Dana Milbank wants a universal military draft to cure what ails us, saying that the great decline since the post-World War II era in members of Congress who are veterans is part of our governing problem:
But one change, over time, could reverse the problems that have built up over the past few decades: We should mandate military service for all Americans, men and women alike, when they turn 18. The idea is radical, unlikely and impractical — but it just might work.
The idea that the natural state of our veteran population is the era of the thirty years after that war when we had national mobilization to win a world war is nonsense.
The idea that military veterans have a superior ability to govern and lead responsibly is a notion that John McCain probably would have appreciated being raised 5 years ago. And if a Republican raised it, it would be shouted down as "fascist," no doubt.
One problem with a draft is that we would have a choice of universal conscription, in which case we'd have a huge military that we'd need expanded bases to house them and increased expenditures to equip and train them--unless dramatically expanding people while holding spending constant is a faster way to wreck our military as a feature rather than a bug.
Sure, you could cycle draftees through quickly by keeping draftee terms of service very short so we don't expand the military and keep universal service, but the troops would be worthless. It takes more than just the initial basic training and advanced individual training to create a soldier (or any other service member). That's just the initial rough stamping. It takes years or decades depending on the job (and rank, of course).
Or, if you want universal service but don't want to expand the military, maybe you think that the excess could just be a pool of cheap labor for state, federal, and local governments? That's probably the more likely appeal for many. But that doesn't address the problem Milbanks thinks military service provides.
Or, far more likely, we keep the military the same size and only conscript a fraction of the 18-year-olds who come of age each year. In that case, we get the fun of drafting rules on who gets exempted. College? Key industries? Doctors? Community organizers? Healthcare.gov programmers?
So right there you'd have the politically connected avoiding service.
And what about medical exemptions? You think the politically connected or simply wealthy won't be able to get doctors to swear they are unsuited to military service?
Oh, and by the way, we still have reserve components. Who gets drafted to serve in the Reserves and National Guard rather than the active components?
But assuming we somehow craft a conscription law that narrowly provides military service to everyone while keeping the same size military (and ignore the length of service term issue), a draft would wreck our military.
Note that other countries are moving toward our system because they have seen how effective our volunteer troops are. And we've managed to recruit enough troops to wage two wars over the last dozen years and maintain that quality. The latter was the major theoretical weakness of the volunteer system and we passed it.
Sure, Switzerland voted to keep conscription. But so what? They are surrounded by the most powerful military alliance in history (NATO). Who is going to attack them? One of the thug rulers with a secret bank account there in case their home rule goes south fast?
And you can cite retired General McChrystal as a supporter, but he is plain wrong. And considering that as a former special forces guy he basically commanded triple volunteers--each special forces operator volunteered for the Army, volunteered for airborne training, and then volunteered for special forces, just what in blue blazes is the general thinking?
Oh, he's thinking that conscription wouldn't affect the quality of his troops. Maybe with a huge pool of conscripts, he'd have a better chance of getting good people even if they are just double volunteers.
No, a draft is bad for the military we have. Consider that we actually recruit people who want to be in the military right now. If we draft, we tell all these people we currently persuade to join that you cannot join.
Then we randomly choose from the vast qualified pool of civilians, saddling our military with troops who mostly don't want to be there, with only a small fraction of draftees who would have joined anyway? Our military leaders will hate that. They've come to appreciate the advantages in training and discipline that comes from having only people who walked in on their own to join rather than resentful conscripts who would rather be anywhere else--and that's just the conscripts who wouldn't have used an exemption if they could have.
So even our officer corps would suffer higher attrition as capable officers decide that they signed up to lead troops and not babysit a "better citizen" incubator with lots of uncooperative conscripts.
Most of those conscripts would get out as soon as they could, wrecking retention and interrupting the path to long-term troops who provide the backbone of our military--long-service non-commissioned officers (NCOs).
And that's on top of the attrition of even those who would have volunteered anyway who have their initial military experience soured by serving with people who want to be anywhere but in the military.
Send that conscript military to war and more of our people will die, more innocent civilians will die in the crossfire, and we'd have a higher chance of defeat.
Face it, the only time it makes sense to conscript is when we face a war on the scale of a world war.
The idea that a draft could cure our civilian society rather than wreck our military quality is so ridiculous that it is hard to imagine that someone could still make the case in this day and age--notwithstanding the glorious Swiss military tradition that we are ignoring.
Some people are just idiots on military matters. Even reporters and generals.
UPDATE: A retired general focuses on the self-killing angle. You don't have to have seen war to understand this--I didn't, don't forget.
