DRAFT DODGERS
If a military draft is really out of the question, why is the Bush
administration spending so much time planning one?
by John Aravosis
No wonder President Bush devoted part of last week's "Iraq: You Gotta
Want It!" speech to urging Americans to enlist. Army recruitment was
down 42 percent in April, so the Pentagon lowered the May quota, but
still missed its mark by 25 percent, according to MSNBC. As a result,
the army is in danger of not meeting its annual recruiting goal for
the first time since 1999. And while the other services are hitting
their quotas, the fact remains that of the 139,000 U.S. troops
currently in Iraq, about 105,000 are army.
DRAFT DODGERS
The Pentagon is desperately trying to stop the hemorrhaging. The army
lowered its academic standards last fall, and, just last month, the
Wall Street Journal wrote that "To keep more soldiers in the service,
the Army has told battalion commanders, who typically command
800-soldier units, that they can no longer bounce soldiers from the
service for poor fitness, pregnancy, alcohol and drug abuse or
generally unsatisfactory performance."
Just what we need: an army of Federlines.
The military's recruiting problems shouldn't come as a surprise. The
mayhem in Iraq continues to grow while Afghanistan is playing
catch-up, fast. According to the nonpartisan factcheck.org, "By most
measures the violence [in Iraq] is getting worse. Both April and May
were record months in Iraq for car bombings…with more than 135 of them
being set off each month." In Afghanistan, the Taliban-orchestrated
violence has gotten so bad that it has left "much of Afghanistan
off-limits to aid workers and has reinforced concerns that the war
here is escalating into a conflict on the scale of that in Iraq,"
according to the Associated Press. Potential recruits may be young,
but they're not stupid.
Adding to the crisis, there are rumblings that more U.S. troops are
needed. Democratic senator Joe Biden recently returned from Iraq,
where, he says, American generals told him they need more troops.
Republican senator John McCain agrees. But where will we get more
troops when recruitment is down, our current supply of soldiers is
getting killed or wounded, and Donald Rumsfeld now admits that we
could be in Iraq for 10 to 15 years?
Does anybody else feel a draft coming on?
The late colonel David Hackworth, the most decorated U.S. soldier of
the Vietnam War, wrote in an article last October that "the
draft—which will include both boys and girls this time around—is a
no-brainer in '05 and '06." Even Republican senator Chuck Hagel warned
last year that a draft "might become necessary" in the years ahead.
The Bush administration, for its part, says categorically that there
will be no draft. The Selective Service website includes a big notice
on its home page reminding visitors that the House of Representatives
voted last fall against reinstating the draft, and that both the
president and Rumsfeld are against it.
That's all well and good, but the House vote took place only one month
before last fall's election. A recent AP-Ipsos poll found that seven
in 10 Americans oppose bringing back the draft, more than half would
discourage their sons from enlisting, and two-thirds would discourage
their daughters. Those congressmen weren't so much voting against the
draft as they were voting to keep their jobs. More importantly, that
vote does nothing to eliminate the growing recruitment problem that
could eventually force a draft upon us.
As for Bush and Rummy, keep in mind that they're the guys who told us
they had no plans to invade Iraq (they did), that there were weapons
of mass destruction in Iraq (there weren't), that the invasion and
occupation would be a cakewalk (it hasn't been), that the Iraqis would
greet us with flowers (they didn't), that the mission was
"accomplished" two years ago (it wasn't), that 160,000 new Iraqi
security forces are fully trained and ready to take over for U.S.
troops (they aren't), and that our coalition of allies remains strong
(it doesn't).
Even more to the point, although the Bush administration may be
promising publicly that there will be no draft, privately they've been
planning one for more than a year. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer
reported last year that the Selective Service secretly asked for the
authority to increase the draft age to 34 and to include women. (Mind
you, they suddenly need this added authority for a draft they assure
us will never occur.)
But it won't be enough to just draft a bunch of grunts. The
Post-Intelligencer also reported that "Selective Service planning for
a possible draft of linguists and computer experts began last fall
after Pentagon personnel officials said the military needed more
people with skills in those areas." And the New York Times reported
that in 2004 that the Selective Service updated its contingency plans
for a draft of doctors, nurses, and other health care workers and paid
an outside consultant to figure out how to implement such a draft and
how to sell it to the public.
That sure is a lot of prep work for something no one's considering doing.
radaronline.com |
