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  ne
reason why the American military attack on bin Laden is being delayed
is because the U.S. army does not have a single person in its ranks
who speaks Pashto, the language of the Taliban." This, according
to a wire-service report from Lahore in Pakistan, filed September
29th. I wonder if this is true? In the eleven years 1988-1998 (the
last ones I can find numbers for without spending all afternoon
in the INS database) the U.S. admitted 24,811 legal immigrants from
Afghanistan. Not one of them felt the urge to join the U.S. army?
I doubt this; but if it is true, we have a serious problem here.
We may have a serious problem anyway. I note, by the way, that you
don't need to be a citizen to join the army, though you do have
to be a citizen to hold officer rank. In fact, an aggregate of three
years of honorable service in the U.S. armed forces entitles an
alien to naturalization — the rest of us have to be U.S. residents
for five years. Conversely, if Uncle Sam asks a resident alien to
do military service and that alien refuses, he or she can be denied
naturalization.
It is by now
a well-worn cliché that the armed forces are the one part
of U.S. society where racial integration has been vigorously pursued,
and made to work. I don't doubt this, but I am curious to know some
of the finer details. It is a simple, commonplace fact that hardly
any line of work attracts people from different racial or national
groups in precise proportion to their numbers in the general population.
This is perhaps less true now than it was 50 years ago, when well-nigh
every barber was Italian, every bartender Irish, every launderer
Chinese, and every ship's engineer Scottish. It is still true over
large areas of the workforce, though. Until two years ago I had
the responsibility of hiring computer programmers for a Wall Street
firm. I couldn't help but notice that the pool of applicants for
these positions was around 40 percent Chinese, 30 percent Russian-Jewish,
20 percent Indian, and 10 percent everyone else. It would be surprising
to learn that applicants for any other line of work broke down the
same way. It would be astounding to learn that the young
men and women showing up at recruiting offices for the armed forces
broke down that way.
In fact, this
country's warriors have traditionally been drawn disproportionately
from quite a small subset of the population: descendants of the
"Scotch-Irish" — those people from the Scottish borders
and Protestant Ulster who poured into the back-country of colonial
America in the middle two quarters of the 18th century. Americans
from other groups have served with distinction, of course (Eisenhower's
ancestors were Mennonite pacifists who had refused to bear arms
in the Civil War), but the fiercest and most aggressive of America's
soldiers have been from back-country Scotch-Irish stock, like George
Patton and Holland "Howlin' Mad" Smith. The historian
David
Hackett Fischer, writing on this topic, notes the intense warrior
ethic in the South (which is much more Scotch-Irish than the North)
in the years leading up to the Civil War: "In 1852, Massachusetts
had one militia officer for every 216 men; North Carolina had one
officer for every sixteen men... There were many military academies
below the Mason-Dixon line and few above it..." He goes on
to discuss the motivations that sent different groups of Americans
to fight in WWII:
Northeastern
liberals joined it as a crusade against fascism and militarism
... Southern conservatives, always more internationalist than
the nation as a whole, were drawn into the conflict by their kinship
with Britain. The back country, bellicose as ever, fought for
national honor — and also for the joy of fighting.[My
italics.]
Tom Wolfe's
audio-novel Ambush
at Fort Bragg reflects the same state of affairs persisting
in the 1990s, his elite-unit troopers all talking in thick hillbilly
accents. Of course, not every American soldier pronounces "it"
as "heeyit," but it's hard to avoid the impression that
a high proportion of the toughest, hardest, and most indispensable
ones do.
The problem
with this is that fighting wars is not just another job like barbering
or laundering. It is a basic, if only occasional, obligation of
citizenship. This fact tends to get forgotten in a long peace, when
such little soldiering as needs to be done can be left to those
who feel personally inclined to a military career. If a really big
national emergency blows up, though, requiring more men and women
in uniform than the voluntary principle can supply, who gets drafted?
The current answer is: "Men of military age, at random from
the draft registers, subject to fifty-seven varieties of deferments
and exemptions."
It seems to
me some useful adjustments could be made here in this age of mass
immigration. If the army needs Pashto speakers, why can't it just
draft them from among those 24,811 Afghan immigrants? Similarly,
I recently read a report that said it is very difficult for the
U.S. intelligence services to recruit spies to work in China. Pretty
obviously, such a spy would need to be racially Chinese for full
effectiveness, and to have a fluent command of the Chinese language.
Well, the U.S. is not short of racially Chinese citizens and residents:
439,521 immigrated during those years 1988-98. So draft a few. It
would be an inconvenience — occasionally a lethal one —
to the persons drafted, of course, but it is an entirely legitimate
thing for a nation to ask of its citizens, and a fortiori
of those who desire to become citizens.
Robert Heinlein
wrote a fine novel, Starship Troopers (not to be confused
with the silly and vapid movie of the same name), about a society
in which you could only vote or hold office if you had performed
military service. I doubt that Americans, generally speaking an
un-military, commercial, and peace-loving people, would ever go
for that, but it might not be a bad idea to ask aspiring immigrants
to show at least some evidence of willingness to put their lives
on the line for the country of their dreams — a compulsory
spell in the National Guard, perhaps. Speaking as an aspiring American
myself, I wouldn't mind. I quite enjoyed my own military career,
trifling and part-time though it was, and would be glad to renew
the acquaintance. Whether Uncle Sam could actually make any use
of an out-of-condition middle-aged guy with flat feet and glasses,
is of course a whole other question. No, sorry, I can't speak Pashto.
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