Now do you believe we need a draft? We're in a new kind of war. Time for a new kind of draft - Column - Statistical Data Included

No Peeling Potatoes

Reinstituting the draft is the obvious way to meet the suddenly increased manpower needs for military and homeland security. This fact would have seemed obvious to previous generations of Americans. That today we aren't even talking about a draft it is a measure of the deep psychological resistance Americans have developed to anything that smacks of the state compelling anyone to do anything. Ideology plays a role here. In general, the left doesn't like the military, and the right doesn't like anything that interferes with the marketplace. When it comes to national needs, the left believes in something for nothing, the right in every man for himself.

The psychological resistance also gains comfort from arguments made by the opponents of the draft and by the military hierarchy, which also resists a return to conscription. (The military resists the draft largely because it resists all change; it opposed ending the draft in 1973).

One argument is that today's military requires professional soldiers, especially for overseas mission. Let's leave aside the fact that in World War II, Korea, and Vietnam, most combat soldiers had only six months of training before being sent to war. Let's also grant that because of today's high-tech weapons and complex war-fighting strategies, the actual combat must be left to professional soldiers (though there is some reason for skepticism here). Still, there are hundreds of thousands of vital military jobs--not peeling potatoes--that could be filled with short-term draftees.

One example is peacekeeping. From experience with U.S. deployments in Bosnia and Kosovo, we know that combat troops tend to chafe at peacekeeping duty when they are stuck on bases with nothing to do and little opportunity to train with their weapons. But it's also clear that military police thrive on such assignments, because they get to perform the jobs they are trained for--patrolling neighborhoods, arresting troublemakers, intervening in disputes with a minimum of force. Military police work doesn't require that many special skills. After two months of basic and four months of special police training, new recruits are shipped off to places like Tuzla, and they do just fine. The average tour of duty in Bosnia or Kosovo: about 6 months. Short-term draftees, in other words, could easily do these M.P. jobs, and many others besides. This would free up more professional soldiers to fight the war on terrorism without requiring that the U.S. to abandon other commitments.

Draftees would not have to be offered the relatively high wages and benefits that it takes to lure voluntary recruits (an increasing number of whom are married with families). This would leave more funds available to raise pay for the kinds of personnel that the military is having a terribly ham time holding on to, such as computer specialists, mid-level officers, and master sergeants. To put it baldly, we now have overpaid recruits and underpaid sergeants. In the draft era, the pay ratio between a master sergeant and a private was seven to one; today it is less than three to one. Restoring something like the old balance is the best way to upgrade retention in hard-to-fill skills and leadership positions.