Alexander Cockburn | No Need for Draft in the Drone Age

By Alexander Cockburn, The Week News

24 July 12

Alexander Cockburn was a powerful force, a friend and mentor to many, known as an uncompromising, unpretentious political writer, who championed the oppressed, giving voice to the voiceless. Friend and co-editor at CounterPunch Jeffrey St. Clair said shortly after Cockburn's death, "He was our Voltaire. He taught two generations how to think, how to look at the world." The following article was published on July 13th just one week before his death on July 20th. We wish you well on your journey, Alexander Cockburn - thank you. CW/RSN

Gen McChrystal wants to bring back the draft - but we pay Lockheed and Co to fight our wars now.

WO YEARS after he was sacked by President Obama as the top commander in Afghanistan for suggesting to Rolling Stone magazine that the real enemy were "the wimps in the White House", General Stanley A McChrystal has recycled a perennial chestnut: Bring back the draft - i.e. a conscripted army, not the volunteer army of today.

These days McChrystal teaches at Yale with what must be a protection unique in the annals of academic freedom. Everything he tells his students is by contractual agreement off the record.

But he made his proposal about the draft in a public venue. McChrystal claimed: "One of the few good legacies of Vietnam is that after years of abuses we finally learned how to run the draft fairly. A strictly impartial lottery, with no deferments, can ensure that the draft intake matches military needs. Chance, not connections or clever manipulation, would determine who serves."

It's certainly true that the volunteer army is a mess. Suicides are surging among the troops. According to AP, the 154 suicides for active duty troops in the first 155 days of the year far outdistance the US forces killed in Afghanistan. The volunteer army also struggles with increased sexual assaults, alcohol abuse, and domestic violence.

Liberals like the idea of a draft army because they think it would curb any president's eagerness to go to war. There are indeed sound arguments for a draft. They were put eloquently not so long ago by Bill Broyles, a Vietnam vet: "In spite of the president's insistence that our very civilisation is at stake, the privileged aren't flocking to the flag."

The war, Broyles wrote, is being fought by Other People's Children. If the children of the nation's elites were facing enemy fire without body armour, riding through gauntlets of bombs in unarmoured Humvies, fighting desperately in an increasingly hostile environment because of arrogant and incompetent leadership, then those problems might well find faster solutions.

The truth is that despite all these fine words, a draft is never going to happen. The military industrial complex needs the money - it's why they're cutting back troops right now.

When Obama introduced 'the new strategy' last year, he emphasised that the Pentagon will be getting more money not less. In the past five years the US has spent $2.59 trillion on defence. The new plans call for an allocation of $2.725 trillion between 2013 and 2017. So much for any peace dividend when the troops come home from Afghanistan.

As my brother Andrew Cockburn recently predicted, the budget will grow but the military will shrink. There will be no more "nation building" with its long and expensive occupations. Overall, troop levels will be cut by about 100,000 soldiers and marines. Fewer new planes will be built. America will no longer be equipped to fight two full-scale wars at the same time - an official requirement for decades.

Such was the military-cultural context for calls for the draft: huge ground forces stocked with draftees. What we have now is precisely the opposite - robot/drone wars, with no need for suicidal soldiers or politically awkward draftee casualties. The money all goes to Lockheed and the other big aerospace companies. Remember there's a good reason why they abolished the conscript army. It mutinied in Vietnam and thus was a prime factor in America's defeat.