From the headlines:
In the latest signs of strains on the military from the war in Iraq, the Army National Guard announced on Thursday that it had fallen 30 percent below its recruiting goals in the last two months and would offer new incentives, including enlistment bonuses of up to $15,000....
The sharp decline in recruiting is significant because National Guard and Army Reserve soldiers now make up nearly 40 percent of the 148,000 troops in Iraq, and are a vital source for filling the ranks, particularly those who perform essential support tasks, like truck drivers and military police.
General Blum said the main reason for the Army National Guard's recruiting shortfall was a sharp reduction in the number of recruits joining the Guard and Reserve when they leave active duty. In peacetime the commitment means maintaining their ties to the military with a weekend of service a month and two weeks in the summer.
Over the last 30 years, General Blum said, the Guard has counted on these soldiers with prior military service for about half of its recruits. Since the Sept. 11 attacks, however, many of these soldiers have been hesitant to join the Guard because of the increasing likelihood that America's citizen-soldiers will be activated and sent to Iraq or Afghanistan for up to 12 months. Indeed, many of the active-duty soldiers the Army would like to enlist in the Reserves have recently fought in Afghanistan or Iraq, and some have no inclination to do so again.
And relatedly:
Which brings us to the strange visit reported by the Brethren Service Center of New Windsor, MD this past October eighth. One Cassandra Costley, Director of the Alternative Service Division at Selective Service, stopped in, "because I happened to be in the neighborhood." But come to think of it, now that she was there, she did want to know if the famed peace church was geared up to handle the demands of alternative service for conscientious objectors just in case a draft were, you know, kinda needed hypothetically at some undetermined date in the possibly near future, although clearly the White House had said nothing to her personally that such a thing might be in the works, etc.
This chance meeting led to other meetings, because peace churches have been watching war states closely for about four hundred years, and on March 4 the peace churches of America will convene near Chicago to get their alternative service act worked out....
And let’s not forget the timely Democratic Senator from Rhode Island, Jack Reed, who was quoted this week by Baltimore Sun reporter Tim Bowman, one of the reporters who found themselves in possession of a leaked memo from another general about the exhausted Army Reserves.
"By consistently underestimating the number of troops necessary for the successful occupation of Iraq, the administration has placed a tremendous burden on the Army Reserve and created this crisis," said [Sen. Reed].
So it looks to me, kids, like it’s time to get real about the draft. Either you can get your conscientious objector papers together and sign up with the peace churches, or you can prepare for employment in the newly restructured Army Reserves, which is going to be rotating folks into Korea, I mean Iraq, for the rest of your lives. They say it’s a free country you live in, boys, so they might even give you another whole month to decide.
But for a contrary view, there is Chomsky:
My guess is that the Bush administration planners will not call for a draft.
The military command, and the civilian leadership, learned an important lesson in Vietnam: you can’t expect a citizen’s army to fight a vicious, brutal colonial war. Their predecessors knew that. The British, French, etc., provided the officer corps, special forces, and professional military, but relied on the Foreign Legion, Ghurkas, Indian troops, and other mercenaries. That’s standard. The US made a serious tactical error in this regard in Vietnam—though it had plenty of mercenaries too: South Korean, Thai, and others. In Iraq, the US is using what amounts to a mercenary army of the disadvantaged, and the second largest military force is the “private” companies made up of ex-military officers, South African killers, etc.
In Vietnam, the army collapsed from within: drugs, killing officers, etc. Citizens are not trained killers, and they are not sufficiently dissociated from the civilian culture at home to fight colonial wars properly. The top brass wanted the army out, before it fell apart. And the civilian leadership agreed....
This seems to assume a higher level of prudence on the part of the civilian leadership than warranted by any existing evidence; and whatever the internal disciplinary problems of the army in Vietnam, the fact is it wreaked bloody havoc quite well for quite a long time.
In an astonishing display of naivety, Chomsky adds:
[F]or what it’s worth....although I was actively involved in organizing and supporting resistance (including support for draft resisters) in the 60s, and was saved from a likely prison sentence only by the Tet offensive, I was never opposed to the draft. If there is to be an army, it would be best, I think, for it to be mainly a citizen’s army. In part for the reasons that the top command oppose that option.
As to how long it will be tolerated, that’s up to us.
It is not up to "us" except in the fictional sense that there is a collective entity that makes decisions in the interests of the common good; but Chomsky knows this isn't so, certainly not in a plutocracy like the United States. The only consequence of a military draft will be to enable Bush & his bestiary of madmen to expand the devastation of their global jihad, killing and maiming more people, both Americans and non-Americans. It may be true (as Chomsky says here) that, "In a decent society [the military] shouldn’t be 'volunteer' in the sense that it’s undertaken only by people who are driven to it by need. Rather, it should be equitably distributed—which one can call 'conscription' if one likes." But we do not live in a decent or democratic society in the relevant sense. We live in a plutocracy, with repeated signs of blossoming theocracy and authoritarianism, where the only consequence of a military draft will be to embolden the bloody ambitions of the chicken hawks and to send more people's children to their deaths.
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