Do We Really Want a Volunteer Army?
Rabasseire, Henry
RECENTLY the idea of a volunteer army, as a substitute for UMT or the draft, has gained adherents among pacifists and opponents of the Vietnam War. The following "theses" have been...
...8) Democrats and socialists from the earliest times on to the present—Pericles, Machiavelli, Jean Jaures, Paul Levi—have advocated the militia as the only means of assuring citizen control over the military establishment...
...5) A voluntary army is especially capable of being used in colonial wars, independent of the morale of the citizens and independent of any war aim or idea...
...Readers' reactions are invited...
...Instead of opposing the continuation of the war in Vietnam, as they do now, those who are afraid of going could then sit it out...
...6) While a volunteer army may be useful, and competent to deal with the specialized cases of insurrection and colonial uprising, it is utterly useless as an instrument of pure defense of national territory and for purposes of collective security affecting other countries in legitimate self-defense...
...Karl Marx, as is well known, favored a universal labor service...
...10) If the idea of a volunteer army were pursued to its logical conclusion, it would have to be admitted that we would be still better off by farming defense out to commercial enterprise...
...1) A "Volunteer Army" is only another word for a mercenary army—the most despicable form of defense establishment ever imagined...
...9) The notion of a volunteer army has become popular in some pseudo-left circles because they wish to avoid a confrontation in case of a conflict of loyalties or of conscience...
...RECENTLY the idea of a volunteer army, as a substitute for UMT or the draft, has gained adherents among pacifists and opponents of the Vietnam War...
...It is imaginable that specialists can be recruited from this service without undoing the basic militia structure of the army...
...Unless one wishes to rely on "massive (nuclear) retaliation," the deterrence of major aggression requires mass armies in preparedness...
...3) A volunteer army would, in practice, be an army composed of "niggers," i.e., it would be based on racial exploitation...
...The military art was perfected first by the condottieri of the 15th century and then by the leaders of mercenary armies during the Thirty Years' War, or by piratical queens who combined business with conquest...
...And now Nixon is for it...
...7) A volunteer army requires organizational structures which in turn encourage further development in the direction of "push-button war"—an intrinsically more dangerous instrument in international crises...
...4) A volunteer army would be a will-less instrument in the hands of its commanders, capable of beating down insurrection or whatever a reactionary government might so term...
...next to prostitution it is the most humiliating form of using people's bodies for commercial purposes...
...It's the easy way out...
...2) A volunteer army means: pressing into service those who have no other means of making a living...
...The following "theses" have been circulated among DISSENT editors and have received favorable as well as unfavorable comment...
Vol. 16 • May 1969 • No. 3
