Lieutenant General Douglas Lute has given a military face to one of the worst ideas presented to date in the ongoing debate about the “War on Terrorâ€, Iraq, and the long war against fundamentalist Islam. For some time now, primarily fundamentalist Leftists have been calling for a return to the draft for primarily political reasons. General Lute’s comments give those political reasons seemingly military credibility.
Unfortunately, both the fundamentalist Leftists and General Lute are both wrong. The current problems that the US Military-especially the Army and the Marine Corps-is having sustaining combat operations in Iraq and elsewhere have little to do with the need for a draft and everything to do with the will of the political establishment to pay for America’s defense.
Let us rewind for a moment to the heady days of the Clinton presidency. The Berlin Wall had fallen. The Soviet Union had collapsed. In the political wisdom of the day, there was no need for a robust, large-scale standing military force. Politicians called this notion the “ peace dividend†as they slashed divisions, reducing the standing US Military to a fraction of its Cold War size.
Meanwhile, the terrorism of fundamentalist Islam grew. Those terrorists declared war on us. Those terrorists attacked us in Saudi Arabia, Zimbabwe, Yemen, and finally New York. Simultaneously, Saddam Hussein was rebuilding his army using money he gained from bribing and skirting UN sanctions against him. At the same time, Iran was building nuclear reactors capable of producing bomb-making materials.
Now, the United States is engaged in a war for the very survival of the West with an army the fraction of the size it needs. However, rather than face the fact that our all-volunteer fighting force simply needs to be allowed to get bigger, the politically expedient solution seems to be to force draftees to fight rather than allowing volunteer patriots to defend their fellow citizens.
The current problem the US Military faces is not one of not enough people willing to do the job, rather it is one of politicians not willing to allow the US Military to have what it needs to do its job. The military needs to be bigger, and a draft will not solve that problem. The military simply needs to be bigger. Make it bigger, and more volunteers will come.
Forcing unwilling draftees to fight will not ease the strain of current military operations. Authorizing an end strength that allows the military to recruit 50,000-100,000 more volunteers will. Allow the military to replace the all-volunteer divisions that were foolishly disbanded in the 1990s with new all-volunteer divisions, and the current problem goes away.
The draft is a bad idea whose time has long since passed. Let Americans who want to defend America do that work, and let them do that work by allowing more of them to do it. The solution to America’s current military stresses lies not in how we get people into the military, but in how many people we let the military have. The solution lies with Congress, and not with a draft.
