Draft NOtices, September-October 2002
This article is from Draft NOtices, the newsletter of the
Committee Opposed to Militarism and the Draft
(www.comdsd.org)
For Those Who Believe We Need a Draft by Rick
Jahnkow
Every now and then we hear people talk about wanting to
bring back conscription. Sometimes it comes from conservatives and
militarists who
would like to see a larger military force so they can expand
U.S. bases abroad and conduct warfare in more places
simultaneously.
We also hear it from liberals, and even a few leftists, who
are under the impression that conscription would be doing a big favor
for
disadvantaged youths or would lessen the chances of war by
spreading the burden for maintaining our bloated military
establishment and overly
aggressive foreign policy to more middle-class people. They
even make the argument, sometimes, that we need a draft to keep us
from drifting
toward Prussian militarism and a Hitler-type
dictatorship.
These aren't new arguments. Some of them were used to
successfully convince people to keep the draft that was begun during
WWII, even
though the people of this country had historically been
suspicious of conscription and previously had only allowed drafts
briefly during the
Civil War and WWI. Many of these arguments were also used in
the early 1970s to try to keep the draft going as we began to pull
out of the
war in Southeast Asia. By then, however, Vietnam had brought
back the traditional understanding that conscription exploits those
who are
politically and economically disadvantaged and makes it
easier for governments to wage illegitimate wars.
Unfortunately, the memory of this lesson is not as fresh as
it once was, and there are both liberals and conservatives who are
now taking
advantage of the post-9/11 climate of fear to make people
think that a draft would be good for the nation.
Right now, our military doesn't really require conscription
to maintain its current force levels, and the Pentagon has found that
using its
well-funded recruiting campaign and expanded outreach to
schools can influence young people in a way that would be impossible
with a draft
(threatening people with jail if they don't enter the
military is hardly an effective way to win the hearts and minds of
younger generations).
However, if the war hawks in this country continue to have
their way, there will be more pressure to enlarge the armed forces
beyond what can
be supported with voluntary enlistments, and the voices
calling for conscription will get much louder than they presently
are. This is a good time,
therefore, to review some of the key issues that should be
considered:
1. There are those who claim that conscription is needed for
national defense. However, it takes months to move people through the
draft
classification system, the induction process and military
training, so it has no usefulness for meeting short-term emergencies.
(The Reserves and
National Guard are designed to play that role.) The draft's
main military value is to provide a steady stream of draftees for a
long, drawn-out war
or when the size of military commitments is so large that
the force level can't be maintained with only enlistments. With a
draft, the government
doesn't have to rely on people voluntarily stepping forward
to fill the military's ranks, so it can maintain a larger force size
and pursue the kind of
unpopular military adventurism that led to more than 10
years of U.S. warfare in Southeast Asia. Not having a draft doesn't
guarantee the U.S.
won't wage illegitimate wars, but it creates more pressure
on the government to justify its actions than if we gave the
president the blank check he
would have with conscription. Imagine what that would be
like with a commander-in-chief like George Bush II.
2. Conscription is an unfair tax. Any government can provide
staffing for public services two basic ways: it can pay people to do
the necessary
work, or confiscate their labor and order them to do it. A
draft is confiscation that forces individuals to give up their
freedom and some of the
higher civilian income they could have earned while in the
military. Because of the higher turnover of drafted military
personnel, training
becomes more expensive and the government is forced to set
wages low for both draftees and professional volunteers, so all
military members -
but especially the draftees - pay a severe personal tax, and
the true cost of the military is not shared equally by all.
3. Contrary to some people's claim, a draft would not
protect us from the dangerous influence of a professional military
class. By nature, the
military is not a democratic organization, and with or
without conscription it is the officer corps and politicians who set
and control policy, not
the lower ranks. Lower-ranking military members take a great
risk in defying orders; even merely questioning them can bring
reprisals that have
much greater consequences than those faced by employees with
civilian jobs.
If the draft were a protection from totalitarianism and
dictatorship, then conscription would not have been relied upon as it
was by past
totalitarian governments in Spain, Russia, China, various
Latin American countries, Prussia/Germany and Japan.
4. The argument that a draft will keep us out of
illegitimate wars because draftees would be more likely to resist
them is often heard, but it
ignores some important facts:
· Draftees are picked young and have the least
understanding of the political policies for which their lives may be
sacrificed.
· They are the most obedient of troops because, above
all, they want to get out of the military, and they know that if they
stay out of trouble, they
only have to wait a couple of years. Volunteers, on the
other hand, are in for a longer term and have much more at
stake.
· A historical fact that has been forgotten even by
many liberals is that most of the organized resistance to the Vietnam
War within the armed
forces - like the Concerned Officers Movement and Movement
for a Democratic Military - came largely from volunteers, not
draftees.
· A draft was in place prior to the Vietnam War, yet it
took more than 10 years of body bags coming home before resistance
and general
opposition grew strong enough to finally force an end to the
war. If the draft was supposed to be an obstacle to illegitimate war,
it didn't do a
very good job with that conflict.
5. Some people believe that the problem with the Vietnam
draft was that it disproportionately affected non-white and
low-income people. They
say a draft that includes more middle-class, white people
would be more just and would cause greater reluctance to go to war.
There are several
problems with this argument:
· Once a U.S. president sends people into combat and
body bags start coming home, it becomes very difficult, politically,
to retreat; those who
are intent on making war know that no politician will ever
want to be the one who says that U.S. soldiers died in vain. This
means that if a
president wants to launch military action, he can do so with
confidence that both Congress and the public will back him, at least
initially.
Draftees would not provide a braking effect until after
there are great losses and probably years of stalemate (Vietnam is a
prime example).
· The U.S. government has learned that the key to
avoiding the kind of civilian and military resistance that occurred
with Vietnam is to keep the
U.S. casualty count, length of battle, and media coverage
down to a minimum. That's why the Pentagon has shifted to fighting
wars more with
massive air bombardment, missile attacks and native client
forces on the ground. Having conscription would not be a reason to
change this
strategy, so spreading the burden of war with a draft would
still not create the potential opposition that some people
predict.
· We will always have a ground combat force that is
disproportionately poorer and non-white. Even with a draft, people
with privilege would be
more able to get the medical deferments and conscientious
objector status that would keep them out of uniform, and if they
failed to stay out of
the military, their education would put them
disproportionately into noncombat jobs. The most important thing that
we can do today to address
racial and class imbalance in the military is to demand a
more equitable economy and an improved, demilitarized educational
system, while also
working to shrink the war budget.
· The logic that we need a draft so that more members
of a particular group can be killed or placed at risk in order to
bring home to the public
that war is wrong has serious ethical implications. Aside
from being a form of hostage-taking, it's like saying people should
become drug users
to learn about the harmful consequences of using drugs, or
that we should support another nuclear arms race, because more people
would feel
the threat of annihilation and that would then lead to the
elimination of war - or at least nuclear weapons (though that clearly
didn't happen after
the 1980s nuclear arms race). If the U.S. government had the
power to send EVERYONE off to kill and/or be killed in its wars of
intervention, it
would be a form of equality - but it would be equality of
the grave. Instead, we should demand that NO one be drafted, and NO
one be
recruited to fight for the economic and political
exploitation of the rest of the world by the U.S.
We have wars because people have been brought up with a
predominant value system that encourages people to solve
disagreements with
violence. The general population is indoctrinated in this
value system from an early age, and our culture and governmental
institutions reinforce
it. Military training is the extreme form of pro-war
indoctrination, which is why people like Napoleon, Hitler and the
militarists of today have
wanted to universally subject young people to conscription.
The draft is a quick and effective way to indoctrinate more people
and then send
them back to civilian society to spread the authoritarian
value system they have learned.
The Pentagon was forced to give up the draft at the end of
Vietnam, but it has been been increasingly insinuating itself in
institutions of
socialization to continue the process of militarization. If
we brought back the draft, it wouldn't remove the military from our
schools or culture, it
would just make it easier to put more people through the
militarization process. We'd end up repeating the post-WWII cycle
that led to decades
of reactionary politics and an obedient population that was
willing to give the Pentagon anything it wanted.
Practicing effective self-government and democracy requires
that we instill in individuals a propensity for critical, creative
thinking and a
willingness to challenge the "chain of command" when
institutions are not serving their needs. Bringing back the draft is
the opposite of what
we should do to achieve those goals.
This article is from Draft NOtices, the newsletter of the
Committee Opposed to Militarism and the Draft (www.comdsd.org)