-Caveat Lector-
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From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: January 21, 2007 9:54:58 PM PST
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Subject: Feel a Draft Coming?
Oiling up the draft machine?
The Pentagon is quietly moving to fill draft board vacancies
nationwide. While officials say no cause to worry, some experts
aren't so sure.
By Dave Lindorff
Salon, January 21, 2007
http://dir.salon.com/story/news/feature/2003/11/03/draft/index_np.html
November 3, 2003 | The community draft boards that became notorious
for sending reluctant young men off to Vietnam have languished
since the early 1970s, their membership ebbing and their purpose
all but lost when the draft was ended. But a few weeks ago, on an
obscure federal Web site devoted to the war on terrorism, the Bush
administration quietly began a public campaign to bring the draft
boards back to life.
"Serve Your Community and the Nation," the announcement urges. "If
a military draft becomes necessary, approximately 2,000 Local and
Appeal Boards throughout America would decide which young men ...
receive deferments, postponements or exemptions from military
service."
Local draft board volunteers, meanwhile, report that at training
sessions last summer, they were unexpectedly asked to recommend
people to fill some of the estimated 16 percent of board seats that
are vacant nationwide.
Especially for those who were of age to fight in the Vietnam War,
it is an ominous flashback of a message. Divisive military actions
are ongoing in Iraq and Afghanistan. News accounts daily detail how
the U.S. is stretched too thin there to be effective. And tensions
are high with Syria and Iran and on the Korean Peninsula, with some
in or close to the Bush White House suggesting that military action
may someday be necessary in those spots, too.
Not since the early days of the Reagan administration in 1981 has
the Defense Department made a push to fill all 10,350 draft board
positions and 11,070 appeals board slots. Recognizing that even the
mention of a draft in the months before an election might be
politically explosive, the Pentagon last week was adamant that the
drive to staff up the draft boards is not a portent of things to
come. There is "no contingency plan" to ask Congress to reinstate
the draft, John Winkler, the Pentagon's deputy assistant secretary
for reserve affairs, told Salon last week.
Increasingly, however, military experts and even some influential
members of Congress are suggesting that if Defense Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld's prediction of a "long, hard slog" in Iraq and
Afghanistan proves accurate, the U.S. may have no choice but to
consider a draft to fully staff the nation's military in a time of
global instability.
"The experts are all saying we're going to have to beef up our
presence in Iraq," says U.S. Rep. Charles Rangel, the New York
Democrat. "We've failed to convince our allies to send troops,
we've extended deployments so morale is sinking, and the president
is saying we can't cut and run. So what's left? The draft is a very
sensitive subject, but at some point, we're going to need more
troops, and at that point the only way to get them will be a return
to the draft."
Rangel has provoked controversy in the past by insisting that a
draft is the only way to fill the nation's military needs without
exploiting young men and women from lower-income families. And,
some suggest, by proposing military service from middle- and upper-
class men and women, Rangel may be trying to diminish the odds of
actually using them in combat. But Rangel is hardly alone in
suggesting that the draft might be needed.
The draft, ended by Congress in 1973 as the Indochina War was
winding down, was long a target of antiwar activists, and remains
highly controversial both in and out of the military. Most military
officers understandably prefer an army of volunteers and career
soldiers over an army of grudging conscripts; Rumsfeld, too, has
long been a staunch advocate of an all-volunteer force.
According to some experts, basic math might compel the Pentagon to
reconsider the draft: Of a total U.S. military force of 1.4 million
people around the globe (many of them in non-combat support
positions and in services like the Air Force and Navy), there are
currently about 140,000 active-duty, reserve and National Guard
soldiers currently deployed in Iraq -- and though Rumsfeld has been
an advocate of a lean, nimble military apparatus, history suggests
he needs more muscle.
"The closest parallel to the Iraq situation is the British in
Northern Ireland, where you also had some people supporting the
occupying army and some opposing them, and where the opponents were
willing to resort to terror tactics," says Charles Peña, director
of defense studies at the libertarian Cato Institute. "There the
British needed a ratio of 10 soldiers per 1,000 population to
restore order, and at their height, it was 20 soldiers per 1,000
population. If you transfer that to Iraq, it would mean you'd need
at least 240,000 troops and maybe as many as 480,000.
"The only reason you aren't hearing these kinds of numbers
discussed by the White House and the Defense Department right now,"
Peña adds, "is that you couldn't come up with them without a return
to the draft, and they don't want to talk about that."
The Pentagon has already had to double the deployment periods of
some units, call up more reserves and extend tours of duty by a
year -- all highly unpopular moves. Meanwhile, the recent spate of
deadly bombings in Baghdad, Falluja and other cities, and
increasing attacks on U.S. forces throughout Iraq have forced the
U.S. to reconsider its plans to reduce troop deployments.
Those factors -- combined with the stress and grind of war itself
-- clearly have diminished troop morale. And many in the National
Guard and reserves never anticipated having to serve in an active
war zone, far from their families and jobs, for six months or
longer. Stars and Stripes, the Army's official paper, reports that
a poll it conducted found that half the soldiers in Iraq say they
are "not likely" or are "very unlikely" to reenlist -- a very high
figure.
Consider that the total enlistment goal for active Army and Army
reserves in the fiscal year ended Oct. 1 was 100,000. If half of
the 140,000 troops currently in Iraq were to go home and stay, two-
thirds of this year's recruits would be needed to replace them. And
that does not take into consideration military needs at home and
around the globe.
"My sense is that there is a lot of nervousness about the
enlistment numbers as Iraq drags on," says Doug Bandow, another
military manpower expert at Cato. "We're still early enough into it
that the full impact on recruiting/retention hasn't been felt."
The Pentagon, perhaps predictably, sees a more hopeful picture.
Curtis Gilroy, director of accession policy at the Department of
Defense, concedes that troop morale is hurting. "There are
certainly concerns about future reenlistments. Iraq is not a happy
place to be," Gilroy says. "[But] I think a certain amount of that
is just grumbling. What we're interested in is not what people are
saying, but what they do." So far, he reports, reenlistments and
new enlistments remain on target.
Beth Asch, a military manpower expert at the Rand Corp. think tank,
agrees that current retention and new enlistment figures are
holding up. But she cautions that it may be too soon to know the
impact of the tough and open-ended occupation in Iraq. "Short
deployments actually boost enlistments and reenlistments," Asch
says. "But studies show longer deployments can definitely have a
negative impact."
While she thinks it is unlikely that the military will have to
resort to a draft to meet its needs, Ned Lebow, a military manpower
expert and professor of government at Dartmouth College, is less
confident.
"The government is in a bit of a box," Lebow says. "They can hold
reservists on active duty longer, and risk antagonizing that whole
section of America that has family members who join the Reserves.
They can try to pay soldiers more, but it's not clear that works --
and besides, there's already an enormous budget deficit. They can
try to bribe other countries to contribute more troops, which
they're trying to do now, but not with much success. Or they can
try Iraqization of the war -- though we saw what happened to
Vietnamization, and Afghanization of the war in Afghanistan isn't
working, so Iraqization doesn't seem likely to work either.
"So," Lebow concludes, "that leaves the draft."
Purely in mechanical terms, a draft is a complicated and difficult
thing to get off the ground. It would require an act of Congress,
first, and then the signature of the president. Young men are
already required to register with the Selective Service system, but
if the bill were signed into law, it would still take half a year
or more to get the new troops into the system. Federal law would
require the Selective Service to immediately set up a lottery and
start sending out induction notices. Local draft boards would have
to evaluate them for medical problems, moral objections and other
issues like family crises, and hear the appeals of those who are
resisting the draft.
Under law, the first batch of new conscripts must be processed and
ready for boot camp in 193 days or less after the start of the draft.
But if the mechanics of the draft are difficult, the politics could
be lethal for Bush or any other top official who proposed it.
Already, the American public is almost as split today over the war
in Iraq as it was about the war in Indochina nearly four decades
ago, though not yet as passionately. But a new draft would likely
incite even deeper resentment than it did then. In the last war
fought by a conscript army, draft deferments for students meant
that nobody who was in college had to worry about being called up
until after graduation, and until late in that war, it was even
possible, by going to grad school (like Vice President Dick
Cheney), to avoid getting drafted altogether. In the Vietnam War
era, college boys could also duck combat, as George W. Bush did, by
joining the National Guard.
But that's all been changed. In a new draft, college students whose
lottery number was selected would only be permitted to finish their
current semester; seniors could finish their final year. After
that, they'd have to answer the call. Meanwhile, National
Guardsmen, as we've seen in the current war, are now likely to face
overseas combat duty, too.
"If Congress and Bush reinstitute the draft, it would be the '60s
all over again," predicts Lebow. "It's hard to imagine Congress
passing such a bill, but then, look how many members of Congress
just rolled over and played dead on the bill for $87 billion for
Iraq and Afghanistan."
New York Rep. Rangel and Sen. Fritz Hollings, D-S.C., introduced
companion bills in the two houses of Congress to reactivate the
draft last January, at a time when Bush was clearly moving toward
an invasion. While both bills remain in the legislative hopper,
neither has gone anywhere.
Even among those who think the public might support a draft, like
Bandow at the Cato Institute, few believe Bush would dare to
propose it before the November 2004 election. "No one would want
that fight," he explains. "It would highlight the cost of an
imperial foreign policy, add an incendiary issue to the already
emotional protests, and further split the limited-government
conservatives." But despite the Pentagon's denials, planners there
are almost certainly weighing the numbers just as independent
military experts are. And that could explain the willingness to
tune up the draft machinery.
John Corcoran, an attorney who serves on a draft board in
Philadelphia, says he joined the Reserves to avoid the draft during
the Vietnam War. Today, he says, the Bush administration "is in
deep trouble" in Iraq "because they didn't plan for the
occupation." That doesn't mean Bush would take the election-year
risk of restarting the draft, Corcoran says. "To tell the truth, I
don't think Bush has the balls to call for a draft.
"They give us a training session each year to keep the machinery in
place and oiled up in case, God forbid, they ever do reinstitute
it," he explains.
"They don't want us to have to do it," agrees Dan Amon, a spokesman
for the Selective Service. "But they want us to be ready to do it
at the click of a finger."
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