The draft.

[Savannahmann]

7. Nuts

First, what is the purpose of an Army, or for that matter, a Military? Is it to find work for anyone regardless of physical state? No, it's single purpose in life is to kill people and destroy things, or be prepared to do so on a moments notice.

Second, according to Churchill, it takes two years to make a soldier. It is more than basic training, it is the creation of a unified fighting force. Time for the people to learn how to apply the most basic of lessons from the boot camp to the actual art of fighting a war. Stalin disagreed, he said it took five minutes. Five minutes in combat and the soldier had learned everything there was to know about being a soldier, if he survived. More than half of those so initiated into battle managed to survive the first five minutes.

Conscript Armies are suitable only as cannon fodder. Further, it's viewed as the worst example of forced labor.

This is what Cannon Fodder looks like. The Hollywood version anyway. Notice how only half those attacking have rifles. Russia didn't have enough rifles to give everyone a weapon on those suicide charges.

So if you want your military to win wars, then you do not want a conscripted army. If you want your army to be a deterrent to going to war, for you and you alone, then the draft rule you propose is probably the best of the stupidity currently out there. The only way to accomplish this in less than two years is to have the draft always active, and all soldiers subject to years of recall until they are too old to really serve anymore. So either it takes too long to be really effective, or it requires everyone to report to the military on their 18th year of life. Which do you choose?

Your idea is to prevent war by nationalizing any military action into automatic conscription. But this is one of the dumbest ideas that keeps coming back to be reconsidered. It means that our military would have to be larger than it already is, and we'd have to spend even more than we do now. History shows that those who spend more on militaries, inevitably use them. They will find a reason to use the Army they have sunk so much money into.

Here's why I say that. You would have to have a rifle for every single soldier. If your maximum military size is thirty million, you would have to have uniforms, boots, and rifles available to be issued to the thirty million draftees. Then you would have to have facilities. Huge bases sitting empty with the doors locked? No. You would have to have a cadre of people who made sure that all the facilities were ready to be used on a moments notice. Barracks that were painted on a schedule, doors repaired, and all electrical systems checked on schedule. Figure one in twenty of what would be there when the base went active. So a million soldiers busy all the time keeping the equipment ready for the thirty million soldiers you would have in case of an emergency. That is larger than our current force, and we'd have to spend billions more every year just maintaining the facilities and paying the soldiers.

Now, this gives you thirty million riflemen. That by the way is called a peasant army. It's what China used in the Korean War in the 1950's. It doesn't work, and it is a fast way to lose a lot of people to no gain.

So we would need trucks, tanks, planes, and all that support equipment like mobile army hospitals. Figure five trillion dollars to buy all this crap. The navy would need ships as well, so another ten trillion dollars as a wild guess for the fleet that we would need to cover this enormous army you're proposing. It would take five years of using every single cent of the Federal Budget to do this. That leaves not one thin dime for any other single thing, like education, health care, and I could go on and on.

The purpose of this kind of proposal is the idea that everyone has skin in the game. that the rich and powerful can not order the poor to go off and fight without risking themselves. Show me a time in history where Universal Conscripted Service was a deterrent to war. Both Germany and France had Universal Service in 1914 and went to war. In fact France thought England was weak because they did not have conscripts. Russia, Austria, and Italy had Universal Service.

What about exemptions for vital industries? Under your plan, we could well lose a significant percentage from all industries. how are you going to support that Army when ten percent of the dockworkers are in uniform? Who would make the war materials?

This is so obviously a horrible idea that I am not surprised it crops up every time the President sends the troops anywhere. If you really want to stop your own nation from attacking anyone, you do so by giving them a military too small to actually attack someone. That was the purpose behind the arms control treaties after the First World War. It was designed to make it possible to defend, but impractical, or even impossible to successfully attack another. You could not have a sufficiently large enough numerical advantage to be given good odds of winning a war.

I wish that our side would think about these things before they bring up this horrible idea that does nothing to achieve the goals they desire, and only shows how out of touch with reality we are. The goal is admirable, to give some restraint before deploying our troops anywhere. The method is the one thing in the world guaranteed to have the exact opposite effect. It would bankrupt us, and it would send us off to war in the "use it or lose it" justification. Like Austria, we couldn't afford to have a call up of the forces without actually going to war and getting some gains to defray the cost.