We Don’t Need a Draft - We Do Need to Vote Sensibly
Congressman Charles Wrangell of New York, among others, has raised the spectre of a draft as the way to ensure that a) we never get ourselves into another Iraq and b) that if we do, at least our entire society will bear the burden and the sacrifice.
It’s an attractive idea for many of us who have opposed the Iraq War from the beginning and who have been particularly appalled that so few have been asked to bear the burden – namely the military servicemen and women whose lives are put in jeopardy, and the families who must endure their absence, in some tragic cases, their loss. In the end, however, I cannot escape the conclusion that a draft would be wrong for the country.
There is little doubt that a professional volunteer military is both more efficient and effective than a drafted force. Whilst there are plenty of reasons to excoriate the politicians who ordered the invasion and occupation of Iraq and the military brass who planned (or didn’t plan) it, there can be no question regarding the sterling performance of the troops themselves. At the small unit level, officers and men alike have conducted themselves with professional skill, valour, steadfastness and fortitude in a challenging environment where danger can take many forms and lurk in any direction. Certainly reserve and National Guard troops have performed well too; however, the bulk of the ground force in Iraq has been comprised of career soldiers, whose extensive training, high morale and unit cohesion have proved invaluable. It surely makes a difference that they volunteered for their service, particularly in insurgency-type warfare, such as in Iraq, where it is critical to be disciplined enough not to overreact to stressful situations by employing disproportionate force, thereby alienating the very people we are attempting to help. It’s unlikely that a force comprised primarily of draftees would have been able to maintain the high morale level and military performance that the volunteer professional forces have achieved to date.
Of course the very professionalism of a volunteer military and the fact that relatively few will be called upon to serve, makes it a particularly inviting instrument for use by an administration with its own agenda. Clearly, this was the case with Iraq, as many of us saw at the time - and many more see now. The Iraq mess has prompted Wrangell and others to believe that a draft would ensure that we would never again sleep walk into a war, by allowing ourselves to be sold on an invasion by a president and vice-president who would have made far better used car salesmen than they have national leaders. The inescapable logic is that if the sons or daughters of the population at large were eligible for service in Iraq or somewhere like it, the nation would very likely be less supine in permitting a president to start a war without a balanced and thorough debate, devoid of charges that opponents were unpatriotic.
There are a couple of problems with this rationale. First, it simply makes little sense in this genuinely dangerous world to have a military that is less than the best. And to have the best is to have a professional volunteer force. Second, a key argument in the selling of the Iraq war, subliminally at least, was that it was going to be easy – a “cakewalk” as Kenneth Adelman, former assistant secretary of defence and arms control director in previous GOP administrations, put it in a Washington Post article in 2002. (Mr Adelman, of course, was only talking about the conventional invasion itself – not the unconventional aftermath. It really is irritating when your enemy doesn’t stand there to be blown apart by your laser-guided bombs and artillery/tanks but instead melts away to become the nucleus of a highly effective insurgency that has claimed the lives of over 3000 Americans).
A draft, in other words, might not have saved us from the initial invasion, albeit it would undoubtedly have impacted the war’s continuation now that the country had become deeply disillusioned.
For me this debate misses the point. There’s no purpose in having a draft if it is designed simply as a means to dissuade us from ever using military force for national security or compelling humanitarian reasons. On the other hand, having at our command a well trained and equipped professional military must not become a license for its inevitable use when the stakes are not high enough, or when the extent of the commitment is not commensurate with the benefit or justification.
In the end it comes down to this: if we don’t pay attention and thus fail to make wise choices in the voting booth we will invariably live to regret it. If the Congress and the media fail to act as a check on a brash and bullying president, it is the country that will ultimately suffer. If we have to arm twist and cajole our allies to go along with us on a specific large-scale military enterprise, chances are we should forget it. We have done best as a nation when we have acted in concert with willing allies; we have done worst when we have acted alone or with reluctant friends.
The United States had an independent media and a governmental system of checks that was the envy of the world. Both have been tarnished by the Iraq experience because, for reasons that will be studied for years to come, they failed to prevent a president, who was clearly in over his head, from leading us into the worst foreign policy blunder in living memory.
Analysing and fixing what went wrong should be our priority, not instituting a draft.
