version of his original bill — which lost in the full House, 402-to-2 shortly before the 2004 election — in January. "My bill requires that, during wartime, all legal residents of the U.S. between the ages of 18 and 42 would be subject to a military draft, with the number determined by the President," he said then. "No deferments would be allowed beyond the completion of high school, up to age 20, except for conscientious objectors or those with health problems. A permanent provision of the bill mandates that those not needed by the military be required to perform two years of civilian service in our sea and airports, schools, hospitals, and other facilities."
Rangel says the civilian national service requirement would continue during peacetime under his proposal. "I know that if we had those people at Katrina their presence would have given so much hope to that community," he said in an August 24 interview. "If you went to the airports, they don't need guns — all they need is that (flag) patch (on their shoulder) and knowing that our country is there. The same in the train stations, school rooms and hospitals — there's so much that young people can do."
He says his bill would make the U.S. less tilted toward war. "We never would have gone to war" in Iraq if legislation like his had been on the books, Rangel says. "I go to Wall Street for the last five years for one reason or the other. I'm in front of every Business Roundtable, the U.S. Chamber, and members of Congress and there's one question: if you knew at the time the President said he was going to invade Iraq, and there was a draft and your kids and grandkids would be vulnerable, would you support the President? And no honest son-of-a-***** has ever told me 'yes' — never," Rangel says. "When some of them mumble that, and their wives are there, I just look at the wives and they grab their husband's hand and say 'No, we would not support it.' If going to war meant talking about sending my kid, the answer would be 'Hell no, let's talk this over, let's wait awhile, let the UN come in, let's see where France is, I mean, let's see where the world is before you grab my kid."
But if war did come, under Rangel's bill some young men and women would be forced to serve in uniform against their will if the military needed their bodies. "Mine is no exceptions, no exclusions, nobody's deferred" except for reasons of health or conscientious-objector status, Rangel says. "Under my bill, there are nine chances out of 10 your kid wouldn't go, but goddam he'd be required to be eligible to go if he was drafted, and that's the part that sticks in the craw of most members of Congress," Rangel says. "You take your chances — for every guy who gets killed, there's a hundred guys who don't come anywhere near the guy who gets killed — so your chances of getting shot are slim, but they're real."
Moskos, like Rangel, likens his military tenure — he was a draftee in the U.S. Army, 1956-58 — as a personally profound rite of passage that the nation's youth (at least the males) no longer experiences. "There was a genuine mixing of all social groups, by race, region, education, social status," the proud Greek-American says. "When I talk to veterans today of any era, it's like talking to a fellow ethnic." He advocates a broad form of national service, where the military would just be one option among many. "Two-year draftees could well perform missions like border guards, peacekeeping, guards for nuclear and physical plants," he says. "Even many of the jobs on forward operating bases in Iraq could be well performed by draftees."
Moskos says there is a sense of selfishness afoot in the country today. "This is the first war in American history where no sacrifice of any kind is being asked of our citizenry," he says. "And the soldiers in Operation Iraqi Freedom know this — 'patriotism lite' is the ethos of the day." That can be seen, he says, in our national politics. "In the last four presidential elections, the American public has voted for the draft dodger over the server," Moskos says, slighting the current President's controversial tenure in the Texas Air National Guard. "Contrary to conventional wisdom, being a military veteran is not a political advantage. It would be with the draft back in play." Moskos, like Rangel, believes that having a cross-section of the nation's youth serving in uniform means the nation would be less-inclined to go to war. "If you have privileged youth serving, going to war is much more debated, and you're much less likely to go in," he says. "But if privileged youth are in there, once you go to war, you're much more likely to hang in there."
Lawrence Korb, who served as the Pentagon's personnel chief during the Reagan administration, also endorses the idea. "National service is great — I think everyone ought to do something for their country," he says. But he adds it shouldn't be thought of as a fix for the military. "The all-volunteer force is not in trouble — the all-volunteer Army is in trouble," he says. And he doesn't embrace Moskos' notion that salting the force with draftees would make going to war more difficult. "If there had been national service, including the Army, on the eve of the war —remember, on the eve of the war, 60 percent of the American people thought Saddam had weapons of mass destruction." If military service is merely one option among many for national service, Korb isn't convinced it would affect what wars the nation chooses to fight. "The only thing that acts as a brake is when you force people to go into the military," says Korb, a Navy veteran, "particularly the ground forces."
David Segal, another prominent military sociologist, also thinks national service would be a good idea for the country. "The military is opposed to a broad national service system because they assume that they would get the short end of the stick," says Segal, director of the University of Maryland's Center for Research on Military Organization. Pentagon complaints that draftees would dull the military's fighting prowess are bogus, he says. "The distinction we make between combat and combat support doesn't reflect the realities of 21st Century warfare," he says. "We're sending individuals from the Air Force and the Navy to be soldiers." Segal says it is "political suicide" to advocate for a draft amid a war, but says a program of national service would have a better chance because of its non-military options. He argues that it should not be compulsory, but strongly encouraged: college loans and grants might be contingent upon such services, as would public employment and maybe even drivers' licenses. "It should be as minimally coercive as possible," Segal says. "You need to reward it with a carrot rather than punishing non-compliance with a stick."
While most civilian military experts interviewed support the idea of national service, including the military, most retired military officers are on the other side of the argument. (It's worth noting here that the military opposed ending the draft a generation ago, so their opposition needs to be taken with a grain of salt.) They argue that when the draft was last used, the military was largely a low-tech enterprise. But now the inside of an M-1 tank looks more like the bridge of the Starship Enterprise, and takes substantial training to operate effectively. The cost of such training would skyrocket if draftee soldiers had to serve only two-year hitches, meaning greater numbers would have to be trained because of their shorter time in uniform. Even more critical, veterans say, is the ethos of the all-volunteer force, which is difficult to measure but impossible to ignore.
National service "is an absolutely bad idea," says Barry McCaffrey, a retired four-star Army general. "My age group learned to love the volunteer military." While McCaffrey says the idea of national service "makes sense in a civic sense" it would lead to lesser-quality soldiers. "We've never had better soldiers in the country's history" than we do now. "They volunteer for the Army, volunteer for combat units, they're high school graduates without felonies, they stay longer," he says, rattling off attributes he fears would shrink with national service.
Robert Scales, a retired Army major general, is an Army historian who once commanded the Army War College. "War has become so complex, and so dependent on ground forces, that the idea of drafting soldiers would greatly harm the American military," he says. "First of all, they wouldn�t go into the military goddammit — they'd go into the Army. And if they go into the Army, they're going to go into the combat ops" — infantry, armor, artillery — "because those are the jobs that nobody wants." To Scales, the paradox of resuming any kind of draft is that it would fill those ranks with people who do not want to be there, just as those ranks have become increasingly important. "The critical job in today's military — the jobs that have to be done right — are those close-combat jobs," he says. "So the irony is that in a draft those skills and will and morale and physical fitness — all those things that we most need in the close combat arms — are least likely to be attained."
John Keane, the Army's former No. 2 general, differs slightly from his colleagues. He is willing to entertain the idea of national service, including the military, so long as no one is forced to serve in uniform against his or her will. "National service is a good idea so long as the military, which would be the most demanding of the national service options, has to stay completely voluntary," he says. "We wouldn't want anybody in it who didn't want to be in it. I think that is a compromise that we in the military should be willing to make for the betterment of the country." Keane says today's youngsters are yearning to serve. "I've been dealing with this age group — from 17 to 25 — for most of my adult life," he says. "The current group of young people, particularly in the post 9/11-era, have a sense of purpose about them — they want to do something with their lives. It's not just in terms of 'What's good for me?'
Keane says that while such service "would be only for a very short period of time, I think the experience and satisfaction of it would actually last a lifetime." And he doesn't think it would harm the Army. "When you have volunteers, you can demand so much more of them," he says. "I'd like to think that the people who would still join us under a national-service requirement would really want to be a part of it. While some of them would be a little more challenging than the volunteers we have today, I would like to think that it would not diminish the Army." And there would be an added benefit. "With the professionalization of the Army, we have a tendency to be considerably more isolated from the American people," Keane says. "In terms of the health of the nation, and even of the institution itself called the U.S. military, the fact that more people would be connected to it through some form of national service would be very healthy."
Today's military was built to fight Colin Powell's kind of war — brief and intense — like the 1991 Gulf War. The U.S. military really doesn't have the depth to wage a sustained ground campaign as we are now doing in Iraq, many military officers say. If the U.S. thinks its future will consist of drawn-out campaigns like that now underway in Iraq, the prospect of a draft makes more sense. While the 1.4 million-strong U.S. military (with another 1 million reservists) is at the breaking point with only 162,000 troops in Iraq, that total is well below what experts estimated would be needed to tame that country. The Rand Corp. said in 2003 that, based on historical troop-to-population ratios from prior wars, the number of troops needed in Iraq would range from 258,000 (based on Bosnia) to 321,000 (based on post-World War II Germany) to 528,000 (based on Kosovo). The numbers suggest that if the U.S. really believes there is a war on terror to be won — and, if as the Bush Administration keeps saying, it is going to be a long war — more troops are going to be required to wage it.
Indeed, the all-volunteer force is getting expensive. The Congressional Budget Office reported in June that a string of pay raises and benefit hikes have led to a 21 percent pay hike over the past six years for enlisted troops. The bottom line, according to the CBO: the average soldier is better paid than the average civilian. While such comparisons are difficult to make, the CBO reported that enlisted military personnel are paid at a rate equal to the 75th percentile of private-sector workers with similar education. (For those whose math skills have deteriorated, that means that those wearing the nation's uniform are paid more than 75 percent of their civilian counterparts.) The Pentagon, in recent years, has tried to peg its salaries for enlisted folks at the 70th percentile. Too often, Pentagon officials say, comparisons of military pay only measure paychecks, which shortchanges military people who receive many valuable benefits — largely tax-free food and housing allowances — that civilians don't.
In a second report released August 15, the CBO noted that total pay for a starting soldier is $54,900 when allowances and bonuses are included. "We're getting a little too heavy on having a professional Army — the bills that are going to be coming due for retirement and medical care are going to be horrendous," Moskos says. "We're ending up with overpaid recruits and underpaid sergeants — in the old days a master sergeant with 20 years' experience made about six times what a private did — now it's about 2.5 to 1." Rangel agrees. "In terms of military volunteers, a lot of money is put into that to pump up patriotism — I mean $20,000, $30,000, $40,000 in enlistment and retention bonuses," he says. Of course, the true cost of renewing the draft — for good and for ill — could go well beyond figures punched into Pentagon calculators.
September 10, 2007
Would National Service Be Better Than the Draft?
By Mark Thompson
Soldiers hate friendly fire, especially when it comes from the White House. Yet that's just what happened late Friday, August 10, when Army Lieutenant General Douglas Lute, President Bush's deputy national security adviser for Iraq and Afghanistan, suggested it was time for the nation to consider resuming the draft. "It makes sense to certainly consider it," he told National Public Radio. The counterattack was intense. "There is absolutely no consideration being given to reinstituting a draft," Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said early the following Monday morning. General George Casey, the Army's top officer, also tossed a grenade Lute's way, 24 hours after Whitman, during an appearance at the National Press Club. While conceding today's Army is "out of balance" — making the woes afflicting the world's most potent fighting force sound like a wobbly Firestone 500 —Casey too tried to extinguish such talk. "Right now there is absolutely no consideration — at least within the Army — being given to reinstituting the draft," he said.
Casey's qualification — "at least within the Army" — is significant. For while his view is shared by Robert Gates, the current defense secretary, it runs counter to the recommendation of the first Secretary Gates. At his confirmation hearing last December, Bob Gates called the Army's personnel woes "a transitory problem" that didn't warrant renewed conscription. Yet Thomas Gates, who served as defense secretary from 1959 to 1961, chaired a commission created by President Nixon in 1970 to consider doing away with the draft. While the panel recommended doing away with conscription — just as Nixon wanted — it also called on the nation to maintain a "standby draft" that would resume if there were "an emergency requiring a major increase in force over an extended period," which certainly fits today's sitrep. The commission pointedly noted that the draft's resurrection should be ordered by Congress, and not the President. "If a consensus sufficient to induce Congress to activate the draft cannot be mustered," it said, "the President would see the depth of national division before, rather than after, committing U.S. military power."
Yet since the draft's end in 1973, it has become obvious that the nation has little stomach for its resumption, even as part of a bigger package mandating national service. While some military experts — including those who have worn the uniform — think national service, with a military option, makes sense, more are opposed to the notion. But it's also plain that the U.S. military's increasing isolation from U.S. society is not a good thing.
Those who favor national service, including a military element, argue that it is a simple responsibility of citizenship that young people should incur in exchange for the fortune of being an American. George Washington and the 1918 Supreme Court embraced this view. Today's backers say it would help knit the various cliques of the nation together, they maintain, and help deal with a wide variety of problems — a lack of soldiers and inner-city teachers among them — at the same time.
Opponents — among them Ronald Reagan and economist Milton Friedman —have maintained that such mandatory service has no place in the democracy. Many experts say that the sharp edge of today's volunteer military, honed over 35 years after initial opposition from the Pentagon, can only be dulled by adding draftees to the force. Most agree that any military obligation could be made more palatable if it were part of a bigger national-service program. Ideally, that would mean that even those fulfilling their national-service obligation by enlisting would do so, at least to some degree, voluntarily (because they could always have opted to have fulfilled that requirement by serving in some non-military slot).
But much of this debate remains fuzzy: if there were a national-service requirement, might some be forced into the military against their will if all the civilian options were already filled? The Air Force, Marines and Navy haven't had much trouble filling their ranks, so would draftees all be funneled into the Army — and more specifically, into the blood-and-mud ground combat units? Beyond such concerns, military officers say, there plainly aren't sufficient jobs — or sufficient money — to employ the entire cohort (as of July 1, there were 4.3 million American 18-year-olds, and 4.4 million American 17-year-olds, according to the Census Bureau). So just as draft deferments poisoned the Vietnam-era draft, how would a new national-service program fairly choose among those eligible (the draft lottery, used for awhile at the end of the Vietnam war to select those who had to serve, has been replaced by state lotteries seeking to fund social programs on the backs of those least able to afford it. Perhaps it could be brought back to life, along with the draft). Would women be included, or exempt? Why include them when current law bars them from the combat forces most in need of personnel?
Charles Moskos, the nation's pre-eminent military sociologist and a long-time professor at Northwestern University, has supported national service, including a military option, for the past half-century. "My drafted contemporary was Elvis Presley — just imagine how it would be if Justin Timberlake were serving today," he says. "I addressed a group of recruiters last year and I asked them if they'd prefer to have their advertising budget tripled or have Jenna Bush join the Army. They unanimously chose the Jenna option. If you get privileged youth serving," he adds, "it makes recruiting a lot easier." Moskos, who has spent decades visiting U.S. troops in various hotspots around the globe, likes to speak of his alma mater to show how times have changed. "In my Princeton class of 1956, out of 750 males, some 450 served, including Pete Du Pont and Johnny Apple," he says. "Last June's graduates — out of a class of 1,100, both men and women now — nine are serving."
Rep. Charles Rangel, a New York Democrat, has pushed unsuccessfully since 2002 for a wartime-only draft. The Korean War veteran (he served in the Army from 1948 to 1952) and Bronze Star and Purple Heart winner unabashedly declares that his legislation would reduce the number of wars the nation fights. But he also adds that it would inspire a greater sense of citizenship among young people. "Shouldn't young Americans be given an opportunity to know and serve their country for two years?" he asks, recalling his own service. "There was something about that flag, something about the march, something about the music," he said in an interview with Time. "I know every son-of-a-***** who got out with me felt patriotic."
Many in the military brush off Rangel's call because they think it is more of an anti-war proposal cloaked in civic-responsibility garb. They particularly disliked his original claim that minorities are over-represented in the all-volunteer military (after it became clear that was not the case, Rangel shifted his argument to focus on how the military's current makeup allegedly relies heavily on the poor. In a June report, the Congressional Budget Office said the scant available data on socio-economic status of the families of military members "suggest that individuals from all income groups are represented roughly proportionately in the enlisted ranks of the AVF.")
Now chairman of the ways and means committee, Rangel unveiled a retooled version of his original bill — which lost in the full House, 402-to-2 shortly before the 2004 election — in January. "My bill requires that, during wartime, all legal residents of the U.S. between the ages of 18 and 42 would be subject to a military draft, with the number determined by the President," he said then. "No deferments would be allowed beyond the completion of high school, up to age 20, except for conscientious objectors or those with health problems. A permanent provision of the bill mandates that those not needed by the military be required to perform two years of civilian service in our sea and airports, schools, hospitals, and other facilities."
Rangel says the civilian national service requirement would continue during peacetime under his proposal. "I know that if we had those people at Katrina their presence would have given so much hope to that community," he said in an August 24 interview. "If you went to the airports, they don't need guns — all they need is that (flag) patch (on their shoulder) and knowing that our country is there. The same in the train stations, school rooms and hospitals — there's so much that young people can do."
He says his bill would make the U.S. less tilted toward war. "We never would have gone to war" in Iraq if legislation like his had been on the books, Rangel says. "I go to Wall Street for the last five years for one reason or the other. I'm in front of every Business Roundtable, the U.S. Chamber, and members of Congress and there's one question: if you knew at the time the President said he was going to invade Iraq, and there was a draft and your kids and grandkids would be vulnerable, would you support the President? And no honest son-of-a-***** has ever told me 'yes' — never," Rangel says. "When some of them mumble that, and their wives are there, I just look at the wives and they grab their husband's hand and say 'No, we would not support it.' If going to war meant talking about sending my kid, the answer would be 'Hell no, let's talk this over, let's wait awhile, let the UN come in, let's see where France is, I mean, let's see where the world is before you grab my kid."
But if war did come, under Rangel's bill some young men and women would be forced to serve in uniform against their will if the military needed their bodies. "Mine is no exceptions, no exclusions, nobody's deferred" except for reasons of health or conscientious-objector status, Rangel says. "Under my bill, there are nine chances out of 10 your kid wouldn't go, but goddam he'd be required to be eligible to go if he was drafted, and that's the part that sticks in the craw of most members of Congress," Rangel says. "You take your chances — for every guy who gets killed, there's a hundred guys who don't come anywhere near the guy who gets killed — so your chances of getting shot are slim, but they're real."
Moskos, like Rangel, likens his military tenure — he was a draftee in the U.S. Army, 1956-58 — as a personally profound rite of passage that the nation's youth (at least the males) no longer experiences. "There was a genuine mixing of all social groups, by race, region, education, social status," the proud Greek-American says. "When I talk to veterans today of any era, it's like talking to a fellow ethnic." He advocates a broad form of national service, where the military would just be one option among many. "Two-year draftees could well perform missions like border guards, peacekeeping, guards for nuclear and physical plants," he says. "Even many of the jobs on forward operating bases in Iraq could be well performed by draftees."
Moskos says there is a sense of selfishness afoot in the country today. "This is the first war in American history where no sacrifice of any kind is being asked of our citizenry," he says. "And the soldiers in Operation Iraqi Freedom know this — 'patriotism lite' is the ethos of the day." That can be seen, he says, in our national politics. "In the last four presidential elections, the American public has voted for the draft dodger over the server," Moskos says, slighting the current President's controversial tenure in the Texas Air National Guard. "Contrary to conventional wisdom, being a military veteran is not a political advantage. It would be with the draft back in play." Moskos, like Rangel, believes that having a cross-section of the nation's youth serving in uniform means the nation would be less-inclined to go to war. "If you have privileged youth serving, going to war is much more debated, and you're much less likely to go in," he says. "But if privileged youth are in there, once you go to war, you're much more likely to hang in there."
Lawrence Korb, who served as the Pentagon's personnel chief during the Reagan administration, also endorses the idea. "National service is great — I think everyone ought to do something for their country," he says. But he adds it shouldn't be thought of as a fix for the military. "The all-volunteer force is not in trouble — the all-volunteer Army is in trouble," he says. And he doesn't embrace Moskos' notion that salting the force with draftees would make going to war more difficult. "If there had been national service, including the Army, on the eve of the war —remember, on the eve of the war, 60 percent of the American people thought Saddam had weapons of mass destruction." If military service is merely one option among many for national service, Korb isn't convinced it would affect what wars the nation chooses to fight. "The only thing that acts as a brake is when you force people to go into the military," says Korb, a Navy veteran, "particularly the ground forces."
David Segal, another prominent military sociologist, also thinks national service would be a good idea for the country. "The military is opposed to a broad national service system because they assume that they would get the short end of the stick," says Segal, director of the University of Maryland's Center for Research on Military Organization. Pentagon complaints that draftees would dull the military's fighting prowess are bogus, he says. "The distinction we make between combat and combat support doesn't reflect the realities of 21st Century warfare," he says. "We're sending individuals from the Air Force and the Navy to be soldiers." Segal says it is "political suicide" to advocate for a draft amid a war, but says a program of national service would have a better chance because of its non-military options. He argues that it should not be compulsory, but strongly encouraged: college loans and grants might be contingent upon such services, as would public employment and maybe even drivers' licenses. "It should be as minimally coercive as possible," Segal says. "You need to reward it with a carrot rather than punishing non-compliance with a stick."
While most civilian military experts interviewed support the idea of national service, including the military, most retired military officers are on the other side of the argument. (It's worth noting here that the military opposed ending the draft a generation ago, so their opposition needs to be taken with a grain of salt.) They argue that when the draft was last used, the military was largely a low-tech enterprise. But now the inside of an M-1 tank looks more like the bridge of the Starship Enterprise, and takes substantial training to operate effectively. The cost of such training would skyrocket if draftee soldiers had to serve only two-year hitches, meaning greater numbers would have to be trained because of their shorter time in uniform. Even more critical, veterans say, is the ethos of the all-volunteer force, which is difficult to measure but impossible to ignore.
National service "is an absolutely bad idea," says Barry McCaffrey, a retired four-star Army general. "My age group learned to love the volunteer military." While McCaffrey says the idea of national service "makes sense in a civic sense" it would lead to lesser-quality soldiers. "We've never had better soldiers in the country's history" than we do now. "They volunteer for the Army, volunteer for combat units, they're high school graduates without felonies, they stay longer," he says, rattling off attributes he fears would shrink with national service.
Robert Scales, a retired Army major general, is an Army historian who once commanded the Army War College. "War has become so complex, and so dependent on ground forces, that the idea of drafting soldiers would greatly harm the American military," he says. "First of all, they wouldn�t go into the military goddammit — they'd go into the Army. And if they go into the Army, they're going to go into the combat ops" — infantry, armor, artillery — "because those are the jobs that nobody wants." To Scales, the paradox of resuming any kind of draft is that it would fill those ranks with people who do not want to be there, just as those ranks have become increasingly important. "The critical job in today's military — the jobs that have to be done right — are those close-combat jobs," he says. "So the irony is that in a draft those skills and will and morale and physical fitness — all those things that we most need in the close combat arms — are least likely to be attained."
John Keane, the Army's former No. 2 general, differs slightly from his colleagues. He is willing to entertain the idea of national service, including the military, so long as no one is forced to serve in uniform against his or her will. "National service is a good idea so long as the military, which would be the most demanding of the national service options, has to stay completely voluntary," he says. "We wouldn't want anybody in it who didn't want to be in it. I think that is a compromise that we in the military should be willing to make for the betterment of the country." Keane says today's youngsters are yearning to serve. "I've been dealing with this age group — from 17 to 25 — for most of my adult life," he says. "The current group of young people, particularly in the post 9/11-era, have a sense of purpose about them — they want to do something with their lives. It's not just in terms of 'What's good for me?'
Keane says that while such service "would be only for a very short period of time, I think the experience and satisfaction of it would actually last a lifetime." And he doesn't think it would harm the Army. "When you have volunteers, you can demand so much more of them," he says. "I'd like to think that the people who would still join us under a national-service requirement would really want to be a part of it. While some of them would be a little more challenging than the volunteers we have today, I would like to think that it would not diminish the Army." And there would be an added benefit. "With the professionalization of the Army, we have a tendency to be considerably more isolated from the American people," Keane says. "In terms of the health of the nation, and even of the institution itself called the U.S. military, the fact that more people would be connected to it through some form of national service would be very healthy."
Today's military was built to fight Colin Powell's kind of war — brief and intense — like the 1991 Gulf War. The U.S. military really doesn't have the depth to wage a sustained ground campaign as we are now doing in Iraq, many military officers say. If the U.S. thinks its future will consist of drawn-out campaigns like that now underway in Iraq, the prospect of a draft makes more sense. While the 1.4 million-strong U.S. military (with another 1 million reservists) is at the breaking point with only 162,000 troops in Iraq, that total is well below what experts estimated would be needed to tame that country. The Rand Corp. said in 2003 that, based on historical troop-to-population ratios from prior wars, the number of troops needed in Iraq would range from 258,000 (based on Bosnia) to 321,000 (based on post-World War II Germany) to 528,000 (based on Kosovo). The numbers suggest that if the U.S. really believes there is a war on terror to be won — and, if as the Bush Administration keeps saying, it is going to be a long war — more troops are going to be required to wage it.
Indeed, the all-volunteer force is getting expensive. The Congressional Budget Office reported in June that a string of pay raises and benefit hikes have led to a 21 percent pay hike over the past six years for enlisted troops. The bottom line, according to the CBO: the average soldier is better paid than the average civilian. While such comparisons are difficult to make, the CBO reported that enlisted military personnel are paid at a rate equal to the 75th percentile of private-sector workers with similar education. (For those whose math skills have deteriorated, that means that those wearing the nation's uniform are paid more than 75 percent of their civilian counterparts.) The Pentagon, in recent years, has tried to peg its salaries for enlisted folks at the 70th percentile. Too often, Pentagon officials say, comparisons of military pay only measure paychecks, which shortchanges military people who receive many valuable benefits — largely tax-free food and housing allowances — that civilians don't.
In a second report released August 15, the CBO noted that total pay for a starting soldier is $54,900 when allowances and bonuses are included. "We're getting a little too heavy on having a professional Army — the bills that are going to be coming due for retirement and medical care are going to be horrendous," Moskos says. "We're ending up with overpaid recruits and underpaid sergeants — in the old days a master sergeant with 20 years' experience made about six times what a private did — now it's about 2.5 to 1." Rangel agrees. "In terms of military volunteers, a lot of money is put into that to pump up patriotism — I mean $20,000, $30,000, $40,000 in enlistment and retention bonuses," he says. Of course, the true cost of renewing the draft — for good and for ill — could go well beyond figures punched into Pentagon calculators.
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