Coming Draft: The Crisis in Our Military and Why Selective Service Is Wrong for America
256
Coming Draft: The Crisis in Our Military and Why Selective Service Is Wrong for America
256eBook
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Overview
In The Coming Draft, Gold charts the path that brought us to this treacherous point and posits an “exit strategy” for America to change its course. In candid language and through authoritative research, he uncovers the flaws of forced enlistment from ancient to recent times and suggests serious and more effective methods to protect the homeland.
“Plans/reality mismatch” is how Gold describes the Bush administration’s handling of the Iraq war. This conflict’s deadly, years-long duration–with overtaxed volunteer troops–has led to the Marines missing their monthly recruitment quotas by up to 25 percent, soldiers over sixty being called out of retirement to serve, and in some cases National Guard tours being extended to 2031. Though the House of Representatives made a show of voting against the draft idea in 2004, Gold believes that a collusion of neoconservatives and liberals could eventually cause conscription to be reinstated. The neocon argument for the return of universal conscription rests in the expectation that American military presence will need to increase in order to combat the spreading threat of terrorism, while the left wing hopes that the revival of the draft will expand the scope of the debate about U.S. military policy, thereby making American involvement in wars an issue that potentially touches every household.
Asserting that selective service has been neither effective nor historically validated, The Coming Draft provides evidence that the Founding Fathers’ concept of common defense differed from our own and allowed for “proper refusal” in addition to service. More damning, Gold insists that starting with the Universal Militia Act of 1791, the draft has been rife with demoralizing corruption and bad faith, whether it was exceptions for civilian slave owners in the Civil War or loophole-laden systems from World War I to Vietnam.
Gold’s practical and innovative alternatives include the redefinition of service (to include earthquake and weather-related relief work), and a drastic rethinking of the duties of the National Guard. All this, he believes, must begin with setting limits on any president’s ability to launch an undeclared war.
Written with an acute awareness and fierce intelligence, The Coming Draft is an indispensable work for anyone who is, or who might have to be, a soldier–and any citizen concerned about the future of our country.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780345495426 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Random House Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 09/19/2006 |
| Sold by: | Random House |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 256 |
| File size: | 422 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Introduction
IN THE SPRING OF 1981, a mere eight years after starting, I finished my Ph.D. Elation was tempered by exhaustion, relief by the fact that I was finally abandoning my semiperpetual student lifestyle for that sad but unarguably adult status: unemployment. My degree was in history. Tenure-track jobs back then were about as common as horse eggs. White males of conservative tendance need not bother to apply.
My prospects, however, were not excessively fatal. My dissertation was on advertising. I’d done a stint in business school and had become enamored of marketing, a hormonal rush of an endeavor, combining rigorous methodology with exuberant chicane. Madison Avenue was an option, even if martinis made my head rotate and pop, and cocaine was anathema. More hopefully, I’d been developing my freelance writing market and was becoming known among the senior neocons. Perhaps something might come of it.
Something came of it. One evening I found a letter in my mailbox, return address but no name on the envelope. I was about to trash it, but the stationery seemed too upscale for junk. I opened it to find a letter from the Smith Richardson Foundation, inviting me to apply for a grant. Fatigue forgotten. Elation again. Modern U.S. cultural history was my passion, especially the issues that had coalesced into Culture War I, that 1960s to 1990s thirty-year tantrum I’d been living as well as studying (we’re into Culture War II now, but that’s a subject for another time). I’d been a conservative, an uneasy, not-quite-True-Believer conservative, since Goldwater ’64.1 I’d sensed that the movement had a dangerously limited and far too hostile view of America’s social and cultural defects and travails and needs, and could use a more enlightened perspective. Now Smith Richardson would fund me to provide it. I would pay off my library fines, collect my diploma, and write the study that would knock their intellectual socks off.
I put my proposal together and invited myself to New York to discuss it. I sat before the program officer, Mac Owens, and explained everything. He paused a moment, then rubbed his face with one hand in a universal gesture of skepticism and said:
“What we’re really looking for is someone to do a book on why we need the draft back.”
My crest not only fell, it hit the floor with an audible thud. The last time I’d considered the issue of conscription was my senior year in college, 1970, when my draft notice arrived. I was furious, and not just because I was legitimately IV-F, medically unqualified, by reason of asthma, hay fever, and a few other maladies with ominously multisyllabic names that always seemed to be prefaced by the word “nonspecific.” I was certainly getting an allergic reaction to my government’s latest communication. How dare they tell me that I had to do something? I got out my finest remaining stationery and scribbled something on the order of:
Dear Draft Board,
Thank you for sending me this induction notice, which I am returning to you. I have no intention of serving in the United States Army. I will never serve in the United States Army. Please stop wasting my time, your time, and the government’s postage.
Sincerely yours.
Philip Gold
P.S. I recently joined the Marines.
Eleven years later, I found myself briefly wishing I hadn’t, or that I’d taken my battery gunny’s advice and stayed in (“Lieutenant, you’ll never be this happy again”). Sitting there, hopes for cultural impact evanescing, I gave my program officer—a former Marine with a Silver Star and two Purple Hearts from Vietnam—to understand that I could be far more valuable as a Culture Warrior operating behind radical lines, conducting raids on “psychologized ethics,” and rescuing issues such as women’s rights from the feminista. He countered that a Jewish Marine with my fancy degrees (B.A. Yale, Ph.D. Georgetown) was ideal to take on the draft issue. No, they didn’t expect an imminent return to the draft, or even a serious political movement in that direction. But it mattered to keep the issue alive, against the day when conscription would be possible again.
The phrase “Semper Fi” is never to be confused with the Marines’ motto Semper Fidelis. “Always Faithful” states an inviolable creed, while “Semper Fi” can have several dozen different meanings, depending on situation and tone of voice. So when I gave Mac Owens the obligatory “Semper Fi,” he understood.
It wasn’t what I wanted. But fifty thousand to write a book and a year as a senior fellow in a no doubt prestigious think tank held a certain appeal. And so began what turned out to be a twenty-five-year ponderization of two of the strangest ideas that human beings have ever come up with.
First, that a democratic state has the right to tear its citizens from their homes, families, and private endeavors in order to send them anywhere the government desires to suffer, fight, kill, and die.
And second, that the citizens of a democratic state have the right to refuse.
A few months later, embedded in a suitably right-wing think tank in the section of Washington, D.C., later to be known as Gucci Gulch, I settled down to write what became my first book, Evasions: The American Way of Military Service. It wasn’t a bad first book. It was certainly sensitive to the funder’s desires, to conservatism’s predilections, and to the general tone of the Reagan years. But it also left me uneasy. Despite (or perhaps because of) all the research, my opinion of conscription hadn’t changed, nor has it since. To put it into a vocabulary accessible to politicians, policy analysts, media “opinion leaders,” civilian “influencers,” and every young person in America: Conscription sucks so bad, you get hickeys on your brain just thinking about it.
But military service…that was different. Always, I’d clung to the antediluvian belief that every American male should spend some time in uniform as a normal part of life and of citizenship. I still do—viscerally, at any rate. I never saw much sense in Vietnam. By 1970, few people did. Four years on an Ivy League campus, however, had convinced me that the opponents of the war, and the outlooks and vocabularies and self-justifications they were so zestfully manufacturing, might ultimately harm the country more than the war itself. I chose to take a stand or, as the deed was also known, to make a statement. Conscientious objection was personally and politically abhorrent. (It still is, although, were the draft to resume, I would extend the right to everybody, no questions asked. More on that later.) So was cashing in on my medical deficiency.
It proved easy enough to do a dodge. I simply forgot to mention fifteen years of schnorks and sniffles and sneezes and sprays and shots, just check off no at the relevant places on the medical history form. Back then, they operated on the principle that if there was anything wrong with you, you’d flaunt it; they didn’t need to look. I then chose the Marines, who, I suspect against their better judgment, chose me. Acceptance did nothing to improve my then-fiancée’s mood, Vassar girls not being noted for their martial enthusiasms. Mine, however, when I asked her if she was crying because I joined the Marines, replied with Vassar-like candor: “No. I’m crying because you wanted to.” My soon-to-be father-in-law, a prosperous dentist with a profound dislike for hippies, radicals, and “Moratoriumniks,” plus an odd affinity for Spiro Agnew and an absolute lust for Richard Nixon, also got candid. After expending considerable energy on dissuasion, he suggested that, if I had to serve, I should let myself be drafted and he would make up the difference between officer and enlisted pay. When I asked why he would do that, he replied, “It would be easier to explain to our friends.”
Semper Fi, Dad.
Officer Candidate School, that intricately structured and intimately supervised initial transition from Ivy League intellectual to lieutenant of Marines, was endured. Then TBS, The Basic School, where the Marines send their neonate brown bars for training. (It’s abbreviated “TBS” because the standard acronymic usage, “BS,” was deemed an inappropriate commentary on the curriculum.) The Marines were pulling out of Vietnam; a training accident that left me in a leg cast for six months precluded a tour. Three-and-out, or so I thought. I did my three, then entered grad school. Two years of academic inanity later, with the Vassar girl and I gone our separate ways, I got to missing the Corps. A colonel of my acquaintance guided me into the abysmally mislabeled Organized Reserve. Since I had some MOSs (military occupational specialties) that were in short supply in the active Corps, and since I could usually get away for a few weeks…let’s just say that one reason the damn dissertation took so long was that I could usually get away for a few weeks. By 1981, I was a major. I had loved it. But the time had come to slip away from all things military and do my cultural gig.
It never happened—at least not full-time. I spent the next two decades plus as, variously, a think tank defense analyst, journalist covering defense, author, and college professor teaching “war and society” and other defense-related courses. Whenever the subject of conscription arose, I was more than happy to note that it wasn’t needed, it wasn’t wanted, and that whenever we’d practiced it, the results had always been unjust, uneven, and unsatisfactory. “Bad faith” was the phrase I used more than once to describe America’s experience with the draft.
Then came Iraq.