This whole chickenhawk business is getting out of control. I just did a

pro-war piece for that well-known paleocon website A.N. Other. In response

I have received many snide e-mails wondering aloud what my record of

military service was. After mulling a number of suitable replies (e.g.

“Mind your own popping business,” or “Better than Pat Buchanan’s”), I

settled on this one.

As a matter of abstract philosophy, I don’t think it is much for a nation to

ask that her citizens perform some sort of military service, with due

allowance made for conscientious and religious objections. I also think

that individual men (not sure about women) are better off for having endured

a spell of military discipline, however brief. I am a big fan of military

training for teens, and have propagandized for JROTC on this site. I also, to

be perfectly frank, think that when the nation is under a draft, as it was

in the young days of GWB, Cheney, Buchanan, Clinton, etc., those eligible

should do their duty without trying to wriggle out of it or cut deals with

the authorities; and the knowledge that a given person did wriggle or cut,

takes the shine off my respect for that person somewhat. I would guess that

a very large number of people feel the same way.

However, we have decided, as a nation, though proper and constitutional

processes of collective decision-making, that we will have professional

volunteer armed forces, not a citizen’s army. Under these circumstances,

the military record, or absence of such, of people who came of age in the

post-draft era, is of no interest or importance whatever when weighing their

opinions; and it is only of academic interest for older people.

I’ll add this, though: If the Vietnam-era draft had been properly,

rigorously enforced on all citizens, we wouldn’t be having these petty

squabbles 30 years later. If the draft is ever re-instituted, I hope it

will be ironclad, with no escape hatches for the elite, ingenious, or

well-connected. One of the reasons I have always thought The Bell Curve

such an important book (and, I suspect, one of the reasons that book was so

vilified) was the way it shows America’s elites drifting away from the mass

of the people. The widespread evasion of the draft by elites in the 1960s

was an early, and to my way of thinking very deplorable, symptom of that.

There now.