After the draft ended after the Vietnam War, the Army (and the military in general) was a disaster. Racism, narcotics and other criminal efforts destroyed discipline in the ranks and it took years to come out of it. As my first boss when I was a lieutenant told me of the mid 70s, "Mike, a staff duty officer did not go into the barracks unless he was armed or had an armed escort." One of the greatest efforts was the Army's war on narcotics beginning in the late 70s, with a zero tolerance for drug use. We ridded the ranks of many of the criminal endeavors that led to dangerous discipline problems.
Another effort at reform was the infusion of volunteers as opposed to draftees. People who volunteered to serve as opposed to those who were taken at the beginning of their adult lives for two years. It let to a higher average of the education of the force, a more motivated and capable force. Without question, one of the greatest successes of America is the last 40 years has been the volunteer service.
Now the problems with liberals like Mr. Epstein is they don't comprehend what the purpose of the armed forces are. General MacArthur said it best in his address to the 1962 class at West Point:
...And through all this welter of change and development your mission remains fixed, determined, inviolable. It is to win our wars. Everything else in your professional career is but corollary to this vital dedication. All other public purpose, all other public projects, all other public needs, great or small, will find others for their accomplishments; but you are the ones who are trained to fight.
Now we have another liberal finding another reason for the Army and how the make it mandatory.
How I Learned to Love the Draft
JOSEPH EPSTEIN
As the struggle with the Islamic State, or ISIS, grows more intense and the Obama administration’s air-attack strategy—if the experts turn out to be correct—proves unavailing, the calls for boots on the ground in Syria and Iraq are likely to become more insistent. Despite the coalition of nations aligned against ISIS and other terrorist groups, no one doubts that any such boots will be preponderantly American. Our current volunteer military will fill those boots.
Which prompts a question: Should the burden of defending America be exclusively theirs? When one watches those heartbreaking segments on the national news of men and women returning from Middle Eastern wars with missing limbs, and reads accounts of their suffering from mental-health problems as a result of their experiences in battle, one feels an essential unfairness about current military arrangements. True, these men and women volunteered for battle, yet in a democracy it somehow feels wrong for a small segment of the population to be charged with the responsibility of defending the country in foreign wars.
The remedy for this fundamental unfairness is of course at hand, and it goes by the name of the draft.
I have never felt more American than when I was in the Army...
...The great example of a successful conscription army is in Israel, where nearly all eligible young men and women serve. Israel exists, of course, in a state of perpetual peril; as has often been said, it cannot afford to lose even one war. But the glory of the Israeli army, and its support by all but the most pacifist Israelis, surely owes to the fact that everyone serves, or has served, in it...
I hate to bring reality into Mr Epstein's world view, but we are not Israel. The United States is a country of over 300 million, Israel 8 million, about the size of New York City. We are not surrounded by nations who have sword to wipe us off the face of the Earth or have regularly fired missiles into our soil. Israel been attacked multiple times since its founding in 1948. Israel's population is so small they must have a larger percentage of the people in the armed forces. Sorry, you are comparing apples and oranges.
...Under the draft, the American social fabric would change—and, judging from my experience, for the better. I write as a former draftee who served in the Army from 1958 to 1960. I was, in other words, a Cold War soldier, and never for a moment in danger. Much of my time in the military—I worked on the post newspaper at Fort Hood, in Texas, and later as a clerk, typing up physicals, in a recruiting station in Little Rock, Arkansas—was excruciatingly boring.
Yet I am grateful for having served. Doing so took me out of my own social class and ethnic milieu—big-city, middle-class, Jewish—and gave me a vivid sense of the social breadth of my country. I slept in barracks and shared all my meals with American Indians, African Americans from Detroit, white Appalachians, Christian Scientists from Kansas, and discovered myself befriending and being befriended by young men I would not otherwise have met. I have never felt more American than when I was in the Army....
...At Fort Leonard Wood, in Missouri, where I did my basic training, I remember a guy from Tennessee named Flowers, whose ex-wife turned him over to the draft for failing to make alimony payments, and who joked about renegotiating the terms of his divorce when first issued his M1 rifle....
I'm glad you had a good experience in the Army of three generations ago. This is not the same Army or the same America. Also, I point out you spent two years in uniform. The modern army needs people for more than two years. If you want us to draft millions for two years, this is what would happen. After spending 10 weeks in basic training, followed by 5-50 weeks of Advanced Individaul Training a new private is sent to his first unit. Then in a manner of months the private, after hundreds of thousands of dollars being put into his training, is preparing to leave the service. A unit that is just getting him integrated into the team has lost a member and he will not be the only one. What a waste.
In contemporary America, if one is born into the middle or upper-middle class, one is unlikely ever to have to step outside that class. One stands to go to school with people from the same social class, marry into that class, raise one’s children within it, live out one’s days among its members. Members of the working classes are more cruelly class-bound and isolated. The ingredients in the once famous American melting pot thus remain frozen.
That is pure bull. I've got friends who work with me in law enforcement (solid middle class) who are married to highly paid lawyers, doctors, engineers, etc. America is a story of how people are born into poverty and rise to greater success (or fall from higher levels). Maybe you should spend more time away from liberal writers Mr. Epstein.
The hiatus the draft brings can have a decisive effect on one’s future. Certainly it did in my case. By drawing me at the age of 22 out of the workaday world for two years, the draft gave me space to think about my life and what I wanted to do with it. But for the draft, I might, God forfend, have gone to law school simply out of the need to appear serious, and today have been a perhaps wealthier but undoubtedly much less contented man.
During the years the draft was in effect, it was not uncommon for judges to let young criminal offenders choose among reform school, prison, and the Army. Most chose the Army, a decision I should like to see made by the gang members who now menace the streets of my city, Chicago, and other major American cities. As a totalitarian institution—that is, one that has total control over the people in it—the Army in my day had a remarkably high success rate in rehabilitating young offenders and even wayward jerks. In the Army, you shaped up or—well, there really wasn’t any alternative but to go to prison or have your life permanently stained by a dishonorable discharge.
I'm glad the Army helped you find out what you wanted to do with your life. But that is not why we have an army, see the quote above.
Arguments against reinstituting the draft, though not trivial, are mainly technical. Training volunteer soldiers is said to be hard enough, given the complexity of military hardware—training reluctant conscripts would be even more difficult. Yet far from all military tasks are technological; clerks, cooks, infantrymen are always needed. Having lots of soldiers who have gone through college and professional schools would also leaven the enlisted ranks in a useful way...
You really don't know how ignorant your statement is. An infantryman is "not technical"? Allow me to put you in the driver's seat of a Bradley Infantry Fighting vehicle and see if you can start it? How about all the communications systems involved with infantry operations. Can you fire a mortar without getting yourself killed? Mr. Epstein, this is not the Army of 1959.
For some reason the people on the "liberal" side of the political spectrum seemed to think "volunteerism" should be mandated. I speak for the overwhelming majority of the men and women in uniform that it would be better for all concerned to have five people who volunteered to be there than ten who are forced to be there at the point of a gun. Inflicting the disruption of the a large number of draftees into the service while we are trying to handle multiple operations will only weaken the military and the nation.
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