Military service is generally understood to be coercive
Really? I suspect a lot of young Americans would view the idea of coerced military service as another one of those bizarre practices from the distant past.
Well, then, the analogy should describe more explicitly the idea of coercive military service. That should serve to scare people as intended :-)
Incidentally, we have on-and-off political and media wrangles about abolishing the draft here in Israel. Service in actual combat units is already volunteer only anyway, everyone else goes to “battlefield support” and desk jobs.
The biggest argument, sometimes the only argument, brought out in favor of keeping the draft is that it’s good for us (the young soldiers) to suffer for a few years. Creates strong character, and so on. Or as the (old male) politicians sometimes put it, “we did it, why shouldn’t they?”
This reminds me a lot of all those people who try their best to find an explanation of why universal death is in fact a good thing and necessary for us to remain “truly human” and it would be evil to try and become immortal. They, too, currently rule the media and perhaps the popular consensuses on the subject.
Of course the real explanation is simpler. We’ll have the draft for as long as the parliament and government is made up in large part of retired generals; and the army’s high command is made up almost entirely of elite (volunteer) combat unit veterans; and people actually being drafted cannot influence the decision, not even by voting in the general elections. (Right to vote is granted at age 18. The draft is also at age 18, or when you finish highschool. General elections are every four years, so almost everyone votes for the first time during or after their army service.)
The biggest argument, sometimes the only argument, brought out in favor of keeping the draft is that it’s good for us (the young soldiers) to suffer for a few years. Creates strong character, and so on. Or as the (old male) politicians sometimes put it, “we did it, why shouldn’t they?”
You know, I once saw someone argue that the single greatest tool the Mormons have for their legendary retention rates is their policy of having everyone go overseas or somewhere to do missionary work for a couple years; the idea being that spending years dealing with hostile or apathetic infidels will, by sheer cognitive dissonance, turn the missionary into a fanatic. Somewhat like those psychology experiments where the more you argue for a position & hear arguments against it, the more you brainwash yourself into believing it.
This would seem to be a useful tool for anyone wishing to preserve the military state of Israel.
Mormon missions do not always take place overseas, and they aren’t required of everyone. (It’s a social expectation of men, but still optional even for them, and very much a voluntary thing for women.)
Point taken; should I have said ‘policy of having many or most Mormon men and some women go far away’? I could be wrong, but I don’t think that materially weakens the ‘Stockholm syndrome effect’, as it were, the possible utility of making everyone serve in the military.
(And it may be a social expectation but I wonder how important the distinction between expectation and policy/law is; when I was a Catholic, we were told clearly that confirmation was optional—yet not one of us felt that we had the genuine option to not be confirmed, and so all of us were.)
Confirmation in Catholicism is administered to children, who are less free to reject social expectations than most adults. Mormon missionaries have all reached the age of majority, and while there may be social consequences, they’re a bit farther removed than “disappointment of parents on whom one is unavoidably materially dependent”. I personally know multiple adult Mormon men who never went on a mission.
Which only goes to show that they don’t read their own history books about drafts, or newspapers about stop-loss policies and the National Guard deployments.
Some may not read history, but it doesn’t follow from what I said. They may know very well that the draft existed in the past.
(I’ve noticed that a lot of people old enough to remember e.g. Vietnam have trouble accepting that we’re in a different historical era now; they often speak in a way that suggests they think the draft could easily be brought back, when in fact the political reality is such that that’s extremely unlikely.)
National Guard service is voluntary, and stop-loss concerns people already signed up.
As for how difficult it would be to put it back into operation, that’s hard to say; consider how many people thought a black man would not be president this side of 2100. The right question is how difficult it would be to get into a war or other national emergency which could make use of the draft; in such situations, the preferences of young people are irrelevant.
As for National Guard and stop-loss: you have a very strange idea of coercion if you think stop-loss isn’t it. There may be a clause in their contracts saying something about contracts being extended indefinitely, but that strikes me as like signing a contract to sell yourself into slavery.
you have a very strange idea of coercion if you think stop-loss isn’t it
Stop-loss itself is coercion, but it’s coercion applied to those already in the military. Citing the (current, contingent) existence of stop-loss policies doesn’t support the idea that military service is inherently coerced. You may as well cite the fact that military personnel have to follow orders (also obviously coercion).
You’re right, military enrollment is not inherently and always coercive; many countries have volunteer-only armies.
For purposes of scaring people with an analogy for “entitlement” rape, we can use the following scenario: your worst enemy, who looks a little like you when he wears a wig, has signed an 8 year irrevocable combat unit contract in your name. It “only looks like” your signature? Tell that to the military police kicking down your door...
Stop-loss was created by the United States Congress after the Vietnam War. Its use is founded on Title 10, United States Code, Section 12305(a) which states in part: ”… the President may suspend any provision of law relating to promotion, retirement, or separation applicable to any member of the armed forces who the President determines is essential to the national security of the United States”
Here’s a contract I’d like you to sign; you work for me for 8 years, but at any time I can change any provision in any way, and if you don’t conform to my changes exactly, I can execute you.
If this is not coercion, then apparently a contract legitimizes anything whatsoever. I’m not prepared to dive that far down the libertarian rabbit-hole, but maybe you are.
There seems to be a misunderstanding here. I specifically said that stop-loss is coercion. Are you trying to get me to defend stop-loss?
I am not prepared to dive down any political rabbit-hole, because this isn’t a political discussion. Whether stop-loss is an ethical policy or not is completely irrelevant; the point was that it doesn’t make the U.S. like Israel, or France (until a few years ago), or indeed the U.S. circa 1970. In those countries, people are/were forced to enter the military, not just to stay in once they’re already in.
Once we’ve clearly established that stop-loss is coercion, I’m done. You want to show that the US is not like Israel? Consider this:
the US today freely trafficks in coercion whenever it feels it is needed, with minimal public outcry, and what outcry there is is due solely to the affected parties
the infrastructure for the draft is still in place, and dissolving it has been specifically resisted by even Democratic administrations like Clinton
after 9/11, there were several public statements in support of the draft, such as this op-ed by Senator Rangels (“Bring Back the Draft”, who submitted legislation to that effect, as did Senator Hollings
‘But top lawmakers, joined by Pentagon leaders and administration officials, say that there are definitely no plans to resume the draft and that the military is much better off relying on a substantially motivated volunteer force rather than on conscripts.’
‴You have drafts when you can’t get the requisite numbers,″ said the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, Representative Duncan Hunter, Republican of California. ″There is not now indications that you can’t get the requisite numbers. But we watch those numbers every month.‴
‴I don’t think we’re going to need to reinstitute the draft,″ Mr. Levin said. ″The combination of recruiting and retention is doing fairly well.‴
“Neither Mr. Korb nor Professor Burk believes that compulsory service will be reinstituted without mobilization of a scale far beyond anything now needed.”
And once stop-loss is permissible & precedent, draft is just more of the same, a point so obvious the reporter includes it:
“He and others said this could appear to those people to be nothing less than logical progression, after the military’s resorting to an extension of tours of duty and the recall of former active-duty soldiers.
″I think what is behind the current public discussion is the sense the Defense Department is using coercion to maintain the service of those who might otherwise get out,″ said James Burk, a sociology professor at Texas A&M who studies the intersection of military and public policy issues. ″That kind of coercion has a resonance of what the draft is all about.″”
So, the US is culturally accepting, has the means, has the experience—but it just doesn’t have the need (like Israel does).
To make an inflammatory analogy, if an American were to claim to not be like Israel or France in this respect, I would put as little credence in that as I would the claim of a child molester that he’s not a rapist because he just flies to Thailand and hires a child prostitute.
(As for your claim this isn’t about politics: stop-loss and the draft are politics. What a government should do to/with its citizens is the very heart of politics; I can’t imagine what else politics could be.)
This seems to be a political hobby-horse of yours; clearly you don’t like stop-loss and think it may lead to a draft in the future. But making political points like that is not what this thread is for. I simply pointed out to DanArmak that the U.S. doesn’t currently practice conscription—which is true—and thus it is a hasty claim that military service is “generally understood to be coercive”. DanArmak later acknowledged that a number of countries (not just the U.S., so you can pick another example if you like) have volunteer forces.
Again, stop-loss may be unethical or otherwise bad policy, it may even facilitate some future draft, but not all bad things are the same. Not even if one leads to another. There is no need to obscure the manifest difference between the militaries of Israel and the U.S. by rhetorical posturing about how stop-loss is in the same moral category as outright conscription. It’s an off-topic distraction.
I don’t intend to continue this political discussion further, but since I did happen to say that there was little political will in the U.S. for a draft, and since your latest comment could be read as an attempted refutation of that claim, I will make the following points before withdrawing:
There is no “Senator Rangels”. The op-ed you linked to was written by Representative (not Senator) Charles Rangel, incidentally the same man currently under investigation for tax violations. His call for a draft was widely seen at the time as pure political grandstanding against the war in Iraq (specifically an attempt to make a point about public support of the war—presumably the public would not support it to the point of tolerating a draft).
Members of Congress regularly make all kinds of public statements in support of this or that. You can no doubt find members of the Congressional Black Caucus who have made public statements in favor of reparations for slavery. That doesn’t mean the idea has any actual political traction. You would have to be very naive about American politics to regard mere pronouncements by congressmen as anything more than very weak information about what policies have a chance of being enacted. Most of it is pure signaling.
The fact that the draft was not reinstituted despite being talked about is evidence in my favor. It isn’t a politically popular idea. Yes, if it were ever necessary it would of course be brought back (essentially by definition of “necessary”), but it was not regarded as necessary after 9/11, even with two subsequent wars. By contrast, forty years ago, it was apparently regarded as necessary to draft people into fighting a war in Vietnam which was not prompted directly or indirectly by an attack on the U.S. mainland.
The quotes you cite make my case, not yours. E.g. “”Neither Mr. Korb nor Professor Burk believes that compulsory service will be reinstituted without mobilization of a scale far beyond anything now needed.”″
The infrastructure for the draft is not currently in place. What is still in place is the legal (i.e. statutory) authority, plus a list of people who are eligible to be drafted (the “Selective Service” registry). Actually implementing the draft would require significant organizational changes in the Pentagon bureaucracy, which would resist them like all bureaucracies resist all major changes. (Or so I am told by a DoD employee who should know.)
There is no “Senator Rangels”. The op-ed you linked to was written by Representative (not Senator) Charles Rangel, incidentally the same man currently under investigation for tax violations.
My mistake; I confused him with the Republican senator. (And I’d point out that if the tax violation thing is an attempt to discredit Rangel, that he can still be in office only points to his influence, even if you are unfamiliar with his chairmanship of the House Ways and Means committee.)
You would have to be very naive about American politics to regard mere pronouncements by congressmen as anything more than very weak information about what policies have a chance of being enacted.
Which is why I specifically mentioned the 2 different pieces of submitted legislation.
By contrast, forty years ago, it was apparently regarded as necessary to draft people into fighting a war in Vietnam which was not prompted directly or indirectly by an attack on the U.S. mainland.
I’m not sure what your point is here. They used the draft because that was how they got the troops they wanted: Vietnam peaked at something like 500,000 US troops deployed, while as far as I can tell, Iraq has never hosted even a third of that, peaking at 160,000. And the latter with a more populous America too (180 million in the ’60s to 300 million now).
The fact that the draft was not reinstituted despite being talked about is evidence in my favor. It isn’t a politically popular idea.
Then why has it never been repudiated? Why are the laws still effective & the registry maintained? For such a politically suicidal idea, as you seem to think it, it’s surprisingly present. The Democrats have plenty of time to pander to even tiny constituencies like paying veterans benefits to allied Filipinos from WWII, but they can’t get rid of something that is supposed to be universally despised?
Face it: what the American people opposes is the use of the draft for specific conflicts like bombing Serbia or Afghanistan or Iraq. The general idea is fine by them. And the quotes you think make your case, make mine: not one of them opposes the draft in general—just using it right now. Mere historical contingency. Not principles.
Face it: what the American people opposes is the use of the draft for specific conflicts like bombing Serbia or Afghanistan or Iraq. The general idea is fine by them. And the quotes you think make your case, make mine: not one of them opposes the draft in general—just using it right now. Mere historical contingency. Not principles.
The problem is that, after Vietnam, America will oppose the draft for pretty much any war that isn’t directly defensive, i.e. a retaliation to an attack or overt declaration of war. With the development of modern media, wars have become much, much harder to wage. The only way you’d see a draft in the US is if we waged a massive defensive ground war. This isn’t going to happen, because technology has progressed too much. The only thing you’re really going to need a lot of ground troops for is an occupation, and occupations are not defensive.
It’s not impossible, but it’s extraordinarily unlikely that someone would pick a fight with the US that would require troops in numbers needed to justify a draft. Particularly when you consider that any such attack would hugely boost volunteering and thus reduce the need for a draft; look at what 9/11 did.
So compulsive military service is quite possible in the case of a rather clear national emergency. Compulsive military service in a muddier, vaguely-preventative war seems extremely unlikely, even if it could theoretically be enacted. Damn near anything could theoretically be enacted, though, so this is hardly a useful point.
[I admit I can’t quite find how this thread originated, so I may be slightly off topic; for some reason it does not show in the comments in the original post.]
The problem is that, after Vietnam, America will oppose the draft for pretty much any war that isn’t directly defensive, i.e. a retaliation to an attack or overt declaration of war.
Vietnam didn’t start with a draft either, IIRC.
With the development of modern media, wars have become much, much harder to wage.
They used to be. But institutions adapted. Do you remember the run-up to the Iraq war? You could drive a truck through the arguments for invading (I remember being particularly unimpressed by the aluminum tubes & audio recordings), yet the media was so supine that even arch-liberal papers like the New York Times drank the kool-aid so deeply they would apologize later. And then there are things like embedded reporters, or those Pentagon pundits (forgotten about them? I wouldn’t be surprised.).
No, in this Gotterdammerung for newspapers, we cannot look to them to stop wars & drafts.
So compulsive military service is quite possible in the case of a rather clear national emergency.
So you agree with me, then, that the American people philosophically accepts coercion like the draft, it’s just that we don’t observe any recent drafts because the specific circumstances that would make it useful are, due to historical & technological contingency, rare? :)
I admit I can’t quite find how this thread originated, so I may be slightly off topic; for some reason it does not show in the comments in the original post.
We’re nested too far down to appear on the main page; you’d have to click ‘more comments’.
Not to mention that signatures on a contract are easy to fake, and the (military) witnesses of signing are often not interested in a recruit walking free.
[The Armed Forces Enlistment Contract states]: “In the event of war, my enlistment in the Armed Forces continues until six (6) months after the war ends, unless the enlistment is ended sooner by the President of the United States.”
But, yeah, it’s deceptive at best.
Back during World War 1, the Supreme Court ruled that the Thirteenth Amendment doesn’t apply to the military. In the context of ruling about the constitutionality of the draft, they devoted one paragraph to the Thirteenth Amendment issue:
As we are unable to conceive upon what theory the exaction by government from the citizen of the performance of his supreme and noble duty of contributing to the defense of the rights and honor of the nation, as the result of a war declared by the great representative body of the people, can be said to be the imposition of involuntary servitude in violation of the prohibitions of the Thirteenth Amendment, we are constrained to the conclusion that the contention to that effect is refuted by its mere statement.
In other words, they said that they don’t want it to apply, so it doesn’t.
Really? I suspect a lot of young Americans would view the idea of coerced military service as another one of those bizarre practices from the distant past.
Israelis have a different perspective.
I realize that. In fact I was specifically calling attention to the difference in perspectives.
Well, then, the analogy should describe more explicitly the idea of coercive military service. That should serve to scare people as intended :-)
Incidentally, we have on-and-off political and media wrangles about abolishing the draft here in Israel. Service in actual combat units is already volunteer only anyway, everyone else goes to “battlefield support” and desk jobs.
The biggest argument, sometimes the only argument, brought out in favor of keeping the draft is that it’s good for us (the young soldiers) to suffer for a few years. Creates strong character, and so on. Or as the (old male) politicians sometimes put it, “we did it, why shouldn’t they?”
This reminds me a lot of all those people who try their best to find an explanation of why universal death is in fact a good thing and necessary for us to remain “truly human” and it would be evil to try and become immortal. They, too, currently rule the media and perhaps the popular consensuses on the subject.
Of course the real explanation is simpler. We’ll have the draft for as long as the parliament and government is made up in large part of retired generals; and the army’s high command is made up almost entirely of elite (volunteer) combat unit veterans; and people actually being drafted cannot influence the decision, not even by voting in the general elections. (Right to vote is granted at age 18. The draft is also at age 18, or when you finish highschool. General elections are every four years, so almost everyone votes for the first time during or after their army service.)
You know, I once saw someone argue that the single greatest tool the Mormons have for their legendary retention rates is their policy of having everyone go overseas or somewhere to do missionary work for a couple years; the idea being that spending years dealing with hostile or apathetic infidels will, by sheer cognitive dissonance, turn the missionary into a fanatic. Somewhat like those psychology experiments where the more you argue for a position & hear arguments against it, the more you brainwash yourself into believing it.
This would seem to be a useful tool for anyone wishing to preserve the military state of Israel.
Mormon missions do not always take place overseas, and they aren’t required of everyone. (It’s a social expectation of men, but still optional even for them, and very much a voluntary thing for women.)
Point taken; should I have said ‘policy of having many or most Mormon men and some women go far away’? I could be wrong, but I don’t think that materially weakens the ‘Stockholm syndrome effect’, as it were, the possible utility of making everyone serve in the military.
(And it may be a social expectation but I wonder how important the distinction between expectation and policy/law is; when I was a Catholic, we were told clearly that confirmation was optional—yet not one of us felt that we had the genuine option to not be confirmed, and so all of us were.)
Confirmation in Catholicism is administered to children, who are less free to reject social expectations than most adults. Mormon missionaries have all reached the age of majority, and while there may be social consequences, they’re a bit farther removed than “disappointment of parents on whom one is unavoidably materially dependent”. I personally know multiple adult Mormon men who never went on a mission.
It was the “Really?” that threw me off. To me it seemed to invite a “Yes, really,” reply.
Which only goes to show that they don’t read their own history books about drafts, or newspapers about stop-loss policies and the National Guard deployments.
Some may not read history, but it doesn’t follow from what I said. They may know very well that the draft existed in the past.
(I’ve noticed that a lot of people old enough to remember e.g. Vietnam have trouble accepting that we’re in a different historical era now; they often speak in a way that suggests they think the draft could easily be brought back, when in fact the political reality is such that that’s extremely unlikely.)
National Guard service is voluntary, and stop-loss concerns people already signed up.
The draft still exists.
As for how difficult it would be to put it back into operation, that’s hard to say; consider how many people thought a black man would not be president this side of 2100. The right question is how difficult it would be to get into a war or other national emergency which could make use of the draft; in such situations, the preferences of young people are irrelevant.
As for National Guard and stop-loss: you have a very strange idea of coercion if you think stop-loss isn’t it. There may be a clause in their contracts saying something about contracts being extended indefinitely, but that strikes me as like signing a contract to sell yourself into slavery.
Stop-loss itself is coercion, but it’s coercion applied to those already in the military. Citing the (current, contingent) existence of stop-loss policies doesn’t support the idea that military service is inherently coerced. You may as well cite the fact that military personnel have to follow orders (also obviously coercion).
You’re right, military enrollment is not inherently and always coercive; many countries have volunteer-only armies.
For purposes of scaring people with an analogy for “entitlement” rape, we can use the following scenario: your worst enemy, who looks a little like you when he wears a wig, has signed an 8 year irrevocable combat unit contract in your name. It “only looks like” your signature? Tell that to the military police kicking down your door...
Here’s a contract I’d like you to sign; you work for me for 8 years, but at any time I can change any provision in any way, and if you don’t conform to my changes exactly, I can execute you.
If this is not coercion, then apparently a contract legitimizes anything whatsoever. I’m not prepared to dive that far down the libertarian rabbit-hole, but maybe you are.
There seems to be a misunderstanding here. I specifically said that stop-loss is coercion. Are you trying to get me to defend stop-loss?
I am not prepared to dive down any political rabbit-hole, because this isn’t a political discussion. Whether stop-loss is an ethical policy or not is completely irrelevant; the point was that it doesn’t make the U.S. like Israel, or France (until a few years ago), or indeed the U.S. circa 1970. In those countries, people are/were forced to enter the military, not just to stay in once they’re already in.
Once we’ve clearly established that stop-loss is coercion, I’m done. You want to show that the US is not like Israel? Consider this:
the US today freely trafficks in coercion whenever it feels it is needed, with minimal public outcry, and what outcry there is is due solely to the affected parties
the infrastructure for the draft is still in place, and dissolving it has been specifically resisted by even Democratic administrations like Clinton
after 9/11, there were several public statements in support of the draft, such as this op-ed by Senator Rangels (“Bring Back the Draft”, who submitted legislation to that effect, as did Senator Hollings
the sole justification offered by mainstream draft opponents is that it’s not needed, which is obviously not a repudiation of the draft at all (see http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/03/us/military-draft-official-denials-leave-skeptics.html ):
And once stop-loss is permissible & precedent, draft is just more of the same, a point so obvious the reporter includes it:
So, the US is culturally accepting, has the means, has the experience—but it just doesn’t have the need (like Israel does).
To make an inflammatory analogy, if an American were to claim to not be like Israel or France in this respect, I would put as little credence in that as I would the claim of a child molester that he’s not a rapist because he just flies to Thailand and hires a child prostitute.
(As for your claim this isn’t about politics: stop-loss and the draft are politics. What a government should do to/with its citizens is the very heart of politics; I can’t imagine what else politics could be.)
This seems to be a political hobby-horse of yours; clearly you don’t like stop-loss and think it may lead to a draft in the future. But making political points like that is not what this thread is for. I simply pointed out to DanArmak that the U.S. doesn’t currently practice conscription—which is true—and thus it is a hasty claim that military service is “generally understood to be coercive”. DanArmak later acknowledged that a number of countries (not just the U.S., so you can pick another example if you like) have volunteer forces.
Again, stop-loss may be unethical or otherwise bad policy, it may even facilitate some future draft, but not all bad things are the same. Not even if one leads to another. There is no need to obscure the manifest difference between the militaries of Israel and the U.S. by rhetorical posturing about how stop-loss is in the same moral category as outright conscription. It’s an off-topic distraction.
I don’t intend to continue this political discussion further, but since I did happen to say that there was little political will in the U.S. for a draft, and since your latest comment could be read as an attempted refutation of that claim, I will make the following points before withdrawing:
There is no “Senator Rangels”. The op-ed you linked to was written by Representative (not Senator) Charles Rangel, incidentally the same man currently under investigation for tax violations. His call for a draft was widely seen at the time as pure political grandstanding against the war in Iraq (specifically an attempt to make a point about public support of the war—presumably the public would not support it to the point of tolerating a draft).
Members of Congress regularly make all kinds of public statements in support of this or that. You can no doubt find members of the Congressional Black Caucus who have made public statements in favor of reparations for slavery. That doesn’t mean the idea has any actual political traction. You would have to be very naive about American politics to regard mere pronouncements by congressmen as anything more than very weak information about what policies have a chance of being enacted. Most of it is pure signaling.
The fact that the draft was not reinstituted despite being talked about is evidence in my favor. It isn’t a politically popular idea. Yes, if it were ever necessary it would of course be brought back (essentially by definition of “necessary”), but it was not regarded as necessary after 9/11, even with two subsequent wars. By contrast, forty years ago, it was apparently regarded as necessary to draft people into fighting a war in Vietnam which was not prompted directly or indirectly by an attack on the U.S. mainland.
The quotes you cite make my case, not yours. E.g. “”Neither Mr. Korb nor Professor Burk believes that compulsory service will be reinstituted without mobilization of a scale far beyond anything now needed.”″
The infrastructure for the draft is not currently in place. What is still in place is the legal (i.e. statutory) authority, plus a list of people who are eligible to be drafted (the “Selective Service” registry). Actually implementing the draft would require significant organizational changes in the Pentagon bureaucracy, which would resist them like all bureaucracies resist all major changes. (Or so I am told by a DoD employee who should know.)
This is all I have to say on this topic.
My mistake; I confused him with the Republican senator. (And I’d point out that if the tax violation thing is an attempt to discredit Rangel, that he can still be in office only points to his influence, even if you are unfamiliar with his chairmanship of the House Ways and Means committee.)
Which is why I specifically mentioned the 2 different pieces of submitted legislation.
I’m not sure what your point is here. They used the draft because that was how they got the troops they wanted: Vietnam peaked at something like 500,000 US troops deployed, while as far as I can tell, Iraq has never hosted even a third of that, peaking at 160,000. And the latter with a more populous America too (180 million in the ’60s to 300 million now).
Then why has it never been repudiated? Why are the laws still effective & the registry maintained? For such a politically suicidal idea, as you seem to think it, it’s surprisingly present. The Democrats have plenty of time to pander to even tiny constituencies like paying veterans benefits to allied Filipinos from WWII, but they can’t get rid of something that is supposed to be universally despised?
Face it: what the American people opposes is the use of the draft for specific conflicts like bombing Serbia or Afghanistan or Iraq. The general idea is fine by them. And the quotes you think make your case, make mine: not one of them opposes the draft in general—just using it right now. Mere historical contingency. Not principles.
The problem is that, after Vietnam, America will oppose the draft for pretty much any war that isn’t directly defensive, i.e. a retaliation to an attack or overt declaration of war. With the development of modern media, wars have become much, much harder to wage. The only way you’d see a draft in the US is if we waged a massive defensive ground war. This isn’t going to happen, because technology has progressed too much. The only thing you’re really going to need a lot of ground troops for is an occupation, and occupations are not defensive.
It’s not impossible, but it’s extraordinarily unlikely that someone would pick a fight with the US that would require troops in numbers needed to justify a draft. Particularly when you consider that any such attack would hugely boost volunteering and thus reduce the need for a draft; look at what 9/11 did.
So compulsive military service is quite possible in the case of a rather clear national emergency. Compulsive military service in a muddier, vaguely-preventative war seems extremely unlikely, even if it could theoretically be enacted. Damn near anything could theoretically be enacted, though, so this is hardly a useful point.
[I admit I can’t quite find how this thread originated, so I may be slightly off topic; for some reason it does not show in the comments in the original post.]
Vietnam didn’t start with a draft either, IIRC.
They used to be. But institutions adapted. Do you remember the run-up to the Iraq war? You could drive a truck through the arguments for invading (I remember being particularly unimpressed by the aluminum tubes & audio recordings), yet the media was so supine that even arch-liberal papers like the New York Times drank the kool-aid so deeply they would apologize later. And then there are things like embedded reporters, or those Pentagon pundits (forgotten about them? I wouldn’t be surprised.).
No, in this Gotterdammerung for newspapers, we cannot look to them to stop wars & drafts.
So you agree with me, then, that the American people philosophically accepts coercion like the draft, it’s just that we don’t observe any recent drafts because the specific circumstances that would make it useful are, due to historical & technological contingency, rare? :)
We’re nested too far down to appear on the main page; you’d have to click ‘more comments’.
Prediction: no military draft in the United States before 2020 (>= 95% confidence).
Not to mention that signatures on a contract are easy to fake, and the (military) witnesses of signing are often not interested in a recruit walking free.
Wikipedia has more.
But, yeah, it’s deceptive at best.
Back during World War 1, the Supreme Court ruled that the Thirteenth Amendment doesn’t apply to the military. In the context of ruling about the constitutionality of the draft, they devoted one paragraph to the Thirteenth Amendment issue:
In other words, they said that they don’t want it to apply, so it doesn’t.