To Draft or Not to Draft?

http://www.time.com/time/personoftheyear/2003/poyforum.html?cnn=yes

This Time forum asks a bunch of interested parties whether or not the United States should reinstitute a draft to deal with troop shortages. I certainly don't know everything about it, and I have never served in the military, but these are my preliminary thoughts.

I like how the first guy says "Increasingly we will be a nation in which the poor fight our wars while the affluent stay home." Increasingly? It's been that way since the beginning. In the Civil War in the North, if you paid a $300 fee, you didn't have to go. That's about as plain as you can get.

The next proponent of a draft says "this would stop the unprecedented activation of reservists." Hello!?!? They know that when they sign up for the army, they will serve active duty and then later be on reserve duty. They know that there's the possibility that they will be called up again. It might be unprecedented, but it's not like they didn't know it was a possibility.

The Armed Forces are often one of the only places where minorities get a shot at equality. The fact that minorities are overrepresented in our VOLUNTEER armed forces is a lot easier to stomach than the fact that they were even more grossly overrepresented in the DRAFT armed forces. They join because there are opportunities to get college money, sure, but a lot stay because they are treated like human beings. This might not be the case, though. Any comments from military people?

I don't know if a draft would ever work (although isn't that what Selective Service is all about?). There are so many people who would refuse to support it because of Vietnam. You'd have to have compulsory service of some kind for EVERYONE, so you couldn't have exemptions for college or whatever. So where would they get the money to pay everyone? If you didn't make everyone serve, then you would have all the problems with the draft during Vietnam all over again.

I know that lots of countries have compulsory military service because they need it, but why does Finland have it? I guess during the Cold War they needed it. But Switzerland has it too, and I can't figure out a necessity for it. South Korea has it, probably for good reason—they trained my roommate to be a dental hygenist, because it was completely random where they put you. Had he drawn a different number, he could have been on the front lines.

There's another problem with a draft: tracking tendencies in school would just be continued. They would point all the smart rich kids from good schools into officer training or the posh jobs, and people who didn't have the same opportunities would be stuck in menial or more dangerous jobs, thus perpetuating the unequal class structure. With the volunteer army, you have a chance to go into something that will teach you life skills, where you might not have had the opportunity outside of the army. Any compulsory military service that wasn't completely random would be inherently unfair. But what Senator would support a draft that gave the possibility that his own son could end up toting an M16 in the desert?

So as you see, I'm not in favor of a draft. We wouldn't have the problems with troop strength if we hadn't decided to invade two countries in less than a year.

Thanks to Shane for the link.