The Whole Standing Army Thing

The debate had begun to rage as I entered high school - All-Volunteer vs Conscription-Augmented.

We're seeing the reality of what both the Founders and the Wacky Hippie Alarmists tried to warn us about.

The Brookings Inst:

The gap in civilian and military experiences in the United States over the 17 years since 9/11 has led to persuasive, persistent, and unrealistic myths that have eroded faith in civilian leadership of defense policy. Among these myths are the superior virtue of military over other kinds of public service; that battlefield experience is the most authoritative source of military policy expertise; and that an exclusively civilian background is inadequate for strategic defense leadership. In the United States, these myths are nurtured and perpetuated by both military and civilian communities and affect general public opinion as well as the attitudes of national security professionals. These myths are also corrosive. Unless they are acknowledged, addressed, and challenged, future civilian leaders may struggle to control the use of force—a profound problem for a democratic system. Downgrading civilian leadership will weaken U.S. national security and the military itself.


It's easy for a Boomer like me to have a knee-jerk reaction against reinstating the draft.  "My war" was Viet Nam, and by the time it was my turn to sweat the lottery, I knew it was already very unlikely that I'd ever be anywhere near the joint, even if I hadn't beaten the 4-1 or 5-1 odds against being selected in the first place (my magic number was 239 in a year when they were "only taking" 1-95).

Anyway, fast forward to other wars of choice - Afghanistan and Iraq - and we see a very familiar variation on the theme of how fucked it all gets if we're not careful. 

During Viet Nam, the draft system got totally corrupted because the "privileged white" kids who had access to lawyers and doctors and other influencers could practically opt out of the draft while the poorer kids - ie: black kids, and others from the lower rungs of the socio-economic ladder - ended up being way over-representated.

In the 2000s, you start out with a really solid military - fairly representative of the American society as a whole. But once it's clear that Afghanistan and Iraq are turning sour, the military starts to run dry (because people do wise up eventually), and we get a lower quality product as a result of the same piss poor management that gets us into stoopid-ass wars to begin with.

I won't recount all the shitty things we've done to our people in uniform (and continue to do to them). Suffice to say that I hope we've relearned the lessons of the founders - that we understand that it's a bad idea to let anybody with guns and tanks and airplanes have too much unchecked power to make the decisions on how they use all that shit.

And the draft? No matter how you try to unrig it, there will always be major problems with a conscripted military. But if we allow the military to be part of a Plutocratic system of government (that a professional military always pushes towards), we let ourselves in for problems that pose the same level of existential threat to the democracy that having no military at all would pose.

Any professional military - standing army or otherwise - is a danger to democratic self-governance.

I think it all goes back to the basics of how we build in the checks and balances. The system that makes sure we maintain the appropriate separations of power. 

And all of that depends on a well-informed public.