Another Argument For the Draft

By TChris, Section Military Draft
Posted on Sun Sep 18, 2005 at 05:59:50 PM EST
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by TChris

As he has done during the invasion and government-building of Iraq, the president wants to spend money for Katrina-related purposes without asking taxpayers to pick up any part of the additional tab. Michael Rooke-Ley makes a compelling case that this is a time for shared sacrifice:

And so, at home and abroad, the levees have broken, exposing two Americas, rich and poor, from the battlefields in Iraq to the streets of New Orleans. Never before have we been such a divided people. If we are to make meaningful strides toward achieving our goals of equal opportunity and justice - among ourselves here at home, as well as with the rest of the world - we must devote ourselves to building communities, not empires. We must commit ourselves to a principle of shared sacrifice.

He makes the argument that shared sacrifice means equal participation in military service by all economic classes:

Without shared sacrifice, this war has little impact on most Americans. Pay any price, bear any burden? Not the privileged. Rep. Charlie Rangel bemoans the fact that "our young men and women whose economic circumstances make military service a viable career choice are dying bravely in a war with no end in sight. ... The outrage of it all is that no one ... seems to care. ... The silence can be deafening when a war is fought by other people's children."

Clearly, Americans do not want to fight this war. Enlistments have dropped to a crisis level. Now that parents are discouraging their children from volunteering, disadvantaged young people will be even more likely to carry the greatest share of the burden. The affluent stand above and apart from military service, especially from the enlisted ranks - the privates and sergeants - which have suffered more than 90 percent of the casualties and fatalities. Virtually no influential policymakers have children in uniform in Iraq.

...

We have severed the link between the people in power who make the decision to go to war and the people in uniform who pay the price for that decision. "Only when the privileged classes perform military service, only when elite youth are on the firing line, does the country define the cause as worth young peoples' blood and do war losses become acceptable," explains Charles Moskos, professor of sociology at Northwestern University and an expert on military affairs. "The answer to what constitutes vital national interests is found not so much in the cause itself, but in who is willing to die for that cause."

All true, but shared sacrifice is difficult to attain. The draft didn't pu