Intro: "Gen. McChrystal wants to bring back the draft - but we pay Lockheed and Co to fight our wars now."]
Protesters burn their draft cards during the Vietnam War. (photo: cannabisculture.com)
Alexander Cockburn | No Need for Draft in the Drone Age
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.
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Comments
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Reinstating the Draft is the only way to force the electorate to re-engage in the policies if this country. If we want to stop the crippling cost of Defense, end the National Debt and jump start this economy again to benefit the many as opposed to the few reinstating the draft is a good first step. Then the whole country has skin in the game and will use their votes to set policy.
Remember how many died in Vietnam? Go to The Wall. American young people will be even more expendable with a draft, even if citizens rebel. Should they rebel this time around the hammer would come down HARD.
It won't though. They'll cut VA benefits, Medicare and Social Security first.
If we must have war, and our economy seems to require endless war, let it be waged by those expendable misfits who volunteer because of stupidity or a love of mayhem.
If warfare can be passed off from the use of live bodies to the use of robots,so much the better. That is a reasonable method of waging endless war for the benefit of our last remaining manufacturing industries, while harming the least number of our own citizens.
Of course it is cruel and unjust, but that is the nature of capitalism, so suck it up.
Better our money be used to buy yachts and palatial homes for the big time investors and CEO's than for killing people all over the world!
Now you can start a war of choice like Iraq just for oil, land and water.
Oh those wars are coming soon to CNN station near you.
The children of the rich will never be drafted. There will always be some loophole that allows them to avoid having to serve.
Actually, it's another 1% who fight the wars for profit ... they're just at the other end of the income scale.
I was drafted & spent 13 months in Nam early in the war. The anti-war movement became serious while I was there. When I came home & learned more about it I realized two things almost immediately. A core group in the movement were the kids of draft age who didn't want their asses shot off. They wrapped themselves in high sounding rhetoric - immoral war, etc. As if at that age they really knew. The cowards among them ran away claiming they were too principled to fight in the war. Today, without the draft, we have two "immoral wars" & no flight to Canada.
I also learned that the draft, by cutting across all levels of society, was a force for greatly raising the public's awareness & involvement in the conflict & they became a serious pressure point for the politicians.
While I support the idea I don't think it will happen.
Also remember that this time around it will also include women, if not it will be cut down as discriminatory.
Now by the nature of things, these young men were largely the sons of career military and diplomats, etc., (also students and tourists overseas at the time). A provison was quietly slipped through Congress that registrants in Draft Board 100 would not be called up until all the other boards had flled their quotas. Accordingly, not a single person was ever drafted from Draft Board 100.
I know this because I was one of those lucky students, at a university in Tokyo, who also benefitted.
The people who decide on our wars will never let their own kids be subject to a mandatory draft.
Now, fast forward about 1800 years, and read the words of Karl Marx: "From each according to his ability; to each according to his need."
Marx can be accused of many things, but only one charge sticks: PLAGIAISM!
Jesus cannot be blamed for the Crusades, the Inquisition, the burning of witches, racism, or homophobia (all of which have been carried out in his name). Likewise Marx cannot be blamed for Stalniism, the "cultural revolution" or the killing fields of Pol Pot.
Marx said clearly that if a communist revolution were to come, it would occur in the richest and most technologically developed countries, not in barely post-feudal Russia or China. He was right.
Let those enjoying the fruits of the Imperialistic society be the first to stick thier heads out of the fox holes.
The reason the draft was ended was to prevent the formation of a massive antiwar movement. And it worked, we have none today, we have mass indifference.
Indeed RIP AC - got introduced to your writings courtesy of the Anderson Valley Advertiser, Boonville CA - you were a favorite author around here.
Well, one feminist that I know reacted by being a tailgunner on a Blackhawk Helicopter on several tours. Israel calls up both genders - no reason for the US not to do the same.
The rich won't allow it.
Amazed by how many Repugs I know who voted for and vocally celebrated the "wars" but refused to enlist--or allow their kids to enlist. Tragically hilarious, not to mention wimpish.
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