Next week the U.S. will launch a two-year effort to find ways to increase military and civic service among its citizenry, especially U.S. youth.
The effort will be spearheaded by an 11-member commission that will travel the country in 2018 and 2019 “to ignite a national conversation around service and develop recommendations that will encourage and inspire all Americans, particularly young people, to serve.
I actually made an effort to contribute to this inquiry last summer with my article "Course Could Be a Lifesaver for Recruiting" (sorry, not online--you'll need a physical copy of the July 2017 Army magazine):
It is about using a civilian version of the Army combat lifesaver course to both build a capacity in our cities to respond to casualty events, whether natural, criminal, or terrorist; and to provide avenues to recruit in regions that are not well represented in the Army by telling the Army story to potential recruits during the training.
The program would target regions--especially cities--that don't provide many recruits as a percent of their population compared to the Army's traditional recruiting base in the south (where many Army bases are located).
Actually, in an ideal world this would be a joint Army-Homeland Security program that could expose more Americans to public service but at worst provide civilians with lifesaving skills useful for disaster response or for coping with terrorism or crime scenes--or even accidents.
A draft in peacetime should be ruled out given that so many would need to be given exemptions because so few are needed compared to the entire population of potential recruits. So far the military is managing to recruit enough, don't forget, even though it is getting harder to do. So if there is a shortfall it won't be by much. You really want a massive draft bureaucracy to get the last few percentage points of recruits?
And no, it isn't better if most drafted are funneled to civilian service. That sounds like involuntary servitude. Which isn't "encouraging and inspiring service," at all. Seriously, just who do you think will get the cushy jobs volunteering in Hawaii or in Denver or Miami soup kitchens rather than being sent to boot camp?
This should be a military recruiting issue only.
And remember, to justify the draft bureaucracy cost you don't want to draft all military recruits instead of recruiting volunteers and thus forfeit willing recruits to get more unwilling recruits. So I disagree with the notion that a draft would increase the quality of the recruits over the volunteer system. That's the exact opposite of our experience going from a draft to a volunteer military.
