These two career military fellows want the draft back.
Are we seriously supposed to believe their claims to want huge conscript forces so the US will fight with them fewer and less bloody wars than it has done or could do with volunteers, alone?
Really?
Major General (Ret) Dennis Laich served 35 years in the U.S. Army Reserve.
Col. (Ret.) Lawrence Wilkerson is visiting professor of government and public policy at the College of William and Mary.
He was chief of staff to secretary of state Colin Powell from 2002-05, special assistant to Powell when Powell was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (1989-93), and deputy director and director of the USMC War College (1993-97).
The Deep Unfairness of America’s All-Volunteer Force
The authors begin spending several paragraphs whining that you have to offer expensive pay and benefits to field a volunteer force, and upkeep and medical care for veterans is also too costly.
Are we to think the far more numerous troops and veterans of conscript forces would be less costly, in total?
Who believes that?
But then they get to the "ethical" objections to relying on volunteers, forgetting altogether the objections to involuntary servitude, to forced labor.
A more serious challenge for the democracy that is America, however, is the ethical one.
Today, more than 300 million Americans lay claim to rights, liberties, and security that not a single one of them is obligated to protect and defend.
Apparently, only 1 percent of the population feels that obligation.
That 1 percent is bleeding and dying for the other 99 percent.
So that there is no draft is unethical, they huff and puff, because the volunteer military is too small.
So we need more people bleeding and dying?
That would be less "unethical"?
And, anyway, what about Trump's entirely accurate remark that this is what volunteers are signing up for, and they know it - just as we might say about police, prison guards, fireman, and (come to that) miners, high-iron workers, and many others people who knowingly choose dangerous lines of work?
People who choose to undertake dangerous lines of work are, uh, more exposed to danger at work than people who don't.
Yes, that's true.
Further, that 1 percent does not come primarily or even secondarily from the families of the Ivy Leagues, of Wall Street, of corporate leadership, from the Congress, or from affluent America; it comes from less well-to-do areas: West Virginia, Maine, Pennsylvania, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, and elsewhere.
For example, the Army now gets more soldiers from the state of Alabama, population 4.8 million, than it gets from New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles combined, aggregate metropolitan population more than 25 million.
Similarly, 40 percent of the Army comes from seven states of the Old South.
As one of us has documented in his book, Skin in the Game: Poor Kids and Patriots, this is an ethically poisonous situation.
No, it's not.
It is no reason for concern if the people going into any particular line of work are not a representative sample of the country, demographically, or even of its workforce as a whole.
Opportunities, as well as aptitudes, skill sets, and aspirations are not uniform across racial, ethnic, class, age, educational, socio-economic, or sexual subsets of the population.
They never have been and never can be, in any society of actual human beings, and children of elites rarely become janitors, welders, carpenters, or cops.
So what?
After these phoney bleats, the authors return to using up many more long paragraphs on their first complaint, that a volunteer force costs way too much for the firepower, for their liking.
But they end their piece with two other absurd objections, and a lie.
First, they challenge the idea that volunteers alone could enable America to defend itself in the altogether fantastic case in which somebody actually attacked and sought to conquer the United States, itself, not with high-tech methods (nukes, for example) but with multitudes of armed men storming our beaches and borders.
And then they present the commonly made but ludicrous - one might almost say "insane" - argument that denying our political leaders the kind of gigantic conscript forces that alone enabled US participation in both world wars, in Korea, and in Vietnam actually encourages, even enables, them to engage far too readily and willingly in faraway, not really necessary wars.
Then they finish with a wholly unjustified slide from the truth that the children of the elites are less common in the military than the children of others to the tacit but evident and egregious lie that none of them are there, at all.
Is there anyone among us who would not believe that having an all-volunteer (or, more to the point, an all-recruited) military coming only from the 1 percent does not contribute to the facility with which presidents call upon that instrument?
In a rational world, we would be declared insane to believe otherwise.
Said more explicitly, if the sons and daughters of members of Congress, of the corporate leadership, of the billionaire class, of the Ivy Leagues, of the elite in general, were exposed to the possibility of combat, would we have less war?
From a socio-economic class perspective, the AVF is inherently unfair.
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