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[Conscription] rests on the assumption that your kids belong to the state.
—President Ronald Reagan
Before 9/11 the draft was a five-letter word that no thinking politician would utter in public. But after years of war, our ground forces almost collapsed from overcommitment. The shock of seeing Soldiers suffer from the consequences of too many deployments is causing politicians of all stripes, some retired generals, and bureaucrats in the Pentagon to rethink the issue. The draft would fill the ranks with cheap and plentiful men and women. No wonder the idea is gaining ground.
Advocates for national service do make some compelling arguments. They point to the intrinsic value of service. “A reinstated draft, or compulsory military service,” writes Joseph Epstein in The Atlantic, “would redistribute the burden of the responsibility for fighting wars, and engage the nation in military conflicts in a more immediate and democratic way.” Old Cold Warriors like Epstein believe that every young American owes his or her country something as part of a debt of citizenship. Proponents are always careful to point out that service does not necessarily mean service in combat. They argue that the young can plant trees for the Forest Service, serve the elderly in retirement homes, help clean up cities and rivers, or mentor and be “big brothers and sisters” to the disadvantaged.1
Older veterans like Epstein venerate their own time in service, because the experience exposed them to their fellow countrymen. Many of them still believe that the barracks is a place for therapeutic social leveling. Rich and poor, black and white all mingle in the barracks, and profess that before leaving (for Harvard, in Epstein’s case) they gain a better appreciation of their countrymen. They argue that a drafted military, comprising a more socially, ethnically, and economically diverse cohort is better (and more fair). Of course, Epstein served his two years writing for an Army post newspaper. I often get a different perspective from Vietnam-era infantrymen, who sweated and rotted in the jungle for months waiting to die from in a Viet Cong ambush . . . and today still suffer flashbacks from their near-death experiences.
Many, mostly liberal, academics look to a drafted army as a hedge against a professional officer corps intent on suborning the Constitution and civilian control of the military. They often argue that an army mostly manned by citizen-Soldiers will be more questioning of authority and might temper U.S. overseas ambitions. The argument goes that voter-parents with sons potentially in harm’s way will always resist the needless spilling of their darling children’s blood. Critics are quick to compare the national ambivalence toward war in the Middle East to the revulsion of Americans toward Vietnam. Massive protests served to end that unpopular war—the consequence, they argue, of an engaged society with skin literally in the game.
Draft supporters often mention countries that maintain the draft, like Switzerland and Israel. But while the Swiss still draft, virtually all other European nations have eliminated conscription. The Swiss retain the draft because they have not gone to war since the Renaissance; for them, national service becomes a means for achieving social cohesion rather than defense of the country. The Israelis draft because they are a hated minority of eight million, surrounded by hundreds of millions of Arabs hostile to their existence.
In this era of severe fiscal constraint comes the argument that a drafted army is cheaper than a professional one. I find it interesting that draft proponents seem to bring up the costs of Soldiers when no one is shooting but that when the bullets start to fly, so does the cost argument. When the price of a Soldier is dear, military pay goes up, benefits accrue, and the quality of Soldier life inevitably improves. When wars die down, like today, the electorate suddenly becomes outraged at excessive salaries and shameful military spending. It is a cycle that never ends . . . and, by the way, the argument for the economy of a drafted military ignores the fact that amateurs die in hugely disproportionate numbers when compared to professionals. The lifetime cost to the VA for a paraplegic who went to war unprepared is tens of millions of dollars. No proponent for the draft ever mentions this unpleasant fact.
Let us be very clear: the draft is not really about national service. It is not about planting trees or emptying bedpans . . . it is about the Army. Other services rarely draft—the Air Force, Navy, and Coast Guard never, and the Marines only in extreme situations. To be even more specific, the draft is about Army infantrymen: the Army never has a problem recruiting linguists, intelligence specialists, medics, or computer operators in wartime. No, the draft is about the unwilling, poor, and unlucky who lose the lottery and are dragooned into a specific part of the service that most Americans view as demeaning, uncomfortable, and dangerous.
The numbers are telling: 70 percent of all Americans who died at the hand of the enemy in World War II were infantrymen. From World War II to the present, that percentage has actually gone up, to 80 percent. In other words, four out of five of all those killed at the hand of the enemy from Korea to Afghanistan come from a population that constitutes less than 4 percent of the uniformed force within the Department of Defense. Some old vets might look nostalgically on their service, particularly if it was in peacetime. Yet I can assure you that most infantry veterans would rather have been doing something else when facing a brutal death in extremely close combat. Proponents of the draft simply have no clue about the corrosive dynamics of impressing young men into life-threatening service against their will.
One very disturbing aspect of arguments for national service is that they ignore the impact of the draft on the fighting abilities of the Army. So, the real question is: Does the draft make a better Army? I think the answer to that is overwhelmingly no. Do more drafted Soldiers die compared to professionals? Again, I certainly know this to be true from my own personal experience. I have served in both a drafted and a professional army. There is no comparison. A professional army beats a drafted army, hands down. Professionals make much better Soldiers for many reasons. Choosing to serve begins the process of making a Soldier a member of a calling, a band of brothers that demands far more from a young man or woman than putting in time waiting to be discharged. Warfare has become so complex and demanding that just two years of short service is not enough to make a competent Soldier. The “Willie and Joe” generation carried a rifle for Uncle Sam in World War II. These poor souls could be manufactured quickly, but they paid a high cost in blood. Today’s Soldiers are required to do more than fight. They must also learn to interact with alien cultures, to be builders, advisers, and trainers. Gen. Charles Krulak, a former Marine Corps commandant, put the issue of the complexity of today’s wars in context when he contended that the modern close-combat Marine needs to prepare to fight a “three-block war”: one block a high-intensity battle, another block a counterinsurgency battle, and the third block humanitarian aid. Infantry work today is done at the graduate-school level, and it is no place for high-school dropouts.
In past wars, Soldiers relied on leaders to make key life-and-death decisions. Today, young Soldiers standing guard at checkpoints in Afghanistan often must make split-second, life-altering decisions . . . alone. Wrong decisions have strategic consequences, as we have seen so often in Iraq and Afghanistan. Making Soldiers good at crisis decision making takes time and requires Soldiers who have the “right stuff.” Soldiers like these cannot be mass-produced in a few weeks of basic training. Good Soldiers, like good wine, take time to mature.
During America’s conscription era from 1940 to 1973, you can bet that young men vulnerable to the draft knew the odds of dying in the infantry, and the good ones usually found a way to avoid the front lines. Fear of dying in infantry combat inevitably perverted the selective service system. The upper class and well connected did not want Johnny to die, so they went to extraordinary lengths to keep him out of the infantry. The system became even more perverted when grossly unpopular wars like Vietnam made avoidance of the draft suddenly socially acceptable among much of the population.
The perversion of draft laws was tragic for those of us who had to lead these men in combat. As soon as the bullets start to fly, the selective service system falls apart. The consequences of having a draft today would be even more tragic. On the contemporary battlefield, there is no room for poorly trained, poorly motivated infantrymen. Less intelligent Soldiers get killed in hugely disproportionate numbers. Drafted armies are by their nature self-killing machines, meat grinders for young, postadolescent kids, virtually all of whom are poor. The most difficult task in war is to fight close to the enemy. It takes extraordinary strength, endurance, skill, and an intuitive sense of surroundings. Yet in my father’s war, thanks to a corrupt draft, infantry came from the lowest mental categories and were universally smaller and weaker than Soldiers drafted for noncombat specialties. Thus it should surprise no one that better-trained and acculturated German Soldiers had a field day killing Americans in the hedgerows of Normandy. The same can be said for my Vietnam generation, where the ranks of infantry units were too often filled with young men who hated the fact that they were there.
Drafted Soldiers serve for as little as six months to two years before discharge. As we learned in World War II, a drafted army of amateurs can be made professional over time, but the price of learning is measured in blood. It takes years to build a cohesive band of brothers within close-combat units. A draft would rush unprepared, undertrained, and poorly bonded Soldiers into battle, only to get them killed. If you think that post-traumatic stress disorder is a problem for a volunteer force, just watch the consequences of putting unwilling, poor-quality, psychologically unprepared drafted Soldiers under fire.
The draft becomes even more of a loser’s choice when juxtaposed with American wartime values. On the one hand, proponents of national service speak about the values of service to the personal betterment of the individual. On the other hand, nothing could be more antithetical to personal betterment than being dead. And make no mistake, a drafted army needlessly kills Soldiers.
National service sounds like a utopian concept for social leveling, and it might be, if it were applied fairly. Those who call for a renewal of the draft proclaim that the social and racial inequities of the Vietnam-era draft would not happen again. The realities of how wars are fought make such pronouncements nonsense. There is no way that a draft could fairly discriminate between those who are likely to die and those who are not. Infantry units in a drafted army would comprise overwhelmingly draftees, most of them poor, disadvantaged, and collectively incapable of dealing with the complexities of modern war.
Reading between the lines of the pro-draft movement is an unspoken contention, that good Soldiers cannot be recruited during wartime. Can we fill the ranks given the reluctance of America’s youth to join in wartime? Yes, we can, if we are willing to accept a peacetime rather than wartime system of recruiting. First, we must change the fifties-era remuneration system and pay Soldiers for risk as well as skill. Private security firms in Iraq have no problem finding good-quality volunteers, because they are willing to pay handsomely for the risks they take. In today’s military, a computer programmer in the Pentagon makes a great deal more than an infantryman humping a hundred-pound rucksack in 120-degree Afghan heat. No wonder infantrymen are hard to recruit and keep. Lately, the Pentagon has tried to solve the problem by offering substantial recruiting bonuses. Bonuses are bribes. Increased pay over the course of a career is an investment. Those who continually go into harm’s way should also be allowed to retire earlier. Selling back three years for each year in a close-combat unit would be about right. In such a scheme, an infantry Soldier would be able to return to civilian life before his psyche or his body is broken. These men should be excluded from the tender mercies of the VA. They should be allowed permanent access to the terrific military medical system for a lifetime.
We should recruit foreigners. For millennia, great powers have allowed indigenous Soldiers in their ranks. To this day, the British Army retains Ghurka regiments from Nepal, and the French army still has its Foreign Legion—both highly respected and competent fighting formations. During the Cold War, we recruited Special Forces Soldiers from Eastern Europe and later from Cuba, because their intimate knowledge of prospective theaters of war could not be replicated from the general population. We could leverage the power of citizenship as an inducement for filling the ranks with young men who are intimately familiar with places like Africa and the Middle East.
Most importantly, we must increase the number of close-combat Soldiers in infantry units before war begins. Recruiting more fighters so as to retain those whom we need most would give those most likely to die time to recover between deployments. A denser population of infantrymen would allow the bravest to reconnect with their loved ones before returning to combat. More time at home would be a long-term investment that would prevent experienced Soldiers from voting with their feet.
Were we to be so foolish as to return to the draft, we would bring back an army of amateurs. The army that we saw performing so magnificently in Iraq and Afghanistan at the tactical level would be a thing of the past. Surely, a nation of three hundred million should be able to recruit and retain the very few long-service professionals it must have to fight its wars.