A Call to End the Draft

...On strictly military grounds the system was ideal...

...To invoke images of the U.S...

...Because of cur callous acceptance of permanent conscription, it is important to review the way in which the development of World War II was translated into specifications of the "clear and present danger...

...In case of war a rapid mo bilization was possible...

...today, where public opinion in foreign affairs has been deliberately muffled, foreign policy decisions remain the exclusive property of hidden cabals in the State Department, the Pentagon and the C.I.A...

...acknowledged the superior claim of national security and withheld its opposition to compulsory military training...

...Such a movement would express popular opposition to compul sory soldiering except under conditions of dire emergency...

...ican Soldier,' a circumspect World War II investigation of army personnel...

...After the initial collapse of the Soviet armies, the Service Extension Act of 1941 declared the national interest impaired and authorized training for as much as eighteen months...

...Thereafter, up to 1940, U.S...

...That the levee en masse provided a successful defense of the French revolution in no way endows conscription with a democratic character...

...it was renewed in 1963 with only ten minutes of Senate deliberation...

...Neither is this basis of justification subject to arbitrary judgment or the ambiguities of an abstract non-historcial context...

...As long as such cabals can count on the rapid dispatching of 23,000 soldiers to Santo Domingo, foreign policy can easily slide into military adventures...

...By contrast the Canadian private gets $112.00, and those with skills, $202.00...

...When the American Civil Liberties Union affirms that "compulsory military service, whether in time of peace or war, is always a severe deprivation of civil liberties," neither the liberals of the Left nor democratic socialists take sufficient heed...

...history...

...The ghosts of both Caesar's Legions and Cromwell's Model Army are said to have stalked the American constitutional convention...

...But service under this act was still confined to the Western hemisphere and U.S...

...But it is patently contradictory to uphold both propositions simultaneously...

...Following Pearl Harbor, these restrictions were removed by the declaration of war, and the length of service was extended for the duration plus six months...

...Please note also the letter by John R. Seeley on this topic, on p. 554...

...ly denied in military organizations...

...What distinguishes the soldier from the civilian is that the soldier lives with the expectation to kill and the demand that he suffer the risk of death by violence...

...The growth of conscript armies contributes as much to the arms race as does the stock-piling of weapons...

...To those for whom the undeclared war in Vietnam and the present system of conscription are understandably repugnant, another course is open, besides seeking individually to opt out of the army by way of "conscience," or by embarking on frustrated expressions of rebellion...

...This constitutes no abandonment of the civil libertarian approach which permits limitation of liberties in the face of greater dangers...

...But it is the conscrip tion advocate who carries the burden of justification...

...1 and 2, Princeton, 1949...

...A bona fide antimilitarist movement will therefore press for abolishing conscription throughout the world, exposing the size of the Soviet armed services and their military expenditures as well as the Pentagon's...

...That denial creates a distaste for the military, as illustrated in The Amer...

...Senator Nelson was one of the few defenders of the uneducated and the poor who are extra-heavily burdened with the draft, when he denounced Selective Service as "a colossal mistake...

...port from Secretary of Defense McNamara...

...Since 1940, however, conscription has been in force almost continually...

...A large national army was discouraged by pro visions for state militias...

...But the essence of military professionalism lies in the training, command and decision-making in both types of armies which come under the complete control of a permanent officer caste...

...In our impulsive response to the class and racial inequities of Selective Service, which shamefully concentrates America's underprivileged youth in the front lines, we find sudden supThis is a continuation of the reflections on the draft which appeared in both our May—June and July—August issues...

...Not only did the G.I...

...Before a "clear and present danger," universal military training can be jus tified, just as overriding needs of na tional security may warrant censorship in times of war...

...If in open debate before the public and Congress, he can confirm the threat to national security, an abridgement of liberties is warranted...

...the armed forces of the nation came under a civilian commander-in-chief...

...We tend instead to be more alerted to other, but less commanding issues like the need to extend draft exemption to a broader category of objectors or to cleanse academia of its new-found guilt over Grades for Death...

...and the support of those forces was allotted only to Congress, whose military appropriations were limited to two years...

...In spite of this long history of professionalism, Caesarism never materialized...

...Conscription, no matter how genuinely universalized, is inimical to both democratic and socialist values...

...tend to become rooted in the nation...

...Justified on the grounds of community preservation, death-dealing and death-receiving transforms military life into a serious matter, a seriousness antiseptically avoided by the effort to equate it with years in the Peace Corps or the antipoverty service...

...either in terms of a "Garrison State" or a "Power Elite" based on a military-industrial complex, accentuates the significance of the officer caste...

...peacetime military operations depended exclusively on a system of voluntary recruitment...

...In time of peace large numbers of able-bodied men were given intensive, efficient military training...

...feel coerced within an "authoritarian organization demanding rigid obedience," but he also deplored and resisted this "highly stratified social system, in which hierarchies of deference were formally and minutely established by official regulation, subject to penalties for infraction, on or off duty...

...When confronted with the Nazi conquest of continental Western Europe in 1940, the A.C.L.U...

...It was this fear that prompted so thorough-going a constitutional subordination of the military to civilian authority...

...It restricted the number of inductees to the amount Congressional appropriation provided, confined training to 900,000 at any given time and specified a terminal date to the system of conscription itself...

...Similarly slighted has been the relevance of peacetime conscript armies to adventurism in foreign policy...

...The whole system of military conscription, however, has been peripherally examined, if at all...

...But the mere existence of armies based on conscription demonstrated what Auguste Comte called "the anti-military incliniations of modern populations...

...To be sure, the present Universal Military Training and Service Act is subject to quadri-annual Congressional review...

...Along with its demands for steps toward disarmament, an antimilitarist movement will urge the reduction of all standing armies...

...Military organization is not just another bureaucracy...

...Values of freedom and equality, cherished in civilian life, are obvious...

...Theodore Draper drives this point home in his meticulous analysis of "The Dominican Crisis" in the December 1965 issue of Commentary...

...Yet conscription was applied to manpower alone, despite repeated pro posals to "draft capital" too...

...Consequently the risks of war fell only upon the armed forces, who suffered over a million casualties, while the proliferation of wartime millionaires grew at a pace unsurpassed in U.S...

...The alternative involves organizing an anti-militarist movement with the aims of abolishing a conscripted standing army and establishing a democratic foreign policy...

...The Selective Service and Training Act of 1940 limited training to twelve months...

...To deny that a conscript army poses a threat to civil government ignores the importance of its officer corps...

...In the U.S...

...No such condition prevails in the Vietnam War...

...Before the youth of the world, nothing is more urgent than to replace the call to arms with a call to end the draft...

...The principle of a nation in arms was most completely expressed in the Prussian system of universal liability from which it soon spread throughout continental Europe...

...Through the conscript the U.S...

...Particularly repulsive is Castro's willingness to permit emigration to all dissidents except those between 17 and 27 who are eligible for Cuban conscription...

...is thus able to minimize its military manpower costs while maximizing the number of military personnel...

...A subsequent investigation uncovered 5,000 married soldiers applying for family relief assistance, and 70,000 men-inarms moonlighting...

...The effort to bring foreign policy into the public domain, where domestic policy questions have long been contested, will surely entail debate over military conscription...

...Had wealth also been conscripted in the name of national defense, the justification for compulsory service might have been more discriminately established...

...When a citizenry is systematically trained to military ideals, those 1 S. A. Stauffer, et al., The American Soldier, vols...

...Nonetheless, at the present time the conscript receives $89.90 per month, less than one-third the salary of a second lieutenant...

...Considered the main alternative to conscription, a voluntary recruitment system obtains what is called a professional army...

...territories...

...Peacetime conscription potentially heightens nationalist and military sentiments...

...Political theorists have generally agreed that a large standing army is both an inducement to militarism and a menace to democratic government...

...But until recent months conscription aroused little concern...