Draft beer…and young Americans while you’re at it

Welcome to Curmudgeon Corner where we gleefully slaughter sacred cows. Today’s topic is the draft. And we will not be talking about beer. I’ve always thought that it was a nasty act of ingratitude for Americans to bitch and moan about the potential of being selected for involuntary military service. It’s two years, so what’s the big deal? Most young Americans don’t have much better to do when they’re 18 or a few years older anyway. And the often-quoted pundit who first said freedom is not free had it right. A couple of years of military service is a cheap price to pay for the privilege of living in a free society like America. Say what you will about that free society concept but you’ll find yourself walking it back if you’ve lived—as I have—in foreign nations around the world.

Of course, all this is moot, or relatively so, after nearly half a century of the all-volunteer American military as the backbone of our national defense. And how has that worked out for us? Depends on who you ask. Most rock-ribbed, lantern-jawed military professionals will point to conflicts in American history post-Vietnam and opine that we’re doing just fine without national conscription. In their view, draftees just muddy the professional waters, lack proper motivation, and take up too much valuable training time. Maybe so, but there’s more to the equation than simply looking at our military performance in places like Iraq and Afghanistan and elsewhere in the Middle East. The sad fact is that in nearly two decades of kinetic action in major conflicts where we’ve committed American forces, we suffered significant casualties that were borne by a mere one percent of our population. Where are the DEI social warriors when you need them to do the simple math involved in those startling figures? 

And speaking of diversity, equity, and inclusion, as I suppose we must if we’re going to be honest here, a draft for short-term military service might just be a cure for some of America’s tribalist social ills. One of the things I recall most fondly about the early days of my own military service was meeting, living, eating, and working with people from all parts of our nation. I was this naïve white guy from southeast Missouri, and my bunkmate was a black guy from Chicago. Our boot camp fireteam included a Chicano kid from south Texas and a Navajo from New Mexico. Unlikely we would ever have run into each other outside the military and probably wouldn’t have wanted to anyway. We had nothing in common until the military gave us all a common denominator.

Had I not been crammed into a barracks and mess halls with them, I might never have met—let alone come to trust, like and admire—people of other races, religions, and backgrounds. That valuable experience is much the same in today’s all volunteer military. Ask anyone who has served, and you’ll discover that the vaunted American melting pot is a reality rather than a cliché in our military services. Why not spread those valuable lessons around among young American men and women before they can develop and adopt thoughtless prejudices? What we have here is an opportunity to disabuse many false concepts about each other through positive personal experience.

There are some other benefits that might accrue through mandatory national service, and one of the best would be elimination of the concept that the world revolves around each of us as individuals. We live in a society where much of the population truly believes the sun rises and sets on them and for them only. It’s all about me and little else matters, right? Enter the military and all that rapidly changes. Suddenly there’s a larger concern. There’s a requirement for devotion to a mission that supersedes our individual concerns. There you are in a desperate, potentially deadly situation, and you need to trust the guys on your right and left, and you all have to worry about the mission. Get through that kind of thing a time or two and your perspective changes. Me-and-mine concerns don’t disappear but they are often influenced and improved by concerns about us-and-ours. That’s easily extended into concerns about our neighborhood or our nation. That’s the way good citizens ought to think. It’s a mindset that is often developed through service in the military. It’s simply a matter of bringing disparate people together outside of their little cliques and working toward a common goal where individual concerns are secondary. Simple, right? So why don’t we do it? The answers are equally simple: because we might experience some discomfort and well, just because we don’t have to.

The U.S. has not drafted anyone into compulsory military service since 1973, but men ages 18 through 25 still have to register with the Selective Service System in case there is a draft again in the future. That’s been a requirement since 1980. The system for registering for a potential draft in America already exists, but it’s strictly passive. When young Americans apply for a driver’s license or apply for student loans, they are automatically registered with the Selective Service System. There are no draft cards as such and most American males (exclusively at this point) are likely not even aware that they’ve been registered for a potential draft lottery. Out of sight, out of mind, you know, but that’s a dangerous situation given the current state of international affairs with open warfare in Eastern Europe and the Middle East plus an increasingly aggressive China pursuing expansive territorial claims and undermining US interests around the world.

What happens if one or more of these powder kegs detonates and the US must jump into the breech? What happens if that’s not enough to contain aggression or meet our treaty obligations allies around the globe? There’s legislation currently floating around on Capitol Hill that makes it automatic on a much wider basis for young men 18-25 to register with the Selective Service System, and that kind of thing is sorely needed. Critics are calling it underhanded to use existing databases such as the Social Security Administration and departments of motor vehicles, to automatically register young men for a potential draft but those critics are short-sighted and historically ignorant.

History tells us most wars don’t begin with formal debates and declarations. Most wars begin with an accident or incident that flares into much larger, sometimes global conflicts. Given what we know about our military age population and their reluctance to serve in the military on a voluntary basis, what happens if we need to institute compulsory military service? What happens if those young Americans don’t happen to be in favor of a war America feels it must fight for the common good? Those are troubling questions and the shadow of Vietnam war protests and anti-draft turbulence in the mid-1960s isn’t encouraging.

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