Military draft

I've advocated for re-establishing the military draft -- not because I want us to have involuntary military service, but because I think we'd be less likely to go to war if it put the sons and daughters of the entire populace are risk.

But, in a blog on Huffington Post today, Dan Froomkin makes the point that we have had a "backdoor draft" operating during the Iraqi-stan wars in the form of the Pentagon's "stop-loss" policy of involuntarily extending the tours of duty of our volunteer armies beyond their contractual dates. It was the Bush administration's way of coming up with the troops necessary to fight these two wars without risking the uprising against a draft.

It worked something like this: a young man would enlist as a volunteer for a certain period of time, say three years. When it came time to be discharged, the military would say: sorry, we need you to stay on; you can't be discharged. You would have no choice, except to desert. Presumably, there's some fine print that gives the government the right to do this in time of war.

Some 145,000 have been affected by this. By contrast, during the Viet Nam war, some 1,900,000 Americans were conscripted for service under the draft. So it hasn't been anything like that -- but who wants to use V.N. as the standard for proper handling of a war?

At least the practice is coming to an end now. Only the army is still using stop-loss, and the last of its troops who were involuntarily extended will be coming home next March.

Have we at least learned this much from Bush's debacled war-mongering? You do not go to war without even making a gesture toward paying for it; you do not go to war with only a volunteer army; and you do not go to war without a plan for what to expect and what to do the day after their government falls into you hands.

Ralph