Should we reinstate the Draft?
Posted by Joel Friedlander | 8 Comments
A few nights ago Bill Moyers suggested in his verbal essay at the end of his program, “Bill Moyers Journal,” that the real way to bring sanity to foreign war policy would be to reinstate the draft. That way, he reasoned, the general population of the United States would have a genuine interest in whether or not we wage war in Afghanistan and Iraq, and possibly elsewhere. As it is, the people fighting the wars usually do not include the children of the members of Congress or the well to do, or even the middle class. What Moyers suggested was that if the draft was reinstated the members of Congress would have to consider what they were actually doing when they sent our soldiers, nay, our children off to be killed overseas.
That got me to thinking about the whole issue of conscription. We would end up with a really representative military if there were no deferments for any reason, and women were drafted along with men. They do that in Israel you know. When that country goes to war the leaders have to answer to their population.
“On the eve of its 61st Independence Day, the country’s population stands at 7,411,000, according to figures released by the Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS). Some 5,593,000 of the population (75.5 percent) are Jewish Israelis, 1,498,000 (20.2%) are Israeli Arabs and the remaining 320,000 (4.3%) are immigrants and their offspring who are not registered as Jews by the Interior Ministry, including some 200,000 foreign workers.” Jewish Virtual Library http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Society_&_Culture/newpop.html.
Their population is one fortieth of ours, which means that the 121 Israeli soldiers killed in the 2006 Israeli-Hezbollah War, were the equivalent of about 4,898 American soldiers being killed in a conflict. In the Yom Kippur War, 2,688 soldiers were killed, which was the equivalent of 107,520 Americans being killed in a war. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yom_Kippur_War.
Moreover, the Israeli soldiers who fight in their wars are generally reservists, who drop whatever they are doing when the get the call to report for duty. They are citizen soldiers in the same sense that our Militia during the Revolutionary War were. There is a unanimity of support for the state in Israel which is almost entirely missing in America. When a soldier dies there all the citizens feel the pain, not just the lower classes. In terms of gender equality, I don’t think I have to tell you that everyone is drafted and serves for two years and are in the reserves forever.
Perhaps we should reinstate a gender equal draft here so that our government policy would comport with our national interest.
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8 Responses to “Should we reinstate the Draft?”
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November 3rd, 2009 @
Sure, go ahead, reinstate the draft. Meanwhile I’ll be off in Mexico, where the weather is warm and the margaritas are cold.
November 3rd, 2009 @
Nobody’d draft a grump like you! Maybe if we start going into Mexico they’d stop coming here.
November 9th, 2009 @
“Perhaps we should reinstate a gender equal draft here so that our government policy would comport with our national interest.”…PS. make it non-exclusionary too.
Exactly how does a voluminous majority of the United States citizenry begin to grasp its national interest? Reinstating the draft provokes the middle of the bell curve to awake. Taken seriously it moves the needle from apathy to engagement from two perspectives; the first from those who fear they may have to sacrifice, the second from those who are reminded they can become involved in the representative process and affect change.
As a starting point of an agreed upon “government policy/national interest” we might use the federal expenditures for our military. Projected for 2010 that would be approximately 57% of all federal recommended discretionary spending (DOD, War & VA per Obama’s Budget to Congress – note it does not include Homeland Security, +3% more).
Most efforts to reinstate the draft begin and end with it being a call to shared sacrifice or “fairness”. That seemed to be the tone of Mr. Moyer’s essay. Not a bad tone, it just falls on deaf ears. One thing Americans have uniformly jettisoned as a result of yoking to the vapor of free market ideology is fairness in practice. In principle all things remain.
In my humble opinion, we the electorate miss the point. If we don’t want to involve ourselves in the creation of policy then at least participate in the allocation and spending of the enormous amount of money expended in ours and our future generations good name. We not only allow our government to spend almost a trillion dollars a year on violence, aggression and fear mongering but we don’t even get our cut. Rather than pay soldiers fairly we pay mercenaries more via outsourcing (unless they are third world subcontracts) everything from support services to armed soldiering.
My enthusiastic endorsement of reinstatement of a draft is that it might begin the national dialogue that indeed comports our government policy with our national interest. That dialogue begins with awareness building. Awareness of what is actually being done on our credit and good will. While we may have forgotten how to be fair in America we certainly have not lost our ability to be indignant. I would trust that trait of a passive population to be the charge that wakens them when they are required to sacrifice. Once the giant is awake it might just ask, “Hey, what are we getting for almost a trillion dollars?”.
Governmental policy is how we spend our money. I would suspect that even the architects of our current Military Industrial Complex could not be dishonest enough to represent our current policy as in our national interests. One thing a good capitalist is, is honest when the door is shut.
The missing link here is leadership. Something we have not seen in a long, long time. So it is left to the upstarts to wage an effort of reason and intellect towards apathy and corruption….keep it up!
November 10th, 2009 @
Perhaps a period of service in exchange for free collegiate/trade school education?
February 17th, 2010 @
I think reinstating the draft will cause a lot ofproblems, becuase that violates people’s individual rights.
March 9th, 2010 @
Surprise surprise kids they already have ..they’ve re-instated the draft via Drivers License Renewal application Quote from back- “By submitting this application, I am consenting to registration with the Federal Selective Service System, if so required. If under 18 years of age, I understand that I will be registered when I attain 18 years of age as required by federal law.”
March 9th, 2010 @
Jay, the Selective Service registration is not the same as a draft. The Selective Service is more like a list of those available should Congress and the President institute a draft.
Check out Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selective_service
February 21st, 2011 @
Good go to Mexico, shows your true allegiance, hope you get beheaded by drug-runners. They should bring back mandatory military service, it doesn’t mean send everyone to the front-line, but to defend power plants, dams, and other important infrastructures. Citizens from age 18-26, and graduated from high school, should have military training, I see no ill-will in this. If you are a true citizen, you must defend your home, state, and country- make it stronger by defending it and spreading democracy.