Thomas Ricks of the Center for a New American Security writes in the Washington Post that the all-volunteer military is a thing of the past and we need to go back to the draft. If the Center for a New American Security sounds familiar, it’s because they’re the same numbnuts who started this talk about doing away with 20-year retirement for the military that we talked about almost a year ago. I guess the CNASC has a business plan that calls for one new stupid idea every year. Of course, bringing back the draft is not a new idea, it’s more like the Left clinging to their glory days.
Ricks’ ill-considered reasoning is that if we still had a draft, the US would be less likely to commit military force where it’s needed;
Over the past decade, this all-volunteer force has been put to the test and has succeeded, fighting two sustained foreign wars with troops standing up to multiple combat deployments and extreme stress.
This is precisely the reason it is time to get rid of the all-volunteer force. It has been too successful. 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.
The drawbacks of the all-volunteer force are not military, but political and ethical. One percent of the nation has carried almost all the burden of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, while the rest of us essentially went shopping. When the wars turned sour, we could turn our backs.
First of all, professional soldiers don’t want a bunch of draftees who we have to babysit for the period of their service. But Thomas Ricks doesn’t know anything about that.
According to Wiki, Ricks is two days younger than me, but his experience in the military is entirely academic. He has “reported” on the military, he is in the business of criticizing the military, but he has never spent a day in uniform, so basically, he doesn’t know that the impact of his idiot opinions would absolutely destroy the military as it exists today.
So, Ricks even admits that having a draft didn’t stop Lyndon Johnson from deploying drafted American soldiers to Vietnam, but he likes to give those draftees credit for ending our participation in the war against communists there. Combat forces went to Vietnam in 1965 and it was eight years before the last combat troops left Vietnam.
Since Ricks called the Iraq War “reckless”, lets’ look at that one and compare it to his reasoning; The US invaded Hussein’s Iraq in 2003 and the last combat troops left Iraq eight years later in 2011. Without a draft. So what’s his point?
Resuming conscription is the best way to reconnect the people with the armed services. Yes, reestablishing a draft, with all its Vietnam-era connotations, would cause problems for the military, but those could never be as painful and expensive as fighting an unnecessary war in Iraq for almost nine years. A draft would be good for our nation and ultimately for our military.
Yeah, that’s the same bullshit thing that the Left uses against home-schoolers – that their children aren’t socializing with the public school students who are steeped in liberal bullshit drivel. So the same process should be applied to the military – there should be more idiot hippies in the military to “connect” the military to society. Personally, I’m not all that happy to be connected to society after my service.
Society is jam-packed with pseudo-intellectuals like Ricks who think I need to be socialized and swallow their idiot opinions whole. I probably would have strangled a whole parcel of hippie draftees if anyone had inflicted those idiots on my platoon.
The fact that draft didn’t stop Johnson from getting involved in Vietnam should be proof enough for most people, but Ricks is upset that the anti-war movement in this century didn’t get much traction, and he’s flailing around trying to give them some more relevance. He ought to wade into a crowd of college students and preach to them about bringing back the draft. I’ll happily provide the crowd with baseball bats so they can properly address his big idea.
Thanks to Marine_7002 for the link.
