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The Draft
2004-4-25
The pro-draft voice is surfacing again... This time the bill is sponsored by Senator Chuck Hagel (R-NE), who has just become my most hated Congressman (previous draft-sponsor Charlie Rangel ties with him on the draft but is much better on other issues, so he's only the runner-up).
In this post, I'll start by refuting the arguments I hear for the draft, and continue by explaining the remaining arguments for my strongly anti-draft position. Most of the arguments I'm about to rebuke are things I've seen on OSP members' blogs while doing my part of the Around the OSP Blogs column; I'm not going to mention names primarily due to laziness (all italicized arguments are parahrased, consequently).
The draft ensures that politicians care about what happens to the troops.
Yeah, right. Assuming a two-year military service, the number of troops will be something like ten million. Even if this allows the war machine that is the US Armed Forces to wage wars where casualty rates are ten times what we see in Iraq (500 so far, roughly, giving us a thousand over a two-year period), we'll get a probability to die of one in a thousand. This is negligible from an individual perspective, and particularly this of a politician for whom life is less important than power.
Further, the interests of the troops and these of innocent civilians aren't always the same. Wars, after all, won't end because of a draft; Israel's had near-universal military service since its independence in 1948 and yet it's a full-blown National Security State that wages pointless, aggressive wars; the Vietnam war didn't exactly end when the draft was reinstituted. Clinton's bombing campaign against Serbia teaches us that sometimes, protecting the troops is at odds with protecting civilians; Wesley Clark begged Clinton to attack from the ground to minimize Serbian civilian casualties, but Clinton bombed from the air to minimize US military casualties. The less the public cares about what happens to the troops, the more people can worry about what happens to non-American civilians affected.
A draft will help by making sure that the burden is shared by everybody.
Is that a good thing? The "burden" talked about is getting killed. Say what you want about the current system, but at least the people killed chose to join the army despite the fact that they knew about the risk. Under the draft, unwilling victims are made to die for something. Where I come from, this is called murder - I think second-degree but I can be wrong. As for the "burdens of democracy" that IIRC Atrios talks about, if the price of democracy is getting killed, then sign me up for dictatorship. After all, freedom is meaningless to a dead man.
Universal military service can socially engineer society to become more equal.
I have two responses. One: screw social engineering if it can get me killed. Two: while this equality may seem favorable, it is in fact negative, because makes everybody worse off. Those currently in the military will have to take a smaller pay and fewer benefits after they leave, and while their probability to die may decrease, it will not decrease by much (see below), it isn't all that matters considering that voluntary soldiers are willing victims, and it will be offset by smaller gains from serving. Those not in the military will have a serious probability to die, and will face hardships such as training, combat, and in the general the inhumanity of military hierarchy.
The draft will make people more anti-war because their relatives will be affected by wars.
Terrorism (n.): the deliberate killing of innocent people for the purposes of terrorizing people into supporting a certain political agenda.
Currently, in the military poor people/blacks are overrepresented; a draft will correct that.
So, if the majority of rape victims in the USA are poor/black, which they most probably are, then does it mean that everyone should be raped?
Now, a few more arguments against the draft, which don't specifically counter common pro-draft claims:
1. The larger the military, the higher its ability to wage war; hence, the draft will not only kill innocent Americans, but also kill many more innocent people living in countries the USA bombs/invades.
2. The cost of a draft is immense - paying everyone 18,000 dollars a year (and that's without veterans' compensation and the GI Bill) will take a 180 billion dollars per year, which will be better spent elsewhere.
3. To directly quote someone I know from a certain forum: "It's better to have 10000 professional killers than to have 100000 teenagers who wish to be anywhere but there, and all they have on mind is their buddies, and in hand a copy of playboy."
4. The idea that people need to get killed for a country is repugnant, as after all it is the country that exists to serve the people, not the other way around.
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