Current location:	Out of the draft
Current mood:	satisfied
Current music:	"Over There".
Entry tags:	and peace., citizenship, the draft, war

Rethinking the draft
I came out of the 60s with the firm conviction that the draft was slavery and that service in our armed forces should be voluntary. I fully believed that this would be a check on stupid foreign adventures, since the voluntary enlistment rate would rise and fall with the perceived peril to our nation.

As time wore on, I noticed that an all-volunteer army was also a professional army, and thought I detected traces of the Us-vs-Them mentality well known to exist among law enforcement personnel, and described in great detail with approval by Robert Heinlein in Starship Troopers. And that every republic known to history had relied on citizen armies - the rise of professional armies went hand in hand with the rise of empire. How to resolve this paradox?

Lately, someone posted a little-known bit of early American history to a historical analysis forum. It was that in the early days of the United States there were three levels of military service, two of them voluntary.

There were the armed forces, which you joined, and they were professionals, complete with training academies for officers.

There was the "organized militia" which was voluntary and non-professional, made up of citizens who volunteered to train and to drill regularly and to be, essentially, first responders in case of trouble in their area. This is what became the National Guard.

Then there was the "unorganized militia" which consisted of all able-bodied citizens between the ages of - was it 18? - and 45. In the old days they followed the model still in use among the Swiss, and were expected to own and know how to use the basic infantry weapon, some sort of long gun. That model is long gone, though among rural people it certainly has its points. However, the cogent fact is that -

They could be called up whenever they were needed. Because they were citizens and this was part of the price of citizenship: to defend your country when you were needed.

This way of doing things slowly vanished as the decades wore on, but the basic structure can faintly be discerned beneath the mutations and misuses (the National Guard was NOT supposed to be sent overseas! They were supposed to respond to disasters here at home!), accretions of time and custom, and changes of terminology.

Therefore: I have changed my mind somewhat. Now, I still don't believe in the peacetime draft, though compulsory military training might be a very useful thing to institute. And we need some way to keep ambitious leaders from being able to call up the nation's youth for wars of conquest. Hmmm.... how about taking the callup out of the hands of the nation's Chief Executive and putting it back in the hands of the People In Congress Assembled?

But - here's my latest thought on the matter, for what it's worth. Full disclosure: I'm way overage. My children and their partners/spouses are around 40, though they're all in the medical profession and therefore among the first to be called up if and when. And there MUST be exemptions for the single parents of minor children!

Another thought, taken from Imperial Rome, and a very good idea it was - military service plus meeting the requirements of speaking English and knowing Civics, should be an instant path to citizenship for the person serving and for the soldier's dependents.