For the Good of the Country

by Bryan Cockfield

The president has committed 20,000 additional troops to the Middle East. To keep our military from becoming too thin (as our military leaders, president, joint chiefs, and defense secretary have done in the past), even with the additional troops, the United States should return immediately to the draft.

The sooner the United States returns to conscription, the better off we will all be. Not only would a draft strengthen the overextended military, it would drastically improve an already burgeoning economy and would also improve the character and disposition of the American people.

This draft, which the U.S. should employ in the months to come, will draft both men and women with one exemption – those who are in college, but only those students who are actively pursuing a degree that will help the war effort upon graduation. However, once these students graduate, they will be eligible for a commission as an officer via draft.

Obviously there will be a lot of debate as to what kinds of majors will qualify as “helping the war effort” but one thing is for sure: majors such as (but not limited to) English, political science, business, and sociology will be taken first. Engineering, science, and architecture majors will be allowed to stay in school.

After this draft has been proposed, the American people will actually see an increase in the effectiveness of national security, rather than empty White House rhetoric about how the country is more secure because of some new, unconstitutional policy (i.e. the U.S. Patriot Act). The draft is a sound national security policy because it directly benefits national security by effectively strengthening the military.

Apart from renewed national security, we should immediately see a drastic economic expansion. With the country driven more towards the war effort, we will see a noticeable upward trend in the economy, similar to the economic escalation right after the United States engaged itself in World War II. The only way to improve the economy significantly is to be involved in a war. Even Ronald Reagan improved the economy by spending massive amounts of money on national defense to create a peacetime war economy.

Even though there are many practical and useful advantages to the draft, it will also improve the morale of the American people. This is not to imply that they will be happy about the draft in any way, but they will be motivated to start paying attention to foreign policy if their friends and family members are being forced to fight and die in a war. People, as individuals, will seek to become informed, rather than have their opinions dictated to them by Fox News Channel. They will assess whether or not they believe that the conflict in the Middle East is actually worth the lives of men and women who are United States citizens, registered aliens, on a student or visitor visa, illegal aliens, refugees, dual nationals, or disabled.

As it is now, with an entirely volunteer force, the American people do not care about the crisis in the Middle East, the people who are dying, or for what reasons they are fighting and dying. The high-ups in the Bush administration do not even know the particulars of the civil war that has engulfed the area (one administrator could not tell a reporter whether or not there were more Sunni or Shi’a in Iraq).

The only opposition to a return to the draft is more empty rhetoric from cut-and-runners that claim that conscription is an infringement on basic civil liberties and freedoms. But we should all be comfortable with giving up some of our basic freedoms and civil liberties for the sake of security. After all, the U.S. Patriot Act passed 99-1 in the Senate, with Russ Feingold (D-WI) as the only senator who cared not to compromise civil liberty.

A few years ago, a few senators proposed to reinstate the draft with no exemptions that included women (Universal National Service Act of 2003, HR 163). Perhaps they realized that if women want equal rights, they should have equal treatment. Or they realized that this was the first step on the road to a renewed draft which would finally be successful with involving the American people in foreign policy. The policy would effectively end the war by finally creating an informed constituency. No wonder that the HR 163 bill was killed by the people a draft would hurt the worst: current members of Congress and their affiliates.