Jack Kelly: The draft is not coming back

Jack Kelly: The draft is not coming back
But fevered liberals persist in their conspiracy
theories
Sunday, September 26, 2004

Two recent polls indicate the presidential race has
tightened again to within the margin of error. John
Kerry made it clear that this isn't true in a speech
in Florida Sept. 22.



Jack Kelly is national security writer for the
Post-Gazette and The Blade of Toledo, Ohio
(jkelly@post-gazette.com, 412-263-1476).
In response to a question after a speech in West
Palm Beach, Kerry said President Bush might bring back
the military draft if he is re-elected.
This has become a meme among Democrats.

"There will be no draft when John Kerry is president,"
said vice presidential candidate John Edwards.

"America will reinstate the military draft" if Bush is
re-elected, said former Sen. Max Cleland, a Kerry
surrogate, in a speech at Colorado College.

"I think that George Bush is certainly going to have a
draft if he goes into a second term, and any young
person who doesn't want to go to Iraq might think
twice about voting for him," said former Kerry rival
Howard Dean at a speech at Brown University in Rhode
Island.

Web logger Betsy Newmark said that college students at
the University of Arizona have been getting an e-mail
that says: "There is pending legislation in the House
and Senate, S 80 and HR 163, to reinstate mandatory
draft for boys and girls (ages 18-26) starting June
15, 2005. This plan includes women in the draft,
eliminates higher education as a shelter, and makes it
difficult to cross into Canada.

"The Bush administration is quietly trying to get
these bills passed now, while the public's attention
is on the elections. The Bush administration plans to
begin mandatory draft in the spring of 2005, just
after the 2004 presidential election."

There are bills in the House and Senate calling for
reinstitution of conscription. They have attracted a
handful of sponsors and cosponsors, all of whom are
Democrats.

The bills are going nowhere, because the Bush
administration strongly opposes them, as do about
three-quarters of the members of Congress.

President Bush and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld
have said repeatedly that America does not need a
draft to fight the war on terror.

"If you add up everyone we are looking for in the
active forces, 1.4 million and the Guard and Reserve
and the Selective Reserve and the Individual Ready
Reserve, it's about 2.5 million. And all you have to
do is alter the incentives and we can attract and
retain all the people we need. We do not need to go to
compulsion."

The draft is an artifact of a bygone era. We would
sooner bring back the musket or the crossbow than the
draft, because military leaders recognize the U.S.
armed forces are the best in the world in large part
because they are all volunteer.

During Vietnam, the IQ and education levels of the
young men who were drafted into the Army and Marine
Corps were significantly below the average for the
youth cohort as a whole. In my Marine recruit platoon
in 1970, half were high school dropouts; there were
twice as many convicted felons as people with any
college, and the other college boy was dual-hatted.
(He'd been busted for smoking dope at the University
of Tulsa.)

The men and women entering the Armed Forces today have
intelligence and education levels far above the youth
cohort as a whole. The "judge-motivated volunteer" is
a thing of the past.

In the Vietnam era, morale in the Army was poor.
Morale in today's Army is high, and it is out of sight
in the Marine Corps.

The high technology military we have today requires
bright young men and women to operate complex
equipment, who are willing to serve long enough to
recoup the cost of training them. A draft which would
bring in the unwilling for too short a time to be
useful would undermine this.

I do think we need a somewhat larger Army and Marine
Corps to effectively wage the war on terror. But there
is no reason to suppose we cannot recruit the
40,000-50,000 additional troops we need voluntarily,
out of a population of 294 million.

Kerry's lie about the draft is of a parcel with
Democratic claims to seniors that Republicans will end
Social Security, or to blacks that Republicans will
bring back segregation. It is as much a sign of
desperation as it is of a lack of integrity.



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Listen to J.R. on Talk Show America, a political conservative talk show that webcasts Mon-Fri 4-6 PM EST live on the IBC Radio Network www.ibcrn.com or 24/7 @ www.talkshowamerica.com (Recorded)