“I think we ought to have a draft. I think if a nation goes to war, it shouldn't be solely be represented by a professional force, because it gets to be unrepresentative of the population.”
– Retired U.S. Army general Stan McChrystal, speaking at the Aspen Ideas Fesitival June 29 (h/t the Cable).
Draft again? Look forward to coming home in a box? You can't have an effective military with guys wearing "FTA" on their helmets, refusing missions and fragging their officers as happened in the seventies. McChrystal needs to back to his day job as a salesman for Siemens -- a German company so forget patriotism.
In the waning days of the Nazi Reich, Hitler had a bit more than the draft at his disposal. He organized the “People's Front”, placing heavy bazookas in doddery elderlies' hands and pitting them in the snow against Soviet tanks (the Russians did the same during the Leningrad Siege). He ordered little girls to collect ammunition splinters and plane wreckages etc. in the fields, everything to be recycled by foreign slave workers into armament, etc., etc. . After all, it was the Total War he and the fanatical masses always cheered for.
But even Hitler never demanded money from crippled or otherwise unfit Germans to cripple or kill other, healthy Germans. Not even Propaganda Minister Goebbels or chief ideologist Rosenberg (or some anonymous Nazi enthusiast) ever came up with such a warped thought. So, maybe the Nazis weren't exactly such grotesque, sick militarists after all, as caricaturists always portray them.
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Fresh in from Oceania's Propaganda Ministry:
“Didn't send your kid to war? Maybe you can send $$
WASHINGTON (AP) — If you have military-age children who have not served in this decade's wars, then you owe a debt — meaning money — to those who did. That's the premise of a new fundraising effort by three wealthy American families who want to help U.S. veterans of the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Every non-military family should give something, they said. The affluent should give large sums. No one should think of it as charity, but rather a moral obligation, an alternative way to serve, perhaps the price of being spared the anxiety that comes with having a loved one in a war zone.
'We have three able-bodied, wonderful, wonderful children, all of whom are devoted to doing very, very good things around social justice; and we could not be more proud of them', said Philip Green, a local businessman who devised the fundraising idea. 'We're also delighted that none of them had to serve in Iraq or Afghanistan'.
Green says he and his wife came to look at that as unfair: 'I realized that there were parents just like me down the street, down the block ... who did not have that luxury' and were suffering sleepless nights and anxiety, 'which I was able to avoid'.
(...)
'Millions of Americans and their families have sacrificed so much in the conflicts and they have such needs', Stimmel said. 'By contrast, so many affluent Americans have not made a commensurate sacrifice; and they should'.
The issue of unequal national sacrifice has been a recurring theme during current and past conflicts and it always touches on at least two questions: Who serves in America and who doesn't? What's the responsibility of those who don't?”
The rest of this patriotic mass appeal could be read on “Yahoo!”'s mainpage until only moments ago:
http://news.yahoo.com/didnt-se...
Soon, being a “proud civilian” will be considered a dishonour in the U.S.A. ...!
McChrystal is right, and I don't say that often or lightly. In fact, McChrystal is the poster child for how an all-volunteer force undermines military professionalism. By the end of his career, he was dismissive of civilian authority, dismissive of the law (routine use of torture under his command), and dismissive of the truth and the American people (the Pat Tillman incident).
The all-volunteer military has opened a civil-military divide that is terribly convenient. It allows us to make decisions about the use of military force without any buy-in from the country. It prevents us from asking any serious questions about the military, because the military is the first to criticize civilian engagement by those who haven't served. It makes Americans less knowledgeable about military affairs and the military more resentful of civilians. It causes unnecessary stress and injury to a force that is overused and abused, all so we can pretend that the military we have is large enough for what we ask it to do. The quality of our enlistees at the margins is a scandal, but no one talks about it. It's easier to say we have the best military possible, and if you say it often enough, people will think it's true.
What is most ironic is that people criticize the Vietnam draft-era military as being unrepresentative of America, but in response we have created an all-volunteer military that is far less representative. Even with all the exemptions of the 1960s draft (such as the college exemption, which no longer exists in current draft law, if it was activated), military service was much more fairly shared than it is today. Furthermore, the numbers show that Vietnam-era draftees were of higher quality, on average, than volunteers. The same would be true today, because we would have access to the full breadth and depth of the population, not the dwindling narrow slice of America who serves today.
It is not possible to have a constitutionally healthy military with an all-volunteer force in an extended state of war.
A former Air Force officer, current law professor, and author of "A More
Perfect Military: How the Constitution Can Make Our Military Stronger"
The solution, general, is not a draft but rather not starting wars. The US military class treats wars as inevitable, which works well for them.
And if they do start their wars what's wrong with unrepresentative professional "warriors?" The Pentagon loves that term, to death, and the military class (except McChrystal) seems happy. They regularly label the current force as the finest military force the US has ever had. So why change?
Wait a minute -- there has been a draft, in a sense. How about all those National Guard and Reserve forces?
Because fielding only the strongest Armed Forces in the World isn't enough: The U.S. generals have much more ambitious plans than that.
