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July 06, 2005
Don't Bet On A Draft
Curzon over at Coming Anarchy highlights a Slate article by Fred Kaplan in which Kaplan summarizes the reasons he thinks a draft will not come to pass. After analyzing the current staffing structure of the Army, and observing that the Army has shrunk considerably since the end of the Cold War, Kaplan argues that this smaller Army has resulted in the possibility of a mismatch between Bush's vision for projecting democracy throughout the world and the ability of the armed forces to support that vision. Kaplan:
So, how do we get more troops? A return to the draft? There are plenty of arguments for or against, but they're not worth the waste of bandwidth, because it's just not going to happen. Military commanders don't want a draft; they're happy to have, in the All-Volunteer Army, the best-educated, best-tempered, most easily trained soldiers in American history. Politicians don't want a draft, because they know it's the surest route to losing the next election; millions of supportive voters will turn into raging protesters if their little Johnny—or, worse yet, Janie—gets forced into battle.
Almost no one in the executive branch wants a draft, because it would instantly give every American family a stake in U.S. foreign policy. With a volunteer Army, issues of war and peace are almost abstract; only a tiny portion of the population is directly affected. With a draft, everybody's life is on the line—a turbulent state that can energize and unify a country under serious threat but tear the same country apart in a war of stalemate or dubious motive. President Bush could not possibly want the intense debate that even the prospect of a draft would inspire.
And yet, draft or no draft, the country is headed toward that debate. Does America want to be—can it be—the world's policeman, colossus, liberator, call it what you will?
As the world's balance of power stands right now, Kaplan's point seems convincing. But the worldwide trend over the last few decades has been toward more, not less, democracy. We had over 10 million men in uniform to fight WWII; we had over half a million in Vietnam, and tens of thousands in Iraq now. If the trend toward more democracy continues, who's to say that 20 years from now the demands on American forces won't be even less than today, especially with our almost unlimited potential to leverage technology?
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