BS: Avert The Draft

Subject: RE: BS: Avert The Draft
From: Bonzo3legs
Date: 16 Aug 07 - 08:41 AM

Without Press Ganging, many folk songs would simply not exist!

Subject: RE: BS: Avert The Draft
From: Teribus
Date: 16 Aug 07 - 09:32 PM

"BTW, 49.2% of the Army casualties in Vietnam and 94.8% of the Marines were volunteers. The Navy and Air Force didn't use the draft. I include members of the Reserves and Guard who were killed in these numbers."

Very pleased to see that somebody appreciates that joining the "Guard" did not guarantee that one would escape service in a "Theatre of War".

And please do not resurrect that old myth about GWB going AWOL, about him dodging the draft, about him not completing his service. The dog won't hunt and to dismiss the purely partisan and subjective arguements put forward, backed by very little substantive fact to support the contention, is all rather easy and very boring.

Subject: RE: BS: Avert The Draft
From: Janie
Date: 16 Aug 07 - 11:55 PM

The Navy and the Air Force didn't need to use the draft directly. I knew a number of young men who 'volunteered' for the Navy as a means of escaping being drafted into the Army, where they were much more likely to be sent to Vietnam, or if sent to that arena, were much more likely to find themselves on patrol in the jungle. If there were no draft, they would not have entered the military at all.

Just in case anyone should misinterpret, I am not denigrating the service of those who opted to go into other branches of the military during the Vietnam War. I also value the courage of those young men who chose to go to jail or into exile. And I am ashamed that the antiwar movement behaved in a blaming manner toward the soldiers themselves.

Art, I was wrong. The classification system regarding deferrment did not change. See this.


Janie

Subject: RE: BS: Avert The Draft
From: Ron Davies
Date: 17 Aug 07 - 11:25 AM

Janie is absolutely right. Since if you were drafted you had no say about where you went, there was a powerful incentive to enlist--especially if you could get-- in writing-- some
commitment by the Army to give you training in an area you might be able to use later. For instance, you could sign up for language training--as long as you were able to insist that the language would not be French (for French Indochina), Vietnamese, Thai, Cambodian or Laotian. Japanese, German and Russian were also available--and we had lots of troops in Germany, for instance. If you signed up for German, you had a very good chance of going to Germany--and not to Indochina. People who took Russian wound up stationed in Alaska, Turkey, possibly Washington state--and again, not Indochina. Of course it was still a gamble--with the military's well-known penchant for jamming round dowels into square holes.


So as Janie points out, it was very much a carrot and stick approach. It is misleading to characterize all the "enlistees" as volunteers--since without the draft the vast majority of these so-called "enlistees" would never have materialized.

Subject: RE: BS: Avert The Draft
From: Janie
Date: 11 Jun 08 - 01:17 AM

After reading the article linked to below, I strongly fear a resumption of the draft is inevitable.

http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/06/10/candidates.military/index.html

I've made clear above why I think a military draft would be more socially just within our US society. I could talk until the cows come home about my moral opposition to our involvement in Iraq, and in a detached manner consider the draft as a strategy to generate greater public opposition to the Iraqi war. I could expound, though not nearly as well as many others, on why I think our whole paradigm of fighting terrorism with increased military action only serves to esculate terrorism and is likely to lead to more and more violence and worldwide division and hatred along ethnic lines that has the very real potential to result in decades or centuries of something that looks like the Irish 'troubles' on a global scale and on steroids.

What really matters to me, however - what really brings me to my knees - is the fear of my son being drafted and going into combat.

I am afraid for my son.   It is the same for every mother and father, I think.
.
Selfishly, I am more afraid for myself.

I don't know how I could possibly bear losing him. I can hardly bear imagining the risk. I would not even have the small, cold solace of believing that his death was an awful, but noble, worthy or necessary sacrifice for a higher cause or the greater good. I would not even have the reality of the randomness of accidents or fatal illness. I would simply have the knowledge that he was wrongfully,wantonly, deliberately and quite willfully coerced into the jaws of danger and death by leaders of governments and religious schools and people from assorted places around the globe, locked into paradigms that they each believe is "right" and "the truth that is worth dying for", driven by unconscious, atavistic and antiquated tribalism, drive for power, and fear of the "other."

I'd blame them all. I'd hate them all. I'd be driven back to my own atavistic family tribalism in my pain, my fury, and my powerlessness to keep him safe and me from grief-driven madness.

When I imagine, (which I generally try to avoid doing because it is so frightening it causes physical pain), I can glimpse within myself the potential for insane hatred and self-righteousness, driven by despair and existential need to reclaim some illusion of power, even if it is only the power to destroy, the potential to need to externalize my own annilating pain by visiting it upon others. I can see the potential for there to be created in myself a heart very similar to what the heart of a terrorist must be.

Not just a remote possibility. A real potential...even with a safe roof over my head, food enough in my belly, fire enough in my stove, and the knowledge that I can safely venture out to work without getting shot at.

Which is the strongest, and most rational argument I have to support my belief that fighting violent radicalism with violence can only serve to perpetuate radicalism.

Subject: RE: BS: Avert The Draft
From: Ebbie
Date: 11 Jun 08 - 03:01 AM

((((((Janie))))))

Subject: RE: BS: Avert The Draft
From: GUEST,Chief Chaos
Date: 11 Jun 08 - 06:06 PM

A return to the draft might end the war but not for the reason you think. It would make things here and abroad all the worse, not because of casualties but because of all the folks who were drafted because they couldn't get away having to be babysat by the troops who are serving because they want to! Please don't let them do that to us! We could use some willing people but for every draftee that doesn't want to be doing whatever he's doing there will need to be two people making sure he does!

Subject: RE: BS: Avert The Draft
From: Janie
Date: 11 Jun 08 - 11:56 PM

John Hardly's 14 Aug 07-03:31PM post just caught my eye. Especially those last two lines:

In reality, it's not a bad proposal. And my leftist friend (professor at Notre Dame) has convinced this righty that a draft is the most moral way to man a military.

Don't know that moral is quite the precise term I would choose, but it certainly is more equitable and socially just.

Of course, if you are naive enough to think that there is no need for a military at all, well, take that up with Rangel. He's your guy.

There is a part of me that clings to the notion that there ought not be a need for a military, but oughts and shoulds are not about what is, and only get in the way of accepting "what is."      By the same token, confusing "ought and should" with "what is" is the prime mistake in thinking that results in wars that really could have been avoided.

Remember "My Country, Right or Wrong?" and the counter "When Wrong, Make it Right?" I thought that counter statement oh so clever in my teens and twenties, and so on target. It was beyond me why "those dolts" didn't get it's righteousness. That was truly naive. Those others were dolts. But so was I.

So, what is the "right" thing to do? Work to support a draft in the cause of social justice, or fight it like hell because of equally valid self-interest?

Subject: RE: BS: Avert The Draft
From: artbrooks
Date: 12 Jun 08 - 12:26 AM

How about fight it like hell because the military neither wants nor needs it?

Subject: RE: BS: Avert The Draft
From: Janie
Date: 12 Jun 08 - 01:05 AM

Art,

I don't doubt the military doesn't want to deal with draftees. Mainstream media reports strongly imply voluntary military personnel are over-extended and overburdened by lengthy and repeated tours. Is there any objectivity to those reports, in your opinion?

From where might objectivity be gleaned?

Subject: RE: BS: Avert The Draft
From: artbrooks
Date: 12 Jun 08 - 02:46 PM

In my opinion, if the military needs to be larger (a questionable point), than it should be "grown" in a rational and organized manner, with recruitment, training and equipment procurement all coming together appropriately. None of the military services have any trouble meeting recruiting goals, and there is no reason to think that this would be significantly different if the goals were to be increased incrementally. The army really didn't need the masses of the untrained and unwilling that it had during the Vietnam Era, many of whom spent only eighteen months or less in uniform (and I served in Vietnam, surrounded by draftees), and today's military has even less need for them.

IMPO, if we had started the current stupidity with some kind of rational plan for ending it we wouldn't be in the fix we are in today, because we would have had an appropriate force structure and a rational force sustainment plan. Returning to a system of military manpower "planning" that was obsolete forty years ago is far more than a step backward.

Subject: RE: BS: Avert The Draft
From: Janie
Date: 12 Jun 08 - 03:01 PM

Thanks Art. That's helpful.

Subject: RE: BS: Avert The Draft
From: katlaughing
Date: 12 Jun 08 - 03:10 PM

Janie, your posting of 117a is one of the most eloquent pieces I've ever read on this, esp. from the perspective of a mother of a son. I felt the same fear/anguish when my son was younger, though there was no war at the time.

If you read over some of the well-thought-out postings to this thread you may find some comfort as I did. I know it was written four years ago, but I think some of the reasoning is still relevant.

{{{{{HUGS}}}}

kat

Subject: RE: BS: Avert The Draft
From: PoppaGator
Date: 12 Jun 08 - 04:04 PM

"None of the military services have any trouble meeting recruiting goals..."

I challenged this statement when someone else put it forward in another one of these threads a while back, and was quickly contradicted. I was too busy and didn't take the opportunity to argue back at that time, but I'm not letting this misleading statement go by again without commenting:

That the services have not yet failed to meet an annual recruiting goal is, indeed, true in a purely technical sense, but they are meeting their goals only with ever-increasing difficulty. Specifically, the educational standards are lowered on a regular basis in order to meet quotas, and an ever-increasing proportion of high-school dropouts are being accepted each month as new recruits.

Well, I suppose it could be argued that the standards themselves are etched in stone and not "lowered," but an ever-increasing number of exceptions are being allowed.

I heard a lengthy report on NPR on this issue a while ago, featuring interviews with several Army officers, both in the Pentagon and out in the field in combat. The presence of more and more underqualified recruits is a problem, since many of these young men are at least as difficult to train and supervise as draftees ever were.

Interestingly, more than one of the officers interviewed volunteered the opinion that the most pressing problem with these dropout/recruits is not lack of intelligence or even lack of schooling, but lack of self-discipline and inability to respond appropriately to authority.

Whether or not recruiting goals are being met, it cannot be denied that the US military is drastically overextended these days. Unless the government changes direction and scales back combat operations while resuming our former policies of diplomacy, multilateralism, etc., I don't see how an effort to reinstate the draft could be avoided.

Of course, any such effort is bound to meet with serious grassroots opposition. I'd hate to have to go through that all over again, but I don't think I could stand idly by without trying my best to oppose it

Subject: RE: BS: Avert The Draft
From: artbrooks
Date: 13 Jun 08 - 12:23 AM

Yes, there are certainly more exceptions to the long-standing rule of, for example, high school graduate and no criminal record. However, I understand that most of the exceptions - and these are done on an individual basis rather than as a blanket change - are to allow GEDs and to waive teen-aged misdemeanors. And no, I don't have any statistics or the interest in looking them up - the data is on each services' recruiting command web site. And yes, the military is certainly overextended, but the draft is not the answer and nobody in the military would advocate, support or welcome it.

Subject: RE: BS: Avert The Draft
From: PoppaGator
Date: 13 Jun 08 - 12:31 PM

"- and these are done on an individual basis rather than as a blanket change -"

Well, when the number of "individual" cases is continually on the increase, it's really just a matter of semantics to argue over whether or not we're seeeing a deliberate shift in policy (a "blanket" change") or just some temporary and accidental quirk.

Hundreds (or thousands) of individual recruiters are assigned quotas, all or most of them have trouble finding enough fully-qualified recruits, and most of the recruiters have to make exceptions in order to perform to expectations. It's pretty disingenuous to dismiss this phenomenon as an accidental series of random individual instances: the quotas are set as a matter of nationwide policy, and the increasing reluctance to volunteer during an unpopular and highly dangerous conflict is no accident, either.

I would also like to believe that reinstatement of the draft will never happen, and understand completely how and why military professionals are no more anxious than pacifists to see reluctant draftees enter the services. However, it's not the professional soldiers I'm worried about ~ it's the saber-rattling politicians who tend to start wars without considering whether they can be finished, and thereby create situations where manpower is stretched beyond any tolerable measure.

Right now, the best idea that the hawks in Washington can put forward to encourage retention is to keep a lid on veterans' benefits, so that soldiers are discouraged from mustering out and finding themselves at a severe disadvantage in a tough civilian economy, unable to afford education and without access to adequate medical care.