End the All-Volunteer Force? End the Stranglehold of the National Security Elite! | William M. Arkin Online

End the All-Volunteer Force? End the Stranglehold of the National Security Elite!Posted on April 22, 2012 | Leave a commentTom Ricks is a keen observer of the military, but his op-ed proposing to scrap the all-volunteer military, no matter how clever his reasoning, is dead wrong.

“Our relatively small and highly adept military has made it all too easy for our nation to go to war — and to ignore the consequences,” Ricks argues.If we had a draft, Ricks says, public opinion might have prevented us from going to war in Iraq, and if we returned to conscription, “the people” would again be reconnected with the armed services.Captive inside the Beltway and surrounded by military friends and colleagues and national security wonks, I can imagine that the world looks this way to my old friend Ricks; but he is wrong about the military, wrong about Iraq, wrong about the people, and wrong about the solution.

The military – our military – doesn’t need a draft, and the notion that hundreds of thousands of young men and women being drafted would help or that they would be drafted so that we can create a coherent national security policy, repair our broken political systems and end a new class structure in our society, is ludicrous.

First, technology has forever changed the face of war. Boots, and boots on the ground, might be a central component for demonstrating some kind of tangible political commitment behind all of our impetuous military interventions, but increasing the quantity of people available in uniform has little to do with the central military task:

Which is defending the United States and vanquishing our enemies. Quantity isn’t needed to fight terrorism, and quantity wouldn’t even be needed to ‘defeat’ a China, at least not vast quantities of infantrymen. (And if it ever came to the point where a Nazi Germany or peer competitor military power arose to threaten us, mobilizing the nation to support the fight would be a piece of cake).

XCerpt

via End the All-Volunteer Force? End the Stranglehold of the National Security Elite! | William M. Arkin Online.

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