The Council For A Volunteer Military

INSISTENCE UPON the continuation of the draft through 22 years of cold war and limited war is, like the recent proposal for universal non-military national service, typical of the authoritarian liberal approach to all political problems. It is not accidental that it is McNamara, that prototype of the coercive social engineer, who made the first serious proposal in American history for a universal labor corps, as it is symbolically significant that it is he who has adamantly stood in the way of even so much as discussion of voluntary military service. With the same phony numbers game with which he has resisted the urgent need to deploy an American antiballistic missile system, he has confused the issue of the costs of a voluntary military establishment—his figures changing as wildly from time to time as his obfuscating projections of American and Soviet missile strength. WE HAVE HERE, beautifully displayed, the typical liberal authoritarian syndrome—an uninhibited willingness to use compulsion against American citizens together with the utmost delicacy when it comes to increasing the armed might of the United States against Communism. I have written previously in these pages [June 28, 1966 and August 9, 1966] my reasons for believing that, although in time of urgent national necessity the draft is politically legitimate and constitutional, there is no political or moral excuse for the draft under the circumstances that have prevailed for the past 22 years. I do not want to repeat those arguments at this time; I want rather to answer the attack of James Burnham [June 13, 1967] upon the Council for a Volunteer Military and upon a broad group of American conservatives who have associated themselves either with that Council or simply with opposition to the draft. I should say that I am a sponsor of the Council, along with such conservatives as the economists Milton Friedman and Yale Brozen, the publisher Henry Regnery, the editor of the New Individualist Review, James Powell, and the editor of the New Guard, David Franke, representing Young Americans for Freedom. It is these conservative leaders, as well as such other opponents of the draft as Barry Goldwater, Russell Kirk and William F. Buckley Jr., whom Mr. Burnham takes to task. The occasion of his criticism is the presence on the Council for a Volunteer Military of a number of men who have joined it for reasons rather different from those of the conservatives who initiated it—such representatives of the Left as Norman Thomas, James Farmer and Sanford Gottlieb. The gravamen of his charge is that it is impossible to support the struggle against Communism and simultaneously to believe that it can be better prosecuted by an army of properly paid volunteers. He accuses those conservatives who support the Council of being “at heart, or . . . getting to be, against the war’—an accusation that for myself and for other conservatives on the Council with whom I have spoken I simply know to be untrue. I STAND for a voluntary army so long as it is militarily feasible’ And I stand not only for the intensification of the Vietnam war but for a firm policy against Communism conducted as aggressively as is advantageous to cur interest. But so long as military needs remain anywhere near the present levels of less than 10 per cent of the male population of military age, there is no moral excuse for conscription. Particularly is this the case when the main argument brought against a voluntary army is its cost, when that cost would be a small fraction of the tens upon tens of billions of dollars we pour out annually for welfare of every description. Surely the personal liberty of the citizen and economic justice to our fighting men would, for any conservative, take preference over that welfarist flood. This would seem to be a point of conservative principle, and if conservatives succeed in gaining the support of those to their left for it, then so much the better. Mr. Burnham mocks at principle, putting the word in quotation marks and equating it with ideology; but if conservatives do not stand on principle, their entire reason for being vanishes. PRINCIPLE being out the window, Mr. Burnham sees the Council as benefiting only those from the Left who have joined it. But even if one accepted his pragmatic approach to political issues, he would be wrong. The Vietnam war would be conducted with greater enthusiasm, greater efficiency, greater support, if the patent injustice of the draft were eliminated. Indeed, so weak is his argument that he has failed to maintain his usually acute perceptions and equates those of us who wish to eliminate the draft legislatively with Cassius Clay and the draft-card burners. But Mr. Burnham must recognize on a moment’s reflection that to work for the repeal of a law and to break it are two radically different acts. The declaration of the Council is specific and explicit in limiting its statements and activities strictly to the single question of a voluntary military. Should there be any tenGency whatsoever to deviate in the direction Mr. Burnham fears, the conservatives on the Council are fully capable of forestalling it. All action is dangerous, but to refuse to support a vitally important principle because of the minor dangers which might arise would be timidity, not prudence. Voluntary military service under present circumstances is, I believe, such a principle. It is both the right and the privilege of citizens of a free society.