Rolling Stone Article: The Return of the Draft

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Mon, 31 Jan 2005 15:04:28 -0800 (PST)

Re: [FightTheDraft] Return of the Draft - Rolling Stone article 1/27/05

 

 

 

I've been reading all day on the draft issue - Signs are that it may be

re-introduced soon...

 

Please spread the word.

 

http://www.dailydraftdispatch.org/

 

Jan 27, 2005 Rolling Stone article " Return of the Draft " : By TIM DICKINSON

| Rolling Stone | 01/27/05

 

 

 

http://www.dailydraftdispatch.org/05_01/27_rollingstone.html?pageid=rs.Home & page\

region=single7 & rnd=1106899761305 & has-player=true

 

The Return of the Draft

With the army desperate for recruits, should college students be

packing their bags for Canada?

 

By TIM DICKINSON | Rolling Stone | 01/27/05

 

Uncle Sam wants you. He needs you. He'll bribe you to sign up. He'll

strong-arm you to re-enlist. And if that's not enough, he's got a plan

to draft you.

 

In the three decades since the Vietnam War, the " all-volunteer Army "

has become a bedrock principle of the American military. " It's a

magnificent force, " Vice President Dick Cheney declared during the

election campaign last fall, " because those serving are ones who

signed up to serve. " But with the Army and Marines perilously

overextended by the war in Iraq, that volunteer foundation is starting

to crack. The " weekend warriors " of the Army Reserve and the National

Guard now make up almost half the fighting force on the front lines,

and young officers in the Reserve are retiring in droves. The

Pentagon, which can barely attract enough recruits to maintain current

troop levels, has involuntarily extended the enlistments of as many as

100,000 soldiers. Desperate for troops, the Army has lowered its

standards to let in twenty-five percent more high school dropouts, and

the Marines are now offering as much as $30,000 to anyone who

re-enlists. To understand the scope of the crisis, consider this: The

United States is pouring nearly as much money into incentives for new

recruits -- almost $300 million -- as it is into international tsunami

relief.

 

" The Army's maxed out here, " says retired Gen. Merrill McPeak, who

served as Air Force chief of staff under the first President Bush.

" The Defense Department and the president seem to be still operating

off the rosy scenario that this will be over soon, that this pain is

temporary and therefore we'll just grit our teeth, hunker down and get

out on the other side of this. That's a bad assumption. " The Bush

administration has sworn up and down that it will never reinstate a

draft. During the campaign last year, the president dismissed the idea

as nothing more than " rumors on the Internets " and declared, " We're

not going to have a draft -- period. " Defense Secretary Donald

Rumsfeld, in an Op-Ed blaming " conspiracy mongers " for " attempting to

scare and mislead young Americans, " insisted that " the idea of

reinstating the draft has never been debated, endorsed, discussed,

theorized, pondered or even whispered by anyone in the Bush

administration. "

 

That assertion is demonstrably false. According to an internal

Selective Service memo made public under the Freedom of Information

Act, the agency's acting director met with two of Rumsfeld's

undersecretaries in February 2003 precisely to debate, discuss and

ponder a return to the draft. The memo duly notes the administration's

aversion to a draft but adds, " Defense manpower officials concede

there are critical shortages of military personnel with certain

special skills, such as medical personnel, linguists, computer network

engineers, etc. " The potentially prohibitive cost of " attracting and

retaining such personnel for military service, " the memo adds, has led

" some officials to conclude that, while a conventional draft may never

be needed, a draft of men and women possessing these critical skills

may be warranted in a future crisis. " This new draft, it suggests,

could be invoked to meet the needs of both the Pentagon and the

Department of Homeland Security.

 

The memo then proposes, in detail, that the Selective Service be

" re-engineered " to cover all Americans -- " men and (for the first

time) women " -- ages eighteen to thirty-four. In addition to name,

date of birth and Social Security number, young adults would have to

provide the agency with details of their specialized skills on an

ongoing basis until they passed out of draft jeopardy at age

thirty-five. Testifying before Congress two weeks after the meeting,

acting director of Selective Service Lewis Brodsky acknowledged that

" consultations with senior Defense manpower officials " have spurred

the agency to shift its preparations away from a full-scale,

Vietnam-style draft of untrained men " to a draft of smaller numbers of

critical-skills personnel. "

 

Richard Flahavan, spokesman for Selective Service, tells Rolling Stone

that preparing for a skills-based draft is " in fact what we have been

doing. " For starters, the agency has updated a plan to draft nurses

and doctors. But that's not all. " Our thinking was that if we could

run a health-care draft in the future, " Flahavan says, " then with some

very slight tinkering we could change that skill to plumbers or

linguists or electrical engineers or whatever the military was short. "

In other words, if Uncle Sam decides he needs people with your skills,

Selective Service has the means to draft you -- and quick.

 

But experts on military manpower say the focus on drafting personnel

with special skills misses the larger point. The Army needs more

soldiers, not just more doctors and linguists. " What you've got now is

a real shortage of grunts -- guys who can actually carry bayonets, "

says McPeak. A wholesale draft may be necessary, he adds, " to deal

with the situation we've got ourselves into. We've got to have a

bigger Army. "

 

Michael O'Hanlon, a military-manpower scholar at the Brookings

Institute, believes a return to a full-blown draft will become

" unavoidable " if the United States is forced into another war. " Let's

say North Korea strikes a deal with Al Qaeda to sell them a nuclear

weapon or something, " he says. " I frankly don't see how you could

fight two wars at the same time with the all-volunteer approach. " If a

second Korean War should break out, the United States has reportedly

committed to deploying a force of nearly 700,000 to defend South Korea

-- almost half of America's entire military.

 

The politics of the draft are radioactive: Polls show that less than

twenty percent of Americans favor forced military service. But

conscription has some unlikely champions, including veterans and

critics of the administration who are opposed to Bush's war in Iraq.

Reinstating the draft, they say, would force every level of society to

participate in military service, rather than placing a

disproportionate burden on minorities and the working class.

African-Americans, who make up roughly thirteen percent of the

civilian population, account for twenty-two percent of the armed

forces. And the Defense Department acknowledges that recruits are

drawn " primarily from families in the middle and lower-middle

socioeconomic strata. "

 

A societywide draft would also make it more difficult for politicians

to commit troops to battle without popular approval. " The folks making

the decisions are committing other people's lives to a war effort that

they're not making any sacrifices for, " says Charles Sheehan-Miles,

who fought in the first Gulf War and now serves as director of

Veterans for Common Sense. Under the current all-volunteer system,

fewer than a dozen members of Congress have children in the military.

 

Charlie Moskos, a professor of military sociology at Northwestern

University, says the volunteer system also limits the political

fallout of unpopular wars. " Without a draft, there's really no antiwar

movement, " Moskos says. Nearly sixty percent of Americans believe the

war in Iraq was a mistake, he notes, but they have no immediate

self-interest in taking to the streets because " we're willing to pay

people to die for us. It doesn't reflect very well on the character of

our society. "

 

Even military recruiters agree that the only way to persuade average

Americans to make long-term sacrifices in war is for the children of

the elite to put their lives on the line. In a recent meeting with

military recruiters, Moskos discussed the crisis in enlistment. " I

asked them would they prefer to have their advertising budget tripled

or have Jenna Bush join the Army, " he says. " They unanimously chose

the Jenna option. "

 

One of the few politicians willing to openly advocate a return to the

draft is Rep. Charles Rangel, a Democrat from New York, who argues

that the current system places an immoral burden on America's

underprivileged. " It shouldn't be just the poor and the working poor

who find their way into harm's way, " he says. In the days leading up

to the Iraq war, Rangel introduced a bill to reinstate the draft --

with absolutely no deferments. " If the kids and grandkids of the

president and the Cabinet and the Pentagon were vulnerable to going to

Iraq, we never would have gone -- no question in my mind, " he says.

" The closer this thing comes home to Americans, the quicker we'll be

out of Iraq. "

 

But instead of exploring how to share the burden more fairly, the

military is cooking up new ways to take advantage of the economically

disadvantaged. Rangel says military recruiters have confided in him

that they're targeting inner cities and rural areas with high

unemployment. In December, the National Guard nearly doubled its

enlistment bonus to $10,000, and the Army is trying to attract urban

youth with a marketing campaign called " Taking It to the Streets, "

which features a pimped-out yellow Hummer and a basketball exhibition

replete with free throwback jerseys. President Bush has also signed an

executive order allowing legal immigrants to apply for citizenship

immediately -- rather than wait five years -- if they volunteer for

active duty.

 

" It's so completely unethical and immoral to induce people that have

limited education and limited job ability to have to put themselves in

harm's way for ten, twenty or thirty thousand dollars, " Rangel says.

" Just how broke do you have to be to take advantage of these

incentives? " Seducing soldiers with cold cash also unnerves military

commanders. " We must consider the point at which we confuse 'volunteer

to become an American soldier' with 'mercenary,' " Lt. Gen. James

Helmly, the commander of the Army Reserve, wrote in a memo to senior

Army leadership in December.

 

The Reserve, Helmly warns, " is rapidly degenerating into a broken

force. " The Army National Guard is also in trouble: It missed its

recruitment goals of 56,000 by more than 5,000 in fiscal year 2004 and

is already 2,000 soldiers short in fiscal 2005. To keep enough boots

on the ground, the Pentagon has stopped asking volunteer soldiers to

extend their service -- and started demanding it. Using a little-known

provision called " stop loss, " the military is forcing reservists and

guardsmen to remain on active duty indefinitely. " This is an

'all-volunteer Army' with footnotes, " says McPeak. " And it's the

footnotes that are being held in Iraq against their wishes. If that's

not a back-door draft, tell me what is. "

 

David Qualls, who joined the Arkansas National Guard for a year, is

one of 40,000 troops in Iraq who have been informed that their

enlistment has been extended until December 24th, 2031. " I've served

five months past my one-year obligation, " says Qualls, the lead

plaintiff in a lawsuit challenging the military with breach of

contract. " It's time to let me go back to my life. It's a question of

fairness, and not only for myself. This is for the thousands of other

people that are involuntarily extended in Iraq. Let us go home. "

 

The Army insists that most " stop-lossed " soldiers will be held on the

front lines for no longer than eighteen months. But Jules Lobel, an

attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights who is representing

eight National Guardsmen in a lawsuit challenging the extensions, says

the 2031 date is being used to strong-arm volunteers into

re-enlisting. According to Lobel, the military is telling soldiers,

" We're giving you a chance to voluntarily re-enlist -- and if you

don't do it, we'll screw you. And the first way we'll screw you is to

put you in until 2031. "

 

But threatening volunteers, military experts warn, could be the

quickest way to ensure a return to the draft. According to O'Hanlon at

the Brookings Institute, such " callousness " may make it impossible to

recruit new soldiers -- no matter how much money you throw at them.

And if bigger sign-up bonuses and more aggressive recruitment tactics

don't do the trick, says Helmly of the Army Reserve, it could " force

the nation into an argument " about reinstating the draft.

 

In the end, it may simply come down to a matter of math. In January,

Bush told America's soldiers that " much more will be asked of you " in

his second term, even as he openly threatened Iran with military

action. Another war, critics warn, would push the all-volunteer force

to its breaking point. " This damn thing is just an explosion that's

about to happen, " says Rangel. Bush officials " can say all they want

that they don't want the draft, but there's not going to be that many

more buttons to push. "