On Involuntary Service

...What does the citizen owe the state...

...The whole concept is made to order for those whose instincts incline toward an ever larger government exerting unprecedented control over its citizens’ lives...

...Its impact on civil liberties would be much more destructive than anything the George W. Bush Administration has ever contemplated...

...Even to many who oppose reviving the draft, the phrase has a seductive ring...

...It would not even save the government money by getting menial tasks done cheaply...

...Luckily, there is not much chance that a Democratic and antiwar Congress will act on his obsession, any more than a Republican Congress did...

...There would in essence be three plausible ways to cope with the excess numbers...

...Nonetheless, the Selective Service System not only still exists but, since the Jimmy Carter Administration, requires all men to register with it when they turn 18, in case Congress should ever change its mind...

...That amounts to over 2 million men a year...

...No less than a military draft, national service would take away everyone’s liberty for whatever period Congress chose, in this case without the justification of defending the country...

...In any of these cases, it would be necessary either to forbid nondraftees to enlist voluntarily in the Armed Forces or to make service in them so unattractive that nobody would be willing to sign up...

...As two enthusiasts, Hodding Carter and Ronald Goldfarb, put it in USA Today last October, “National service isn’t a new idea...

...In the latest iteration, Representative Charles B. Rangel (D.-N.Y...

...a veteran of the Korean conflict, has been loudly demanding a new draft ever since the prospect of war in Iraq started to get serious...

...The draft was always a terrible idea in a free society, justifiable (if at all) only in the event of the most extreme military emergency...

...NATIONAL SERVICE,” as its proponents call it, is something else again...

...Today the uniformed forces of the United States consist of 1.4 million volunteers...

...A disproportionate number of the poor and members of minority groups make up the enlisted ranks of the military, while the most privileged Americans are underrepresented or absent...

...history...

...The third would be to draft everyone but allow most to perform “national service” in an array of yet-to-be-defined civilian capacities...

...Large-scale deferments would simply replicate perceived inequities that helped bring about the abolition of the draft...

...It looks, in fact, like a classic example of a hugely disruptive solution in search of a problem...

...And no wonder...

...Otherwise all or most of the Pentagon’s needs would be met, as they are now, by volunteers...

...Of course, you would still need trained career officers, who would have to be volunteers...

...Despite the Iraq War, the Army, which bears the brunt of combat, has been meeting its recruitment and re-enlistment goals, and the Pentagon has consistently opposed restoring the draft during administrations of both parties...

...It arises from one of the oldest themes of U.S...

...Except in a national emergency on the scale of World War II, it will continue to be a long shot...

...The officer corps of the Army, Navy and Air Force would preside over short-term conscripts, most of whom would rather be somewhere else— to put it crudely, an army of temporary slaves...

...When he announced after the midterm election that he planned to reintroduce his perennial bill, his party’s leaders distanced themselves with an almost panicky haste...

...Television news invariably greets the idea as though it were brand-new and solemnly debates the pros, rarely getting around to the most serious cons...

...It also depends on the questionable assumption that working involuntarily for the government is automatically more useful to society—“in the public interest”—than the jobs young people might freely choose...

...The second would be to institute a lottery...

...After completing national service,” Carter and Goldfarb patronizingly assure their readers, “these young people would enter their next phase in life more mature and more knowledgeable about the rich variety of America’s peoples and the breadth of the nation’s unfinished business...

...After correctly pointing out that support for national service is found on both sides of the political spectrum, they get more specific: “The best approach to mandatory national service would be to require every 18-year-old man and woman, and every young immigrant seeking citizenship, to spend 18 months to two years in public service...

...Conscripts would presumably not be paid much, but the logistics of training, housing, insuring, and organizing jobs for them would be colossally expensive and require yet another Federal bureaucracy that would inevitably lead to a new Cabinet department...

...Clearly the services would have a hard time coping with such numbers...

...In 2004 the John F. Kerry Presidential campaign tried to frighten voters by claiming wildly that if the Republicans won re-election, they would reinstate the draft...

...A lottery would give us in the most literal sense an Army of losers whose morale does not bear thinking about...

...Mandatory national service, in short, smacks of coercion for its own sake, rather than a means to accomplish some necessary or useful set of tasks...

...Answer: mandated public service without exceptions...

...Women remain exempt from registration, as they were when there was an actual draft...

...Few members of Congress are willing to risk either the political unpopularity of a draft (especially now that 18-year-olds can vote) or the damage and chaos it would bring to the Armed Forces...

...Second Thoughts On Involuntary Service By Christopher Clausen EVERY TIME the United States gets involved in combat, someone is sure to call for reinstating the military draft it abandoned in 1973...

...Fortunately, the price tag would be so high—in both lost freedom and actual taxpayer dollars—that national service is about as unlikely to be enacted as a new draft...

...In 1966, the peak year of the Vietnam draft, only a small fraction of eligible males was called up...

...Its proponents have a hard time explaining its goals in concrete terms...

...We need to return to the tradition of the citizen soldier—with alternative national service for those who cannot serve because of physical limitations or reasons of conscience...

...The first would be to grant wholesale educational, occupational and hardship deferments, as in the old draft...

...The whole idea of national service as its supporters describe it has an anachronistic, impractical air, as if we were back in the Depression instead of in a period of low unemploy - ment...

...Like most draft supporters, Rangel subscribes to the populist “hostages for peace” theory...

...Marketing compulsion as an opportunity for the young to “give something back” does not make it less authoritarian...

...In the 21st century it looks positively antique, a relic of times when citizens were more deferential toward government and wars were fought by vast armies of lightly trained infantry...

...Service in our nation’s Armed Forces is no longer a common experience,” Rangel explained in a 2002 New York Times OpEd...

...A restored draft would be logistically nightmarish, prohibitively expensive, and devastating to the effectiveness of the Armed Forces...

...Remember, we are talking about more than 4 million new bodies every year...

...Now Democrats control Congress, and Rangel is an influential committee chairman...

...It fits all too well with the assumptions not only of liberals who look back nostalgically on the New Deal, but of “national greatness” conservatives such as Senator John McCain (R.-Ariz...

...All of these possibilities are unsatisfactory...

...Their service could be in the military or in the Homeland Security Department, or be in programs similar to President Franklin Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps, Sargent Shriver’s Peace Corps or President Clinton’s AmeriCorps—any work experience that is in the public interest...

...Although Carter and Goldfarb are committed Democrats, “liberal” is not the first adjective that comes to mind for this relationship between the individual and the state...

...who favor oldfashioned discipline and a powerful, ambitious state...

...Most received deferments or exemptions of one kind or another, leading to noisy complaints that the Army consisted disproportionately of the poor and minorities—exactly the same charge currently being made by Congressman Rangel and others about the volunteer force...

...Usually that someone is an opponent of whatever war we happen to be engaged in...

...Whether rubbing the faces of the idle rich in the brute realities of military life would actually keep us out of war is debatable, but irrelevant to the main issues...

...Contrary to widespread opinion, they are about as white, affluent and welleducated as the general population...

...The “national service” stratagem would leave the question of who actually fights our wars pretty much where it is at present, in the hands of volunteers who selected that option from a menu of choices...

...Even if one shares their particular view of America’s unfinished business, it is hardly worth upsetting every young person’s life for such a nebulous return...

...If it were ever reinstated, Congress or the courts would very likely insist that women be drafted too, bringing the total number to more than 4 million every year...

...This holds that if the children of the advantaged had to serve, fighting would become much less frequent...