Thinkin’bout Stuff

***  Apologies if you tried to visit between 3pm & 8:30pm EST… the server this blog is hosted on was down  ***

I believe the men and women of the United States Armed Forces are highly trained, skilled professionals who are the best at what they do; I bet you believe that too, as do the vast majority of Americans (at least they say so in public since that’s the PC thing to do these days).

So, if we are all in agreement that these are skilled positions in the military, why on Earth are we still discussing a return to the draft? Would we draft people into other skilled positions to make sure we have a “fair” cross section of citizens performing public service?

If a conscripted army is better than an all volunteer army, how about police forces, teachers, librarians, municipal waste removal, or any other publicly funded government jobs?

Think of how many problems would be solved. No more worrying about finding teachers for inner cities or arguing over the right to go to schools with better teachers. All teachers would come from a draft pool, randomly selected to ensure fairness, regardless of education, background, intelligence, race, sexual orientation, religion, knowledge of subject matter… a summer of basic training and you’re good to go for two to three year teaching assignments.

And who wouldn’t feel safer knowing that the police officer patrolling the streets of their community has a background in criminology gained from years of experience in the system as a juvenile offender?

What about the people who hold those jobs today? Hey, these are government jobs; we need to be fair and make sure everyone gets a turn, so they’ll just have to move on to something else.

Sound ridiculous? Absolutely! So why then are some folks so hot on the idea of going back to forced military service, as if military service is some sort of bottom feeding job that should be filled via lottery so everyone has an equal chance of losing? Perhaps these folks do not really believe our military is a highly trained, skilled, professional force made up of the best our country has to offer, doing a job they have chosen to do (as opposed to doing a job they have to do because they can’t do anything else).

So… why am I thinkin’ about this topic yet again? (previously here and here) Well, an apparent slip of the tongue by Veteran Affairs Secretary Jim Nicholson is leading some to believe he thinks we need to return to the days of the draft:

December 22, 2006 The Sun: “I think if we bring back the draft. there should be no loopholes for anybody who happens to be drafted,” he said. “If it’s a random system, it ought to be an honestly random system. And if drafted, they should come in and do service or have, possibly, an alternative way of doing other public service for a period of time.”

He added: “And, I think our society would benefit from that, yes, sir.”

Yep.. sure does sound like he thinks it’s a good idea.  Later he said this:

“Today, some comments I made about my experiences in Vietnam during that war may have been misconstrued,” Mr. Nicholson said. “Let me be clear, I strongly support the all-volunteer military and do not support returning to a draft.”

Seems a bit confusing, but I guess the first statement is his opinion and the second is his position? Well then, I guess I support his position and disagree with his opinion.

When we say society would benefit from the draft, perhaps on some levels this is true. The training and discipline that is gained through military service has helped many individuals in their post-service careers and everyday life. It helps society as a whole from the perspective of increasing the number of young men and women of good character in the general population, but the assumption is that the same would hold true if people were forced to serve as opposed to volunteering; that the good character is a byproduct of the training and not necessarily something these brave men and women brought to the table and had refined through military training.  And even if the assumption were correct, would the benefit outweigh the compromises we would be making in our military. If random selection were to be applied in its purest form, would the raw material necessary to build a professional fighting force be available, or would we be settling for mediocrity in the name of “fairness”.

Don Surber, in his blog, has a great article exploring the impact of this “fair” approach on society.

So, my thinking on this is that the benefits of a draft, as it is being applied here, are somewhat similar to the benefits of busing and quotas. It is being promoted as a means of ensuring fairness in selecting who fights wars and who stays home, completely ignoring the fact that our all volunteer military is the best fighting force we have ever fielded. To substitute draft-driven social engineering for the effectiveness of our military would do more harm to our society than good.

If we reach a point in time where a draft is the only way we can ensure sufficient levels of military personnel to defend our country, then the draft would serve a useful purpose as a fall back position; but even then we need to ensure our “selective service” is selective and not entirely random. This ain’t some game we are playing here, nor is it an issue of fairness; we need to ensure the quality of the draftees is on a par with those we accept as volunteers.  If not, we risk placing the lives of our professionals in danger as they are forced to fight side-by-side with conscripted soldiers.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 22nd, 2006 at 1:02 pm and is filed under Politics, War. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.