Rough Draft; will the all-volunteer army survive?

Rough Draft
Liberals think calling for conscription makes them sound tough, but all it does is strengthen President Bush.
By Asheesh Kapur Siddique
07.28.05

Concerned that America's current all-volunteer Army cannot successfully wage an expansive, lengthy war on terrorism, a wide range of liberals now want to reinstate the military draft. Last November, Noam Chomsky argued that a new draft would reap political benefits for anti-war progressives. In March, Phil Carter and Paul Glastris proposed that the government require anyone planning to attend college to first complete a year-long stint in either the armed forces or a national community enrichment organization like AmeriCorps or Teach for America. And last month, Michelle Cottle added her voice to the chorus of liberal pundits supporting a draft.

It's tempting to act tough by calling for a draft, but it places the discussion we should be having about defense policy on the back burner. Flirting with conscription, which 70 percent of the public opposes, distracts from the much-needed critiques of the flawed national-security strategy that brought us a troop crisis in the first place. The smart -- and tough -- move isn't reviving the draft; it's revising the strategic policy that brought us an overtaxed military in the first place.

To be sure, the armed forces face a significant recruitment shortfall. As of late May, all four major military divisions were behind in their enlistment goals. The result has been overstretched an overstretching of forces. By the end of 2004, for example, about 80 percent of the Army's active-duty combat brigades had been deployed. This situation prompted the Defense Science Board to warn that the "inadequate total numbers … will not sustain our current and projected global stabilization commitments." The Army just missed its recruiting quota for the fourth straight month. Just as troubling, the proportion of "high-quality" enlistees (defined as the top scorers on the Armed Forces Qualification Test among high-school graduates) is on the decline. The Pentagon is creating a database with the names of every college student and many high-school students to enlarge its dwindling recruitment pool.

But this isn't the all-volunteer Army's fault; it's George W. Bush's fault.

If we hadn't diverted ourselves with Iraq, we wouldn't be facing this reserve shortfall. Even war supporters must realize that the administration's arrogant approach to public diplomacy compounded things by dissuading the rest of the world from contributing forces. Furthermore, the ignorance of postwar reconstruction challenges led to faulty assessments of how large a force would be needed to win the peace. By reinstating conscription, we would merely shift the burden of the administration's mistakes onto the backs of a much-enlarged swath of young Americans. In this sense, a draft would be fundamentally counter to progressive principles of justice and fairness.

Calling for a draft also gives the administration's grand strategy -- in dire need of sustained, substantive critique -- a free pass. Liberals must instead adopt the recommendation of a 2003 Army War College report and advocate refocusing our efforts on destroying stateless, transnational Islamic terrorist organizations like al-Qaeda. Because the neocons bypassed this actual threat with a political diversion in Iraq, the troop crisis has now been augmented unnecessarily. A timetable for withdrawal and a commitment to refocus our fight upon the new threats of this new era would reduce the strategic need for broad-based conscription, which would increase the number of ordinary citizens in the armed forces rather than the specialists we need to destroy terrorist networks that operate across national boundaries. Instead, we must fund pertinent educational initiatives, like instruction in Arabic and special-operations mission training, to produce skilled professionals with the expertise to stop terrorists before they attack civilians.

Even if Bush's strategy were merited, incidentally, a draft still wouldn't be the answer. According to a recent report from the Center for American Progress, the number of soldiers leaving the ranks is rising while recruitment plummets because few want to commit to spending eight years in the Army, the current length of the active-duty obligation. Shortening this commitment by two years would make the military a more palatable option for the many young Americans genuinely interested in the service but turned off by the long requirement. And it wouldn't have any negative impact on troop quality; recruits in this stage of military readiness don't receive any training anyway. Other changes in recruitment policy, such as repealing the disastrous "don't ask, don't tell" policy that's resulted in the discharge of nearly 10,000 highly competent persons over the past decade, would remedy the crisis without a socially disruptive draft.

If you want to concede Bush's grand strategy for saving the world, then by all means call for a retrogressive draft. But the right thing for liberals to do now isn't to push the country back down that road; it's to show the way forward. That requires realistic new solutions -- not conscription.

Asheesh Kapur Siddique is an intern at The American Prospect and a junior at Princeton. He is the editor of the Princeton Progressive Review and writes regularly for CampusProgress.org