This is a question I've only recently come to ask regarding the draft. Looking back at the history of why the draft went away, it's clear to me that Nixon did it as a way of hollowing out the antiwar movement against Vietnam in 1973. He figured that if the college kid's asses weren't on the line anymore they'd have less motivation to pro…
This is a question I've only recently come to ask regarding the draft. Looking back at the history of why the draft went away, it's clear to me that Nixon did it as a way of hollowing out the antiwar movement against Vietnam in 1973. He figured that if the college kid's asses weren't on the line anymore they'd have less motivation to protest the war. I think the global war on terror proved him right, because it's the first war that lasted more than a year that we ran on the contract system since the draft went away and I saw just how badly DOD struggled to maintain manpower. They're still struggling today just to maintain peacetime manpower numbers. It's literally a readiness issue. The draft going away made it easier for people to ignore wars of choice that subsequently went on for years and I'm very doubtful that if we had a draft since 9/11 that the wars would have been allowed to go on as long as they did with the failures of our counterinsurgency and nation-building policies within sight as early as the mid-2000's. Iraq was the more "successful" outcome of the 2 wars, and it only rates something like a 29/100 on the Freedom House index ("Not great Bob").
Our wars only saw a collective KIA rate of something like 7,000+ with the majority of those casualties happening between the years 2003-2008 in Iraq (you have to double the entire KIA rate of the AFG war in order to match the KIA rate in Iraq from 2003-2007). To put that into perspective, Russia just lost something like 10,000+ in Bakhmut in a week. What happens when we get into a war some years from now, perhaps against China, and we're losing something like 10,000+ per *month*? If manpower was so short that we had to recycle guys like me to a combat zone 3 times in 3.5 years due to manpower shortages, how many kids do you think will get recycled to combat in a war with China when even fewer young people are willing to serve in a war that produces much higher casualty rates than counterinsurgency campaigns? Whoever is unfortunate enough to be in a ground combat MOS when the next war happens will get recycled to a much deadlier conflict with much higher KIA rates. "Rolling the iron dice" deployment after deployment in that threat environment is going to get a lot of people killed on their 1st, 2nd, and 3rd tours as the KIA odds go up. We're going to be forcing kids to "roll the iron dice" multiple times on worse odds simply because there aren't enough fresh bodies willing to roll the iron dice just once.
That's what I worry about the most. If you think my generation of veterans are broken off, just wait until you see how broken the next generation of veterans are going to be when they get recycled in a conflict with someone like China. Shit will look more like the Iran-Iraq War than "Operation Iraqi Freedom." American service member casualties will cross the hundreds of thousands mark let alone the tens of thousands mark. How many people will be volunteering to put down 4 years in the Marines at that point? These are the thought points that make me wonder if bringing a draft back is a must rather than a maybe. More of the country will need to share that burden, including the rich kids. It can't just be us recycling high school kids with few options to hideous conflicts over and over again.
If we don't bring back the draft, we should at least raise the age requirement for enlistment to 21 or 22. The brain doesn't stop developing until around 25, and the younger you send kids off to war, the more likely they are to have severe PTSD outcomes, especially if they are recycled. Make the recruiters go after older kids instead of younger high school kids and 1st or 2nd year college students. Even if we went to a draft system I would support raising the draft age to 21 or 22. We shouldn't be sending teenagers off to kill people if we don't even think they're mature enough to drink a beer.
This is a question I've only recently come to ask regarding the draft. Looking back at the history of why the draft went away, it's clear to me that Nixon did it as a way of hollowing out the antiwar movement against Vietnam in 1973. He figured that if the college kid's asses weren't on the line anymore they'd have less motivation to protest the war. I think the global war on terror proved him right, because it's the first war that lasted more than a year that we ran on the contract system since the draft went away and I saw just how badly DOD struggled to maintain manpower. They're still struggling today just to maintain peacetime manpower numbers. It's literally a readiness issue. The draft going away made it easier for people to ignore wars of choice that subsequently went on for years and I'm very doubtful that if we had a draft since 9/11 that the wars would have been allowed to go on as long as they did with the failures of our counterinsurgency and nation-building policies within sight as early as the mid-2000's. Iraq was the more "successful" outcome of the 2 wars, and it only rates something like a 29/100 on the Freedom House index ("Not great Bob").
Our wars only saw a collective KIA rate of something like 7,000+ with the majority of those casualties happening between the years 2003-2008 in Iraq (you have to double the entire KIA rate of the AFG war in order to match the KIA rate in Iraq from 2003-2007). To put that into perspective, Russia just lost something like 10,000+ in Bakhmut in a week. What happens when we get into a war some years from now, perhaps against China, and we're losing something like 10,000+ per *month*? If manpower was so short that we had to recycle guys like me to a combat zone 3 times in 3.5 years due to manpower shortages, how many kids do you think will get recycled to combat in a war with China when even fewer young people are willing to serve in a war that produces much higher casualty rates than counterinsurgency campaigns? Whoever is unfortunate enough to be in a ground combat MOS when the next war happens will get recycled to a much deadlier conflict with much higher KIA rates. "Rolling the iron dice" deployment after deployment in that threat environment is going to get a lot of people killed on their 1st, 2nd, and 3rd tours as the KIA odds go up. We're going to be forcing kids to "roll the iron dice" multiple times on worse odds simply because there aren't enough fresh bodies willing to roll the iron dice just once.
That's what I worry about the most. If you think my generation of veterans are broken off, just wait until you see how broken the next generation of veterans are going to be when they get recycled in a conflict with someone like China. Shit will look more like the Iran-Iraq War than "Operation Iraqi Freedom." American service member casualties will cross the hundreds of thousands mark let alone the tens of thousands mark. How many people will be volunteering to put down 4 years in the Marines at that point? These are the thought points that make me wonder if bringing a draft back is a must rather than a maybe. More of the country will need to share that burden, including the rich kids. It can't just be us recycling high school kids with few options to hideous conflicts over and over again.
If we don't bring back the draft, we should at least raise the age requirement for enlistment to 21 or 22. The brain doesn't stop developing until around 25, and the younger you send kids off to war, the more likely they are to have severe PTSD outcomes, especially if they are recycled. Make the recruiters go after older kids instead of younger high school kids and 1st or 2nd year college students. Even if we went to a draft system I would support raising the draft age to 21 or 22. We shouldn't be sending teenagers off to kill people if we don't even think they're mature enough to drink a beer.