Redstate

By streiff Posted in User Blogs — Comments (4) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

Promoted from Diaries.

Answering a question about the draft that had been posed at a forum with voters, Kerry said: "If George Bush were to be re-elected, given the way he has gone about this war and given his avoidance of responsibility in North Korea and Iran and other places, is it possible? I can't tell you."

And so John Kerry tries to put into play an idea that he almost certainly knows is fraudulent.

Ever since Charlie Rangel floated this idea in January 2003 it has reared its ugly head fairly frequently. Though it doesn't deserve it, it may be time to take an analytic look at the subject.

One argument is often made that a draft should be imposed for the sake of one of the left's minor deities: fairness. The fairness argument goes: only poor kids join the military and it is unfair that poor kids should bear the burden of fighting the nation's wars. Michael Kinsley, despite a couple of glaring factual errors, effectively eviscerates this argument.

Demographically the services are similar but I'll address my comments to my area of expertise -- the Army.

Read on.The yearly military recruit cohort is much more educated (89.5% with traditional high school diploma vs. 86.5 of all their peers, this is not exactly an apples to apples comparison as the civilian cohort includes GED recipients and the military doesn't count a GED as high school completion) and much more intelligent (72.7% in mental category I-IIIA on the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery or approximately equivalent to an IQ of 100 or more v. 50% of their peers) than their civilian counterparts.

Overwhelmingly they come from the suburbs. They come from a home with two custodial parents. They come from lower-middle to middle income families.

Indeed, in today's recruiting system poverty is nearly a barrier to enlistment. Poor school districts produce students who score poorly on the ASVAB. Any conviction for anything more than a traffic violation, including minor non-traffic offenses, requires a waiver be granted by the recruiter's supervisor 4 echelons up.

Another aspect of "fairness" is the assignment to combat units. Charlie Rangel has famously claimed that  significant percentage of troops in combat units are minorities (as a test of this statement, watch the next video of a firefight and look at the faces).   DoD (actually a friend of mine who has had a much better career) wrote a response to Rangel's claim (see p.5 for a summary of the 11 page letter) showing just the opposite is true. It was an amusing claim for me as I did an official response to Rangel about 12 years ago where he was claiming that minorities were being unfairly excluded from the combat arms and thereby damaging their ability to win quick promotions.

Those who wish to worship at the altar of fairness are welcome to do so, but they should offer some other sacrifice besides the military.

A less disingenuous argument is the idea that a draft creates a rite of passage into citizenship. That philosophy governed continental Europe during the Cold War with most of our allies maintaining, in effect, two armies: one of long service professionals and another of conscripts. Anyone who ever served alongside the Bundeswehr quickly discovered this unpleasant fact. If you believe a) that citizenship is earned and not a birthright and b) the role of the military is primarily that of a social institution this argument has a certain attraction. If you don't subscribe to either of those premises, if you believe that the Constitution grants citizenship by virtue of birth or naturalization and that the role of the military is to kill our nation's enemies it doesn't make very much sense. Though the sight of a bunch of Moveon.org pukes breaking ice in the worm pit at 3am would be amusing.

There is also the canard of the idea that a draft would snarf up the sons of senators and congressmen and thereby deter them from going to war. Anyone vaguely cognizant of the draft knows this is absolute horsepuckey but not only is it a conceptually idiotic statement (Korea and Vietnam happened with a draft and that really slowed things down, didn't it?) it is demographically unlikely. The average age for a member of the House is 53.4 and that of a senator is 59 (I know this is for the 107th Congress but I can't find a more recent profile). The average age of marriage is the US about 25 (24 for women, 26 for men). Age 20 is the primary age of draft vulnerability. So it would be exceedingly unlikely that a single member of the House or Senate would have a child who is draft eligible.

The only real reason for a draft in a free society is military necessity. Have we reached that point yet?

The first way of dealing with military necessity would be to mobilize the  National Guard and Reserve.  There are 351,000 soldiers in the Army National Guard and 179,000 in the Army Reserve. This would more than double the   500,000 soldiers in the Army.   To date we have called up 163,000 and absent Congressional action the president is limited by law to calling up a total of 200,000 Guardsmen and Reservists. Of course, this would be a "backdoor draft".

Even if Congress decides to permanently expand the Army by 40,000 or so troops a draft wouldn't be necessary.  In  1993 the Army recruited 70,380 men and women for a force of 572,000 (70,000 more than today).  In 2003 the Army recruited 69,571. Admittedly, this reflects the annual recruiting it would take to maintain that strength at steady state. And absent an articulated expansion strategy it is impossible to say how many recruits would be immediately needed. But in 1983, when the Army had a strength of 779,000 it recruited 133,000 men and women with virtually the same ASVAB and high school graduation level as today. So we can easily achieve a 50% increase in the Active Army without a draft.

What does all of this mean? It means that militarily there is no reason for a draft. It means that politically no one is going to support a draft without a military requirement. And it means that Kerry is foisting yet another fraud upon the people who might vote for him.