When Ya Get Drafted

Jello Biafra might disagree, but the article to read right now is Phil Carter's and Paul Glastris' endorsement of the draft in the center-left Washington Monthly. Although I don't know much about the foreign policy/national security bonafides of Glastris -- except that he's the editor in chief of the Monthly -- I have great respect for the opinions of Phil Carter, especially in the area of military affairs.

Until now, calls from the Left for instituting the draft have been aimed at raising the threshold for committment of military force; the idea being that if more people were directly affected by military interventions (i.e. having brothers, sisters, sons, or daughters called up to serve), they would be less willing to support such ventures. The Glastris/Carter approach is nothing like that . Their argument in a nutshell is:

America's all-volunteer military simply cannot deploy and sustain enough troops to succeed in places like Iraq while still deterring threats elsewhere in the world. Simply adding more soldiers to the active duty force, as some in Washington are now suggesting, may sound like a good solution. But it's not, for sound operational and pragmatic reasons. America doesn't need a bigger standing army; it needs a deep bench of trained soldiers held in reserve who can be mobilized to handle the unpredictable but inevitable wars and humanitarian interventions of the future.

Before reading the article, I had been a proponent of increasing the size of the active duty army. But Carter and Glastris are pretty convincing on why this is not a great idea:

...it's the long-term cost issues that most militate against making the all-volunteer force bigger. Generals today are fond of saying that you recruit a soldier, but you retain their families. One reason the Army has resisted Congress' attempts to raise its end strength is that it does not want to embrace all of the costs associated with permanently increasing the size of the military, because it sees each soldier as a 30-year commitment—both to the soldier and his (or her) family. According to the Congressional Budget Office, each soldier costs $99,000 per year—a figure which includes medical care, housing, and family benefits.

The United States does not necessarily need a massive standing military all the time. What it needs is a highly trained professional force of a certain size—what we have right now is fine—backed by a massive surge capacity of troops in reserve to quickly augment the active-duty force in times of emergency. Sure, right now, the Army is light several hundred thousand deployable ground troops. But over the long term, the demands of Iraq will subside, the need for troops will decline, and it could be another decade or two before another mission that big comes along.

That said, the "draft" that Carter and Glastris propose is nothing like our Vietnam-era conception of a draft:

A better solution would fix the weaknesses of the all-volunteer force without undermining its strengths. Here's how such a plan might work. Instead of a lottery, the federal government would impose a requirement that no four-year college or university be allowed to accept a student, male or female, unless and until that student had completed a 12-month to two-year term of service. Unlike an old-fashioned draft, this 21st-century service requirement would provide a vital element of personal choice. Students could choose to fulfill their obligations in any of three ways: in national service programs like AmeriCorps (tutoring disadvantaged children), in homeland security assignments (guarding ports), or in the military. Those who chose the latter could serve as military police officers, truck drivers, or other non-combat specialists requiring only modest levels of training. (It should be noted that the Army currently offers two-year enlistments for all of these jobs, as well as for the infantry.) They would be deployed as needed for peacekeeping or nation-building missions. They would serve for 12-months to two years, with modest follow-on reserve obligations.

Check out Irregular Analyses for a critique of this proposal in terms of military policy; mainly that "draftees are not well trained enough - through no fault of their own - to demonstrate the skills necessary for successful [counterinsurgency] work: cultural sensitivity, extreme patience and the nerve to ask questions first and shoot later." For critiques from the western side of the Atlantic see Matt Yglesias here and Kevin Drum here. The major thrust of the Yglesias/Drum critque goes like this: "the problem isn't that our military is too small, [but] that our strategy is too big."

Although I'm unsure if I buy into the Carter/Glastris draft argument, I find the "our strategy is too big" critique deeply unsatifying. Matt offers the fact that the US accounts for "almost half of global military spending" as proof that our military can't possibly be too small. I beg to differ.

For good or ill, the developed world essentially has ceded its security requirements to the United States. Whether it's stopping genocide, distributing aid after an environmental catastrophe, or toppling an aggressive dictator, the US has to provide the bulk of the military force if a credible international response is to occur. Like it or not, this is the reality, and it doesn't look like it's going to change anytime soon. And somehow, we've got to adapt our military to this reality. So if nothing else, Carter and Glastris have performed a vital service by igniting the debate over the best way to equip our military to safeguard global security over the coming decades.