Exit, Pursued by a Bear

unselective service

from Alternet:

Despite statements to the contrary, quiet preparations for the return of the draft have been under way for some time. The Selective Service System's Annual Performance Plan for Fiscal Year 2004 – despite a ton of obfuscatory jargon, acronyms, and bureaucrat-speak – can't quite manage to bury all of its bombshells.
Strategic Objective 1.2 of the 2004 plan commits the Selective Service System to being fully operational within 75 days of "an authorized return to conscription." Strategic Objective 1.3 then commits them to "be operationally ready to furnish untrained manpower within DOD timelines." By next year the government intends to turn the ignition key on a mobilization infrastructure of 56 State Headquarters, 442 Area Offices, and 1,980 Local Boards.

It’s hard to know what to make of all this. The Selective Service System is in an impossible position: it has a mandate to prepare for organizing a draft, but if it does it in a way that sounds at all purposeful, it sets off political explosions. All you have to do repeat phrases like “a mobilization infrastructure of 56 State Headquarters, 442 Area Offices, and 1,980 Local Boards” in an official voice to set any number of Americans of a certain age hyperventilating.

The whole trend of Western armies in the last generation has been against conscription: Switzerland and Israel are now the only serious holdouts, while France and Germany have closed down the induction centres. (In France, interestingly, the left has traditionally supported conscription, while the right has opposed it; when it was finally abolished, it was as a measure of a right-wing government, angrily denounced in Libération.)

A serious debate in the U.S. over a practical return to the draft, as opposed to just maintaining the ghostly bureaucracy for one on a tiny budget, would resemble the Canadian conscription crises, minus the Anglo-Franco politics, more than anything the U.S. itself has seen. The U.S. has traditionally had draft machinery ready to go at the beginning of a conflict, whereas Canada’s two experiments have involved resorting to conscription late in the game out of desperation – after we had run through the really enthusiastic volunteers – something a draft under these circumstances would resemble.

In any case, I’d be surprised if it happened.

The current senior leadership in the U.S. armed forces - and Colin Powell, for that matter - were junior officers in a draft-era army, and remembers the end of the draft as the turning point after which their military was able to dig itself out of its post-Vietnam hole.

Creating the vast infrastructure to train conscripts would suck away the experienced officers and NCOs that an overstretched army needs. Conscripting a small number of people would lessen this problem, but the shift to conscription itself would be so politically expensive that it would hardly be worth taking that route.

Conscripts are mostly pretty crappy soldiers, for obvious reasons. As terms, conscripts and conscript army carry all kinds of baggage that doesn’t usually have to be spelled out. Because potential conscripts have choices other than being conscripted, the average draftee end up being less capable than the average member of the pool of potential draftees. Once the draft notices start arriving, all kinds of capable people join the military on terms more of their own choosing – in order to join as officers, say, or to get a technical qualification. My two American uncles, who joined the Marine Corps as officers when they got their draft notices in the early ‘60s, are good examples of this. The result is not a true top-to-bottom cross-section.

Conscript armies have different provost needs than volunteer armies. You need a lot of big, hard-assed MPs and a serious investment in punishment facilities to make them work. (These are the same MPs, as Phil Carter keeps pointing out, that are now so useful in Iraq.)

The disciplinary systems of volunteer armies only really ever have to deal with acquisitive crime and inappropriately directed aggression, and both at a manageable level. Conscript armies, on the other hand, are constantly forced to answer the question ‘Yeah, and who’s going to make me?’ This is particularly true if the conscripts are inducted for an unpopular war, or a not consistently popular war, like Iraq or the next imperial project. It will be less true if there is real, widespread support for the war effort, though on an individual level it’s never really going to go away.

There is a civilian version of the same problem: if the draft system is going to be taken seriously, it will need a serious investment of civilian police and court resources to back it up. For example: it wasn’t unknown for draft resisters in the Vietnam era to get prison sentences of anything up to four years. In a real war for national survival (not that Vietnam was), in a society that has a very strong commitment to shared risk and sacrifice, that’s not an unreasonable punishment. To have the system work, civilian police would have to treat hunting stray conscripts as a real priority, and judges would have to be harsh enough to routinely hand down deterrent sentences. Otherwise, it’s not really going to work.

Posted by Patrick at March 25, 2004 01:28 PM