One of the most important questions we should be asking ourselves ten years after 9/11 is more likely to generate guilty shrugs than nods in agreement: Why did no one in authority ever mobilize the American people? In those early days when armies were gathering for war, the nation was summoned not to sacrifice but to return to the shopping malls. Inevitably, the burdens of that war fell on the few instead of the many. A decade later, we the many are running out of troops, taxpayer dollars, and, apparently, any original ideas. Returning to the draft is not the answer, but we are overdue for a serious conversation about linking national service to education benefits.
The memoirs of Pres. George W. Bush, his secretary of defense, his secretary of state, and now his vice president collectively number thousands of pages. These tomes reveal that there was little questioning of our basic assumptions after 9/11, such as whether our all-volunteer military could sustain such a long conflict. Unlike other wars, Americans fought this one by simply sending other people’s kids. Less than one percent of Americans have ever served in uniform throughout an entire decade of war. Today, you are more likely to know a resident of North Dakota, our least populated state, than a soldier on active duty in the United States Army. (With the reserves added in, both populations number about 600,000.)
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Our volunteer, professional army dates from the early 1970s and was reduced to present levels after the Cold War ended. Congress, charged by the Constitution with raising armies, agreed to a key assumption: The National Guard and reserves primarily exist to buy time when the nation goes to war. While the reserve component has day-to-day missions (e.g., disaster relief after Alabama tornadoes and Hurricane Irene), in wartime it provides the only effective means to transform the nation’s youth into soldiers. But after 9/11, we simply drafted the reserves and National Guard. Despite the national emergency, the nation’s youth were left free to attend college and generally do their own thing. To this day, wearing a uniform on an Ivy League campus is more likely to mean that you’re acting in the senior play than serving your country.
The result has been a chronic shortage of American military manpower. While volunteer forces are the most effective way to maintain a professional military, they cost money at every step from enlistment to retirement. With those forces pared to the bone, you handle increased operational requirements (surges are one example, tsunami responses another) either by increasing the length or the number of foreign deployments. That is exactly how we have fought the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001.
With soldiers routinely deployed on multiple combat tours, the effects on them and their families are now unmistakable. Divorce rates, a traditional indication of manpower distress, have skyrocketed, along with suicide rates, among soldiers. In July, we lost more soldiers (32) to suicide than to the Taliban. Equally insidious are the long-term effects of post-traumatic-stress disorder, the subject of a recent book, Combat Trauma. Written by 15 veterans of Vietnam (not Iraq or Afghanistan), their symptoms have endured for 30 years. Their conclusion was even more startling: PTSD is like radiation. The more combat time you endure, the greater your risk of PTSD. And remember: Those soldiers experienced only a single year of Vietnam combat, not the three to five years quickly becoming the American military standard.
It is hardly surprising that our military chiefs have unanimously tried to protect their expensive and superbly capable, but scarce and badly overused, manpower resources from future budget cuts. They have a point, but the necessary economies cannot come from within DOD without rethinking our national manpower policies. As the dean of American military sociologists, Charles Moskos, once said, “American education policy is like having the GI Bill but without the GI.” So why not begin there?
Here are some basic ideas to consider:
1. The draft worked well in the 20th century, but in the 21st we need to create a graduated system of national service. The education benefits now granted more or less freely could be tied to the completion of national service after age 18. Each young adult would be required to complete a year of service in return for enjoying the lifetime privileges of American citizenship. Completing that minimum requirement would also determine future eligibility for education benefits.
I've been thinking about this idea for some time, and it does have its merits. One of the biggest arguments for it is that it will make kids think more about going to college - attendance won't just be automatic. If they want to go to college, they will immediately have some skin in the game. Hopefully, they'll be more conscious of the cost, if it is paid, at that time, in service hours.
Some of the kids will consider joining the service, instead. My daughter only thought about joining after she had a year-long course in a military subject (ROTC) at her college. She served 8 years, before leaving to have a child.
It would give a boost to the National Guard program, if they were augmented by National Service volunteers. I've never like the idea of using the National Guard for repeated, prolonged deployments. Doing so makes it harder to keep the units fully staffed, and causes it to deplete the units of older members, who can't continue to serve, and risk their jobs. It also leaves the states absent their militias.
I agree whole heartedly with this sentiment. This is the exact reason I chose to serve our blessed country. When I graduated from college, I was surrounded by far too many who were self entitled, narcissistic, and altogether took for granted the unique freedoms we possess as Americans. Too few understand the hardship that defines military life for today's service men and their families. The extremely high operational tempo of the deployment cycle is an immense strain on those serving and just as great of one on those standing beside them. Between deploying to Afghanistan and training work ups in preparation for deployments, in the last three years I have spent a cumulative of seven months together with my wife. This story is not uncommon among those on active duty.
Students in our schools and especially our universities are taught that service to one's community and country meant protesting industry for environmental degradation and harassing corporations for not paying enough taxes in support of welfare programs. Students are discouraged from military service by elitist left-wing educators who seek to unravel any patriotic leanings in their students and replace it with an inherent mistrust and suspicion of free enterprise and the American constitutional republic. If more were required to serve the nation, only then will they fully appreciate the sacrifice that those who came before us endured to found this greatest nation on God’s green earth.
1stLt Adam Writer USMC
Via Helmand Province Afghanistan
1St Lt,
I think you may want to reconsider some of your opinions.
National Service isn't anything new. One only need go back a century, and the sentiments you possess were shared by people as diverse as Teddy Roosevelt, Benito Mussolini, and Woodrow Wilson. It's a Progressive idea that is problematic for a democracy such as ours. At the heart of this thinking is a desire to "correct" some of the excesses of an individualistic society such as ours and replace it with some vague national community or national community spirit. Progressives from both sides of the political aisle wished to re-create the organic spirit of "community" that was present in centuries past. Of course, a hidden if not darker agenda usually sprouted up with such programs. Forming large cadres of military ready "reservists" isn't anything new. But the US isn't Prussia. And the temptation for one political party to impart its agenda on such a large and youthful organization is certainly a danger.
As far as readiness goes. Congress has all the tools it needs to change existing manpower laws. The 1990s draw-down was never corrected. And that is a political problem, not a moral one. During the 1980s, the DOD never had a problem attracting young recruits despite the thriving economy. And I can tell you that the DOD would have no problem attracting either highly qualified officer candidates or enlisted recruits.
There is something more at play here; I fear some people are using the current manpower problems to further another agenda.
Thanks for your service, Lt. However, I'm forced to disagree with your comment. I would love to see more young people "doing their part" in the defense of our country, sharing your burdens and taking the risks along with you. It might be the fair thing - I don't know. But as for military service making people better citizens: sorry, won't work.
For one thing, the military doesn't get hold of people until they're 18. If a man or woman isn't a good citizen by that time, forcing them into the military isn't going to make them change. (Only in the movies.)
For another, people bring to the military whatever problems they had in civilian life. A pot-head, drug addict, alcoholic, dyslexic, malingering scumbag doesn't become Chesty Puller because somebody stuck him in a uniform and taught him to obey orders. As a previous commenter said, if you want to start drafting Everybody then you'd better start building brigs and training MPs. I'd add that you'd better hire about ten thousand more psychiatrists, drug counselors, alcohol counselors, marriage counselors, sexual orientation counselors, financial planning counselors, and remedial English and math instructors. You're going to need them to deal with the influx of dysfunctional losers the draft will bring to your beloved Corps.
Another issue is: Military values are not civilian values. True, military values can be an asset in any civilian job. At the very least, self-discipline, the ability to make decisions and communicate under pressure, and a need to do things the right way are all desirable qualities in an employee or a manager. However, civilians are not soldiers. They never will be soldiers. They shouldn't have to be soldiers. A draft instituted to make civilians more soldierly would be...bad. I, for one, would hate to live in a world in which everyone always did everything with USMC intensity and perfectionism. It would be a living hell for normal people.
Lastly, I hope you recognize that, as others have commented, instituting national service in order to mould Today's Youth into something better is really a left-wing, collectivist solution. We may yearn for a better type of American - as the Communists once did for their "New Soviet Man." However, we have no right to create one by force. The Founders didn't want that. Neither should we.
The colonel is treading on thin ice. The following quote is worriesome:
"Each young adult would be required to complete a year of service in return for enjoying the lifetime privileges of American citizenship..."
In his opinion citizenship is a privlege; but, who pray tell bestows the privlege? Why the State, of course. At the heart of his thinking is a dangerous concept. What the State giveth, they State can take away. In short, citizens are not citizens but corvees of the State, who can be made to "give back" to thier community (ie gemeinschaft). Colonel Allard's nationalism is no different than the fascist Nationalism of the 20th Century. What should give him and us pause to reconsider is that President Obama proposed the exact same program in 2008. The State cannot compel anyone to provide labor in order to enjoy the "benefits" of citizenship. I believe the Constitution is quite clear on that matter.
If the DOD is having manpower shortages, perhaps a draft is necessary. In that case let Congress or the President ask for it (and watch the fireworks fly). If I am not mistaken, Congress has limited the number of active duty servicemen. Perhaps, it would be better to lift the quotas on active duty servicemen. Col Allard raises a strawman in order to push for national service.
The year-long mandatory service is a troubling idea for another reason: one year isn't enough time to make the time spent to get someone trained and into place worth it.
I didn't mention this earlier, but I think your objection is a fatal one. Young people tend to have few skills. Trying to find something useful that they can do probably would not be worth the trouble.
You are absolutely right: Congress determines the military's collective size (the proper term is "end-strength"), and then they enjoy calling foul when are forces get stretched thin and act like they had nothing to do with it. A lot of this stems from the political punditocracy constantly calling for cuts to the Defense budget, which now comprises something like 5 percent of all federal spending and 20 percent of GDP. You will find that entitlements, not defense (which is actually a Constitutionally-required function of the government, unlike most of the other garbage they spend their time doing) is where our debt issues originate.
To the colonel's point: he is living in a dream world. Yes, the Consitution is very clear on this matter, which therefore means any change would require a formal amendment, which ain't gonna happen. More importantly though, as a former servicemember myself, I'll take a stretched force over serving with some of the ignorant, lazy, unmotivated, and anti-American sloth our society so graciously harbors (no sarcasm intended) any day.
To add to you comments, compulsory service is slave labor.
I'd have been happy to serve my country. I joined the ROTC when I went to college. In the mid 70's there wasn't a lot of call for Navy pilots (my dream) and I withdrew. What would have been done with me were service compulsory? Wasn't it just a valuable that I took my college degree and applied it in the private sector so I could pay those taxes needed to pay those volunteer soldiers? Perhaps teaching in the inner-city would have been my assignment. Would I really have been more useful to society?
I'm afraid the Colonel thinks everyone should do as he did.
If you don't have income you don't pay income taxes. You can make a median income and pay no income taxes. You can choose not to make more income and therefore not pay income taxes. You can choose to be homeless and not pay income taxes. You can be G.E. and not pay income taxes.
Slavery is involuntary servitude. A year of compulsory service is involuntary servitude. Ergo, compulsory service is slavery.
Not paying income taxes one owes is like not paying any other debt you owe. Some might say, colorfully, that a mortgage is LIKE enslavement. It is not slavery.
The beauty of a language as rich as the English language is that we don't have to use the same word for everything. Marriage is not slavery, incomes taxes are not slavery, doing the dishes is not slavery. Compulsory service is, by definition.
Compulsory service for national defense is most certainly not slavery, because you are participating in the defense of yourself and your own homeland. You pay appropriate homage to the beauty of appropriate word choice, and I wish that you would practice it.
This all seems like a massive act of wishful thinking.
I've seen estimates that said that, at at least some points in the Iraq war, reservists and National Guard personnel constituted over half of the frontline troops.
This means that if we were to truly use reservists and the National Guard for just homeland security AND wanted to ensure that the military remain mostly a volunteer force, then we'd be forced to not fight wars on the scale of Iraq.
Those who complain that President Bush failed to unite the country after 9-11 always fail to offer suggestions of how such a unification could have come about. If he had called for volunteers, the people would have ignored him. If he had tried conscription he would have had riots. It was the left, blaming America, that threatened the unity of America, and continues to do so.
We don't need "national service" the colonel should know better. What we need is more regulars, more volunteers. Using reserves as minutemen is a worthless idea. Reservists are soldiers just like anyone else in uniform and should be used as such.
Our military has spent 10 years fighting, and suffered less than 5,000 deaths. It sounds like our soldiers are doing just fine with national service.
The military is already a target for harmful social change policies. With respect, what the colonel is suggesting could very well swing the door wide open for the worst social experiments any liberals could concoct. Our military could be much worse off in the long run.
Remember: to a liberal / socialist, National Service looks like Acorn. Be careful what you wish for.
LoyalJetFan, I disagree with you on the Jets but otherwise agree. Let's explore a few notions that the COL mentions. "The draft worked well in the 20th century." Oh really? During my service (now retired USMC LtCol) in the post-draft era we were not plagued with disciplinary problems. We closed most of the brigs (or whatever the Army calls them). Does the COL wish to re-open them? Because whether its in the military or for Homeland Defense or the other "service" he vaguely alludes to, when "Each young adult would be required to complete a year of service in return for enjoying the lifetime privileges of American citizenship" you will either have to look the other way at all sorts of malfeasance or enforce standards. Which will it be? Either is scary. What he proposes is essentially to expand AmeriCorps at what expense, who knows, and to equate service there with real military service results in "mandatory volunteerism" and cheapens the essential function of national defense. If standards are enforced, not only will you have to create/expand some sort of court and prison system, but as you (JetFan) mention then we can force mandatory EEO training (such as agreement with "gay marriage") on the whole nation, with concomitant prosecution of anyone who resists. The COL's idea gives our liberal masters -- who ban things like smoking routinely, love regulations everywhere and don't tolerate intolerance -- a huge tool to indoctrinate entire generations. All in the cause of "freedom" of course. [comments continued in next post]
