The Wrongologist

This is Part II of a continuing series in 2015, bringing forward for your review, ideas that have the potential to transform and end the ossification of our country. Part I was about ending our love affair with the unregulated free market.

In Part II, we argue for re-establishing compulsory military service. In response to the anti-military opinion during the Vietnam War, Nixon replaced the compulsory military draft with an all-volunteer force in 1973. This facilitated our ability to make decisions about conducting wars without worrying about who fights them.

Registering for the draft (as differentiated from compulsory service) is still the law for young men in America. If you were born in 1996 or earlier, that means you’re potentially on the hook if America runs out of professional military during wartime.

There are two problems that compulsory military service will help to ameliorate. First, the permanent state of war that our politicians and defense contractors have fostered in the past 40 years. Charles F. Wald, retired Air Force general who oversaw the start of the air war in Afghanistan in 2001 told the WaPo in September:

We’re not going to see an end to this in our lifetime.

Second, a professional military has dangerously skewed the demographics of our professional military compared to our society at large.

We have a permanent state of war because the price we pay is opaque, or meaningless to most citizens, despite some estimates that Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan cost more than $4.4 Trillion, including future obligations for the disabilities of American soldiers. Reinstating the draft would compel the American public to have “skin in the game” for the wars we fight. James Fallows in a very important article for The Atlantic gives us some perspective relative to when we had the draft and what goes on today: (brackets and parenthesis by the Wrongologist)

At the end of World War II, nearly 10% of the entire US population was on active military duty—which meant most able-bodied men of a certain age (plus the small number of women allowed to serve).

[Today] the US military has about 1.4 million people on active duty and another 850,000 in the reserves.

(Out of a population of 310 million, or about three-quarters of 1%, served in Iraq or Afghanistan at any point in the post-9/11 years, many, many of them more than once)

Since 1970, the population of the US has grown by about 50%, from roughly 200 million to 300 million. Over the same period, the number of active-duty armed forces has fallen approximately 50%, from 3 million to 1.4 million. Fallows quotes Admiral Mike Mullen, the retired chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under George W. Bush and Barack Obama: (brackets by the Wrongologist)

My concern is this growing disconnect between the American people and our military…I would sacrifice some of [our military’s] …excellence and readiness to make sure that we stay close to the American people. Fewer and fewer people know anyone in the military. It’s become just too easy to go to war.

Moving to the demographic differences between the professional military and American society at large, Charles J. Dunlap Jr., a retired Air Force major general who is at the Duke Law Schools says: (emphasis by the Wrongologist)

I think there is a strong sense in the military that it is indeed a better society than the one it serves…In the generation coming up, we’ve got lieutenants and majors who had been the warrior-kings in their little outposts…They were literally making life-or-death decisions. You can’t take that generation and say, ‘You can be seen and not heard.’

Dunlap told James Fallows: (brackets by the Wrongologist)

[The military is] becoming increasingly tribal…in the sense that more and more people in the military are coming from smaller and smaller groups. It’s become a family tradition, in a way that’s at odds with how we want to think a democracy spreads the burden.

Making Dunlap’s point, Danielle Allen, of the Institute for Advanced Studies on Military Service wrote about the political implications of a professional military in the WaPo:

By the end of the draft in 1973, military service was distributed pretty evenly across regions. But that is no longer true.

Tellingly, changes to the map of military service since 1973 align closely with today’s red and blue states. Montana, Alaska, Florida, Wyoming, Maine and Texas now send the largest number of people per capita to the military. The states with the lowest contribution rates? Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Jersey and New York. What’s clear from the data is that a major national institution, the US military, now has tighter connections to some regions of the country than to others. The uneven pattern of military service is not an insignificant reflection of the cultural differences that characterize different regions of this diverse country. This has broad ramifications for our future.

Heidi A. Urben, a Lieutenant Colonel, studied the attitudes of the officer corps, and found that about 60% said they identify with the Republican Party, and that 70% had not changed their party affiliation, despite two long wars.

The Pentagon reports that bringing back conscription would be costly at a time when the US Army is drawing down its forces. It might cost billions to reinstate the draft, while maintaining the present quality of armed forces. But it may be the only way to wake up a detached and nonvoting public that has depersonalized military service. The additional cost of managing a draft and training all Americans for some kind of government service would pay dividends:

• A draft would ensure that government decision-making regarding military involvement would be undertaken only after the fullest debate — a debate today that seems to not be part of the national consciousness and hardly registers any interest by the public.
• A draft would narrow the gap between people in power in Washington and the men and women at peril in fighting our nation’s battles.
• A draft could re-balance the skewed demographics of the military.

A draft could mean that voting on Election Day would be more important in our now-fragile democracy. It could mean that going to war is worth having every citizen sacrifice, or it isn’t worth any soldier’s life.