The Draft, Practicalities thereof

I know, the generals do not want a draft. I know, the politicians do not want a draft. Let’s not talk about that.

Let’s presume our office is tasked to draw up a policy for an American program of conscription.

  1. If we need technically inclined people, where shall we get them?
  2. If we were to draft college graduates, in order to get more educated folks, how would the GI BIll (which pays for college) be impacted?
  3. Ought women to be drafted? Perhaps at some reduced rate?
  4. How long ought conscripts be forced to serve?
  5. Ought we to draft some professions, such as doctors?
  6. Last time around, we used birth dates to selected the lucky winners. Is there a better system?

The military tends to produce its own technically inclined people - this works pretty well, and I see no reason to screw with it. Even in a draft, that would just increase the number of people in the pool that could go to electronics, radar, or intelligence schools. And the rest could become infantrymen. :wink:

The G.I. Bill can be used to pay grad school benefits, so some will participate even if they have a good level of education. And they have an option not to participate as well, so that they don’t lose their $1200 contribution out of their pay.

A medical draft can be handled without registration, as local draft boards can easily find people with medical training by examining the employment rolls of local hospitals and first responders. And while there is no current law providing for such, a “doctor’s draft” was conducted during the Korean War.

I think a birth date lottery can be perfectly fair provided deferments are limited and fairly applied.

For the record, while I am a member of my local Selective Service board, these are my personal opinions and do not represent the views of the Selective Service System or the Department of Defense.

With our eyes firmly on the improbability of a draft, and just as a theoretical discussion:

Hire them. The same way the government/military gets technical people it needs now. Contract them, pay them bonus’s, give them perks, etc etc. Its how they got ME for years when I lived and worked in Washington DC and Northern Virginia.

Don’t know…make a provision for post-graduate work I guess. College graduates would probably be drafted as officer candidates in some kind of accelerated OCS or something I would imagine.

Don’t know. On the one hand I think that women are citizens and should share fully in that citizenship. On the other hand I’m not sure if this would further impair military efficiency (it would already be in the toilet with the draft as it is). I’ve seen some studies about women in combat positions and how it effects the men around them (IIRC men in mixed sex units tend to take higher casualties).

Perhaps you could draft women to fill all the non-combat roles that men currently take, freeing them up to go die for king and country. Or maybe you just suck it up and accept that your military is already fucked up with the draft, the impact of women in those units isn’t going to make it all that much worse. As I said…not sure.

Considering how long it would take to get them in, train them and ship them out I’d guess ‘for the duration’ is what you’d end up with. ‘Ought’? I’d say ‘they shouldn’t be forced to serve any time at all’.

I wouldn’t. I’d contract them as specialists…maybe make them warrant officers or whatever but hired not drafted.

General draft, no exceptions. If you are unfit to serve in a combat role there is probably something you CAN do. Its the only really fair way to do something like this.

-XT

We did all this when I was a kid. The reason for the lottery was fairness, but also to allow those who were not going to be called up to get on with their lives. I’d see no reason to change that.

Whatever one thought about the draft, it worked pretty efficiently. Some things, though, are policy decisions. Do you want to give college deferrments? If so, you will draft college graduates, who may or may not be more technical than the average population. Do you want to draft women. Back 35 years ago, that was out of the question, but now women are near combat all the time. There were deferrments for teaching and other such stuff. If you want to increase the number of college grads going into teaching, that’s the way to do it.

It will work one way or another - how is political.

I don’t see how women wouldn’t be drafted in this day and age. How would it be justified? Even pacifist feminists will be up in arms. And personally, that’s why I don’t think a draft can happen. If the public can hardly stomach a pretty white female soldier getting hurt after wilfully enlisting, what the hell will they make of untrained female civilians getting sent into battle against their will? And how can you explain to their sons that you want them to respect their sisters and all women as equals and human beings but, well, only the boys in the family will be going off to war?

According to current law, student deferments run until the end of the semester or the academic year if you’re a senior. Then you have to report.

The days of stringing college and grad school together to avoid military service are over.

The only way a draft can work politically is a universal draft. Everyone, regardless of sex, fitness, or religious belief, is drafted and must serve in some capacity. On your 18th birthday you are forced to go. And if you don’t go, you spend the exact same amount of time in prison as you would have spent in the service.

So everybody serves. Except we don’t need that many untrained infantrymen, so the military will select the people they want out of the draft pool, and the rest including all conscientious objectors and various other troublemakers go into the non-military pool. Everyone goes through boot camp, I guess the military draftees would have to go on to a second boot camp to get specific military training. Military draftees get sent overseas as cannon fodder for the various countries we’ll be occupying indefinately. Non-military draftees form labor batallions. Really unskilled people will be used as migrant farm workers, others will become nurse’s aides, orderlies, truck drivers, garbage collectors, road crews, caterpillar fur-counters by touch, testing survival gear on Titan, and any other government job that we currently use minimum wage workers for.

Of course, what this amounts to is a direct tax on labor…everyone, regardless of skill, regardless of ability, regardless of the opportunity cost, is shoveled into unskilled, uncompensated dangerous minimum wage positions. And the benefit to society would be that we don’t have to pay taxes to pay the current minimum wage workers…we would have paid our dues already in the form of uncompensated labor.

Only the trouble is that paying room, board, medical insurance, training, counseling, liability insurance and so forth for a bunch of resentful 18 year olds is almost certainly going to cost more than simply paying minimum wage (or higher) to hire the people we need to to the jobs we deem neccesary.

The alternative…just picking people at random and forcing them to join the military up to the levels required to meet military staffing levels…would be so unfair as to be politically impossible. A draft could possibly be sold if everyone had to go. A draft where only a miserable few were selected to pay the price could not be.

If we need a draft to support the indefinate occupation of an indefinate number of third world shitholes for the forseeable future, then such occupations simply won’t happen.

The other alternative…paying people wages and benefits so generous that they choose to enlist…reveals the true cost of the occupation while a draft sweeps the costs under the rug. But paying soldiers what they would be worth would also be politically unsupportable.

If it were politically feasible to draft men into combat roles, it would probably be feasible to draft women into non-combatant roles, or at least civilian-military service.

Speaking as a broken-down old infantryman, I would point out we are not unskilled. Trust me.

The Washington Post has an article by 12 Army Captains advocating looking at conscription. I would post the link but the parrot wants to go to bed.

But can you turn an 18 year old into a skilled infantryman in only 1 year? And how long will his training last and how long will you be able to force him to stay in the service? If it takes 6 months to train a competant but not skilled infantryman, and you’ve only got your draftee for a year, then you’ve only got 6 months of work out of him.

I understand that “soldier” is a skilled job. And my contention is that you can’t be trained to perform a highly skilled job in just a few months. It takes training, practice and experience. Or are we going to draft people into 20 year enlistments?

That’s why I put up a little wink.

But I would point out that you started out pretty unskilled, I’d bet, and that the Army gave you skills. Nothing wrong with that - it has always been the role of the Army to train its soldiers.

Some percentage of them will probably decide to make the military a career. When the hitch is almost, up a recruiter can swing by and try to talk them into another few years.

Do they say why?

Army Captains? That’s not very high up the food chain… that’s the same as a Navy Lieutenant. (O-3)

Were they in some Pentagon staff position, or the War College?

Otherwise, I don’t understand why these Captains would be used as “insider sources”…

Captains head up companies, artillery batteries, and cavalry troops. They’re in a position to see a lot of problems firsthand.

But if the captains are seeing problems, how can they figure a draft will solve the problems? OK, they’re not seeing as many privates re-enlisting, they’re seeing lower quality new recruits. And so we have to ask, WHY don’t those privates want to re-enlist, WHY don’t more young people want to enlist in the first place? Obvious answers there. So how is shipping kids off to Iraq at gunpoint going to help those captains win the war? If you think you see low-quality recruits today, how are resentful conscripts going to compare?

Or if you don’t plan on using the conscripts as infantrymen, but rather as support personnel to free up volunteers to serve as infantrymen, what’s wrong with hiring civilians? How about us taxpayers paying for what we think we want, rather than forcing 18 year old kids to do it for us for free?

During WWII plans were drawn up to draft women to serve as nurses, but those plans were shelved after Japan surrendered. The UK did something similiar to what you’re proposing. While men ended up in the military (except for a few sent to the mines) women had to serve, but could choose between the military, agricultural work (Women’s Land Army) , factories, or social service type work (Women’s Voluntary Service). However in this day in age it would be most unfair to require men to risk their lives in combat while women get a free pass. A young mother being killed is no more tragic than a young father being killed.

At least sixty female US soldiers (or airmen, etc) have been killed in the Iraq war so far. I haven’t heard anything close to a public outcry about it.

In this day and age we require men to risk their lives in combat while women “get a free pass” in that they are not allowed in combat roles.

The Times yesterday mentioned that there is a growing shortage of officers, which looks especially bad if the military expands. I think they’re now paying $35K re-enlistment bonuses. I suspect a group of Captains would be very close to this problem.

I’d suspect that a certain percentage of draftees would enjoy the military and stay in. Would you happen to have info on this from the draft era?

After all, Gomer Pyle did. :smiley:

See, that’s exactly the problem.

The army doesn’t want more junior personnel, they want trained veterans. If they can’t convince their volunteer junior personnel to stay in long enough to become trained veterans, how are they going to convince draftees?

The draft provides us with something more like the Soviet military…a small cadre of officers and NCOs, and a herd of conscripts trying to serve out their sentence without getting killed, either by the enemy or by their superiors.