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03/15/2007
The Draft
On Sunday’s “60 Minutes,” Andy Rooney finished his
commentary on army recruitment by saying “Whenever we, as a
nation, decide to fight a war – in Iraq or anywhere else – it
should be fought by average Americans who are drafted.”
I found this interesting because I had just finished reading a 1980
article by Senator James Webb, who back then was on the House
Veterans Committee and would later serve the Reagan
administration as assistant secretary of defense and then
secretary of the navy.
I don’t recall offhand where Webb stands today on a draft, but in
April 1980 his essay for The Atlantic left little doubt where he
stood so it’s worth noting today.
Webb started out his piece titled “The Draft: Why the Army
Needs It” by bemoaning the fact women were playing an
increasing role in the U.S. military, while at the same time
recruiting methods employed for the volunteer army were
suspect. Webb also blasted the fact the military was allowing
men and women to sign up and then leave without few
repercussions. For example, in the four years before his article,
“190,000 servicemen and women have simply walked away,
with discharges under honorable conditions – enough to populate
the entire Marine Corps at full strength.”
40% of the enlistees back in 1980 failed to complete their period
of obligation, and yet managed overwhelmingly to receive
discharges under honorable conditions. “How can a military
commander create a properly disciplined environment when his
members can simply walk away and still be rewarded for ‘honest
and faithful service’?”
Then Webb builds his case for the draft.
“In the volunteer Army a deserter is seldom even court-
martialed. As an example of the deterioration regarding this
peculiarly military yet important offense, from 1974 through
1977 the military reported 608,000 AWOLs exceeding twenty-
four hours. The Army court-martialed almost none of them. In
fact, only 11% of the most serious offenders, the thirty-day
‘deserters,’ were court-martialed. And of these 608,000
offenders, only 2,335 were discharged for the offense. As a
referent from another era, more than 29,000 servicemen were
convicted for court-martial for being AWOL in 1952 alone.
“The cohesion and morale of an army are often measured by its
desertion rate and what its leaders do about it. Condoning
unauthorized absence destroys the notion of duty and
commitment in a military unit, and affects discipline as few other
breaches of military custom can. The military becomes simply a
job. Soldiers become employees, who show up whenever and in
whatever condition they choose. But how does a system stop
this when it must beg its members to join, and when those who
become annoyed with their service can quit?
“A draft would remedy this and other shortfalls, not merely by
offering up more manpower and a less delicate command
environment, as opponents of the draft so often maintain, but by
causing a much-needed reorientation of priorities. The military
is not a job, any more than paying taxes is a job. In fact, military
service might be equated to a tax. We each surrender a portion
of our income to the common good, and we should all be willing
to give a portion of our lives in order to assure that our freedoms
will not disappear. It is so very basic, and yet so much maligned
in the cynical wake of Vietnam: conscription is not slavery, it is
societal duty.
“Reinstituting the draft would help in yet another, more
elemental and equitable way. We created a military, just as we
created a society, for ideological rather than mercenary reasons.
Detractors of the draft who claim that our natural state, through
history, has been draft-free fail to recognize that our position in
the world until well into this century was less than preeminent.
Nor do they recognize the post-World War II strategic realities.
It is fundamentally wrong – and cowardly – in a democratic
society to claim that those who stand between us and a potential
enemy should be risking their lives merely because they are
‘following the marketplace,’ and the military is their ‘best deal.’
The result of such logic is today’s volunteer Army, a collection
of men and women who have been economically conscripted to
do society’s dirty work, as surely as if there were the most
inequitable draft imaginable.
“The draft would not make us a nation of militarists; it never has.
It would instead leaven the military and at the same time weave
those in uniform back into the fabric of our nation. People who
work together and depend on each other end up liking each other;
that was the greatest lesson of World War II, which brought
together 16 million American men from all walks of life. The
obverse is true of Vietnam, which over a longer period saw 9
million men in uniform, less than a third of the draft-eligible
males in the pool, selected out largely on the basis of education
or lack of it.
“Those who oppose the renewal of the draft claim that the young
will refuse to serve, invoking some misconception from the
Vietnam days about widespread draft resistance. My best is that
they are wrong, just as they are wrong to invoke Vietnam as
precedent. The lesson of the Vietnam draft is not that people will
not go if called: only 13,580 men refused the draft during that
entire era, while millions went. The real lesson is that a draft,
once invoked, should be fair in its application, and should not
allow the travesties of avoidance within the law that draft
counselors perpetrated during Vietnam. How is a system
equitable when Joe Namath, a fabulous athlete, and Tom
Downey, now a vigorous, basketball-playing congressman, are
found physically unfit for service? In America, only one in three
was drafted. In Israel today, 95% of the males serve in one
capacity or another. There are plenty of desks to sit behind in the
Army, in order to free those more physically able to fight. It
only remains for a system to refine itself in order to determine
who should type and who should fight .
“But our greatest need is to get beyond those old jealousies from
Vietnam, to make our military once again a fighting force rather
than a societal lab, and to stop being afraid to ask the men of
Harvard to stand alongside the men of Harlem, same uniform,
same obligations, same country.”
[Source: The Atlantic, April 1980]
Hott Spotts will return next week.
Brian Trumbore
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