Why not reinstate the draft

But many more Americans reach draft-eligible age each year than the military could possibly use. Any new draft would still raise new questions about the fairness of who serves and who does not.

Any major conflict with a great power adversary — however unlikely — would require a much larger military than the country has at present. Registration is supposed to provide Selective Service with a list of everyone eligible to be drafted and their contact information.

So registration theoretically speeds up the process of bringing hundreds of thousands of soldiers into the military. And planning is important. Failure to plan adequately for bringing large numbers of recruits into the military has made wartime mobilization complicated in the past, as in the U.

The mobilization process itself is a massive production. During World War II , more than , volunteers helped evaluate men at over 11, local draft and appeal boards. Every person was examined; classified as available, deferred or exempt; and then processed through the system appropriately, including considering appeals. In , during the Vietnam War, with a much smaller draft than in World War II, more than 31, people staffed thousands of local and appeal boards around the nation.

The present system has just 11, volunteers identified as ready to help. In rejecting National Coalition for Men v. Bacevich's solution?

Bacevich, professor emeritus of international relations and history at Boston University, is critical of American foreign policy in the post-Cold War era. He maintains that after the Cold War, Washington came to see military power as a tool to solve problems instead of relying on diplomacy. He also contends that popular culture has given rise to an unrealistic portrayal of what war is really like, simultaneously promoting war as heroic as well as the stereotype of the broken warrior with PTSD.

Some say these misconceptions only widen the gap of understanding between the civilian and military populations. Bacevich's only son, Andrew Bacevich Jr. The cross-partisan organization With Honor seeks to help more veterans get into Congress and perhaps bring us back to a time when the goal of war was peace rather than one based on intervention.

According to With Honor, veterans represented more than half of Congress for much of the second half of the 20th century. Today, veteran representation in Congress is near a historic low at 19 percent. Bacevich isn't convinced that veterans can do a better job at handling the way our military forces are deployed but says he wholeheartedly supports more veterans in Congress.

Retired Air Force Col. It's also clear that the government is serious about investigating not only how to bridge the gap between civilian and military populations, but how to inspire the American public to serve. Let me cite just one example: About 24 million men were registered for the World War I draft, and about 17 million passed the initial physical and mental tests. Of these, more than 8 million petitioned for exemptions for a variety of reasons.

Virtually all of those exempted were white! African-Americans made up 9 percent of the population in , but 13 percent of those drafted.

Because there were no African-Americans on draft boards, and when a white man requested an exemption, an African-American could be found to send in his place. Given in the political impotency of African-Americans, the sorry state of race relations, the relatively much poorer health of African-Americans in general, and the terrible schools African-Americans attended, the statistics are striking. So much for the war to make the world safe for democracy.

The World War II draft was perhaps our most just draft, but even there, the undereducated were most likely to be carrying bayonets or leading those who did, and the well-educated were more likely to find themselves in the Pentagon or serving in one of the dozens of civilian organizations that ran the war effort. Furthermore, many skilled workers burrowed into war industries in which employees were granted draft exemptions, and they guarded these privileges fiercely.

In , because of a severe manpower shortage, the War Manpower Commission tried to draft more than , surplus farm workers, but farm-state representatives and senators were successful in legislating against their being drafted. President Truman vetoed the bill, but, because he did so in the spring of , none served. The primary reason I oppose a draft, however, is because presidents have taken advantage of this too readily available pool for domestic political reasons. Truman could not have gone to war in Korea without a formal declaration if he had not had a draft force to fall back on.

But a more glaring example is Vietnam. Let me give you a quote from President Lyndon Johnson: In , on the cusp of deciding whether or not to up the ante in Vietnam, McGeorge Bundy suggested that Johnson consider using only volunteers to fight in Vietnam. He was never drafted but served 27 years in the U. Air Force, including two flying tours in Vietnam in which he accumulated more than combat missions.

His views are his and his alone and do not represent those of the Industrial College of the Armed Forces, the National Defense University, the Department of Defense, or anybody else. Then we left. I then glanced into the rearview mirror, at that little sliver of her face that was just her eyes, and I watched as she tried to understand the difference.

Never before in our history has an American been able to fight in a war that is older than they are. Currently our civil-military divide is arguably as wide as it has ever been. From Somalia to Syria, American forces are engaged in combat. With recent military posturing against Iran, against North Korea, it is also easy to imagine our country sleepwalking into another major theater war.

And the only way to do that, I increasingly believe, is to reconsider the draft. Congress has also taken a renewed interest in the draft, having created in a bipartisan National Commission on Military, National and Public Service charged with two missions.

This past January, while it continues to hold hearings in communities across the country, it released its first interim report. Although the draft was abolished in , the Selective Service registration requirement was resumed in , when after the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, a capability to conscript was again deemed critical to the national defense.

People often assume the draft was compulsory for an entire generation, but this was never the case. Of those killed in Vietnam, the war most inextricably linked to the draft, To wage war , America has always had to create a social construct to sustain it, from the colonial militias and French aid in the Revolution, to the introduction of the draft and the first-ever income tax to fund the Civil War, to the war bonds and industrial mobilization of World War II.

In the past, a blend of taxation and conscription meant it was difficult for us to sustain a war beyond several years. Neither citizens nor citizen soldiers had much patience for commanders, or Commanders in Chief, who muddled along. This is no longer true. Today the way we wage war is ahistorical—and seemingly without end. Never before has America engaged in a protracted conflict with an all-volunteer military that was funded primarily through deficit spending. Our leaders responded to those attacks by mobilizing our government and military, but when it came to citizens, President George W.

In fairness to Bush, when read as a response to a terrorist attack designed to disrupt American life, his remarks are understandable. However, when read in the context of what would become a two-decade military quagmire, those same remarks seem negligent, even calculated.

This is particularly true for a generation of leaders both Republican and Democrat who came of age in Vietnam, when indignation at the draft mobilized the boomer generation to end the war, one that otherwise might have festered on like the wars today.

Instead, deficit spending along with an all-volunteer military has given three successive administrations a blank check with which to wage war. And wage war they have. Without congressional approval. It decreases it. There are few debates in public life that should merit greater attention from its citizens than whether or not to commit their sons and daughters to fight and possibly to die.

Imagine the debate surrounding troop levels in Afghanistan, or Iraq, or Syria, if some of those troops were draftees, or if your own child were eligible for the draft. Imagine if we lived in a society where the commitment of and year-olds to a combat zone generated the same breathless attention as a college-admissions scandal.