November 26, 2006
Revisiting the Draft III Posted by John Steele Gordon at 05:25 PM EST The Wall Street Journal yesterday had a long editorial on Charles Rangel’s proposal, which had some very interesting numbers from a Heritage Foundation report, which can be found here .
Since the first draft law, during the Civil War, in which those with the money ($300) could buy their way out, it has always been said that “it is a rich man’s war but a poor man’s fight,” that the wealthier parts of society get us into wars, and benefit from them, but that it is the poor who have to fight—and all too often die—in order to win them. This has certainly been the mantra of Charlie Rangel and many others on the left (and is surely the origin of Senator John Kerry’s now infamous “joke”), that the military recruits disproportionately come from the poorest segment of American society. But, as I have long argued, when it comes to foreign and military issues, the left is stuck in 1968. I would again recommend Max Boot’s War Made New for a good overview of how much the military has changed, both in personnel and in equipment and tactics, since the Vietnam War. It is not your father’s army anymore.
That the poor make up the bulk of the military, it would seem, is no longer the case. According to the Journal, “The percentage of recruits from the poorest American neighborhoods (with one-fifth of the U.S. population), declined from 18 percent in 1999 to 14.6 percent in 2003, 14.1 percent in 2004, and 13.7 percent in 2005. Put another way, if military burdens aren’t spread more evenly among socio-economic groups in the U.S., it’s because the poor are underrepresented.”
While slightly less than 80 percent of young Americans have high school degrees, 97 percent of military recruits do. And the intellectual quality of these recruits has been going up, not down, since 9/11. The percentage of recruits who are, by the military’s definition, “high quality” rose from 57 percent in 2001 to 67 percent in 2004.
When broken down by race, blacks, whites, and Hispanics are all represented at percentages close to their percentages of the total population (Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders, for reasons unknown to me, are greatly over-represented in the military as compared with their percentage in the population as a whole).
Unless the Heritage Foundation report is seriously flawed, it would seem that the modern American military is a pretty fair mirror of the population of young American as a whole, exactly what, in an ideal world, it should be. Perhaps the strongest motive for joining the military these days is not to escape grinding poverty but—thanks to educational incentives for enlisting—to escape being saddled with huge debts to finance college.
Another point: About 4 million people turn eighteen every year. If a draft were instituted, what on earth would we do with them all? The entire active-duty military today is less than 1.4 million. If many would not be called, how would that be handled fairly? With such a vast recruitment pool, physical standards would be very high and thus escaping the draft for physical reasons would be relatively easy, encouraging cheating. And the cost of housing, training, and equipping such a huge number would be astronomically expensive. How would it be paid for? Veterans’ benefits would saddle the federal government with vast future obligations.
Mr. Rangel knows all this perfectly well, of course; he is a very smart and politically savvy man. He knows that his proposal has about as much chance of being enacted, even in a Democratic Congress, as a resolution against Mom and apple pie. The military needs to change in fundamental ways (again, I recommend Max Boot on the subject), but the days when wars were fought with enormous numbers of boots on the ground are probably over for good. As we have found out in Iraq, winning the war, in the sense of occupying the enemy’s territory, is easy for the only military great power left in the world. Winning the peace afterwards, however, has proved to be very, very difficult, requiring all sorts of new expertise that the military has been reluctant to develop. Saddling it with 4 million angry recruits who want only to be out of uniform would make that job even more difficult.
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