The military draft meets “the ethic of irresponsibility”

I hit enlistment age in the early 1970′s. If the Pentagon keeps extending its recruiting reach into middle age — it’s at 40 and rising — I may hit it again in the not too distant future. Absent some dramatic changes, it seems likely to me that we’ll see the return of the draft before the end of Bush’s term, assuming there is an end.

The possibility seems remote to most people. Proposing a draft would be political suicide for anyone seeking reelection. The military is bitterly opposed to the proposition. Among ideas, it is a friendless, diseased orphan.

But to ignore the possibility is to ignore three factors, one of which is getting some recognition and the other two, little or none. The first is that the Army is in an accelerating crisis. The second is that whatever goals the administration has for Iraq are as distant now, or more so, than they were before the invasion. And the third is that whatever else you can say about Bush, he is at this point both convinced that he has unlimited authority in national security matters, and not concerned with reelection.

Taking those factors in reverse order, Bush and his “legal” advisors have quite clearly stated they believe the president has the authority to do virtually anything in the name of national security: order people killed — which he does routinely, as with the unmanned drone missile attack in Pakistan recently which, as Chris Floyd notes, guaranteed civilian deaths by targeting three homes in the village — tortured, illegally surveilled and so on. If someone tells him he needs more bodies to fulfill his destiny, he won’t hesitate to order a draft. Congress might object, but there’s no indication they’ll go to the wall on any constitutional issue, even one that threatens their own livelihoods, or that there’s anything they can do short of impeachment and conviction that would stop him. They might squeal about a draft, they might refuse to appropriate money for it, but even where the power of the purse is concerned, Bush claims the authority to redirect any funds once they’re in the grasp of his “unitary executive.”

Among the reasons Bush might see the need for more cannon fodder is that the largely ignored goal of turning Iraq into the Middle East launching pad for US military operations in the region is still on the table and is in no danger of being realized any time soon. Those who think the US will be withdrawing substantial numbers of troops in the near future have to believe the administration is willing to write off one of their core purposes for the invasion. The original “plan” — the one involving parades and flowers and a secular, US- and Israel-friendly government that would cover our invasion expenses — involved building bases and infrastructure to support perhaps two Army divisions and to accommodate whatever Air Force operations might become necessary. The metrics, as Don Rumsfeld might say, haven’t changed; if anything, the administration will now see the need for such a force as more pressing than it was before they began deconstructing the region. As things now stand, protecting the permanent force would require every troop we have in the country today, and then some.

Add to that the looming, if artificially inseminated crisis with Iran, and there’s every reason to think the administration will want to keep a large force in the neighborhood forever, and little reason to think they won’t actually do so. Opponents of the occupation and invasion have sometimes remarked that disavowing any desire to build permanent US bases in Iraq is a necessary step toward mitigating the distrust non-combatant Iraqis hold regarding our intentions. But the administration have refused to do so, even going so far as to avoid directly lying about their intentions. Optimists would do well to ask why, and what that refusal means in terms of our military presence.

The Army’s woes, and the National Guard’s, are well documented publicly and privately. A report commissioned by the Pentagon and written by Andrew Krepinevich, a retired career Army officer who now runs the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, is quoted by BBC as saying the US Army is “stretched to breaking point” and that the US military is incapable of outlasting the insurgency. The report hasn’t been released yet, and may never be, but you can get an idea of what’s in it from an essay, “How to Win in Iraq,” Krepinevich wrote last year in Foreign Affairs, the house organ of the Council on Foreign Relations.

The essay introduced the “oil spot strategy,” in which US troops embedded with Iraqi troops would work to secure an area, populate it with security forces to prevent the return of insurgents, and move on to secure another area. The goal of the strategy is two-fold: reduce the number of US troops required to maintain the current level of insecurity in the country, and increase the likelihood that Iraqis, emboldened by enhanced security, will begin providing better intelligence about the insurgents. Krepenivich advocates the strategy because the current strategy, or lack of one, has brought “little progress in defeating the insurgency or providing security for Iraqis, even as it has overextended the U.S. Army.”

That overextension makes itself apparent in the accelerated rotations the Pentagon has implemented for troops involved in Afghanistan and Iraq, which is pretty much all of them, and in the Army’s recruiting woes and the measures the Pentagon is taking to address them: lowering the bar on the military aptitude test, accepting more high school dropouts, raising the enlistment age and doubling enlistment bonuses, and in at least some cases, retaining personnel who test positive for drugs (the latter were National Guard troops preparing for deployment to Iraq).

According to a recent update of an October, 2003, Congressional Budget Office report looking at the potential consequences of an extended occupation, the rotations, a strong reenlistment effort (driven in part by large bonuses), the liberal implementation of stop-loss orders — almost 13,000 soldiers, or nearly ten percent of the total in Iraq, are involuntarily serving under those orders now — and the diversion of traditionally non-combat training units to Iraq have to this point kept the wheels from coming off altogether. But the report notes that a large number of National Guard units are approaching the legal limit of their active-duty deployments, and that the Army’s recruiting woes are dwarfed by the Guard’s; two more rotations will see the end of the Guard as a reliable component of the forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. Covering for that attrition would require what would amount to a blanket stop-loss program, and that would serve only to maintain the current levels or slightly lower.

So the choices facing the administration are to give up on Iraq as the centerpiece of US military strategy in the Middle East, or to find a way to realize that strategy with fewer troops than are failing to achieve it now, or to find more bodies. The first seems wholly unlikely and the second only slightly less so, since we’ve been there for nearly three years now without any progress on that score. So the third seems more and more likely.

I broached the possibility of a draft to an online friend, who said my reasoning was sound but that a draft would violate what he calls “the ethic of irresponsibility.”

The Volunteer Army is worth its weight in gold to everyone involved in American decision-making. The Volunteer Army frees politicians to make reckless military decisions and engage in bellicose rhetoric without having to worry about the risks of an unhappy military. It frees voters to revel in that bellicose rhetoric without having to worry about whether their kids will be dying in some god-forsaken place like Iraq. And it frees the military from having to worry about large numbers of dissatisfied grunts. The Bush administration would start imitating professional sports teams and handling out seven figure “report” bonuses before they re-institute a draft and the Democrats would be right behind them saying that the bonuses should be limited to $900,000. Their grandkids are going to be paying for it anyway.

That’s a solid counter-argument, and one that neatly highlights two faces of the Bush administration: the carefree cokehead spendthrift one that inspired my friend’s response, and the dour, messianic and homicidal one that informs mine. In this instance, I think we’ll hear the horns and chorus of the Messiah if there’s even the hint of a precipitating event.