{"id":30707,"date":"2012-07-10T09:11:10","date_gmt":"2012-07-10T13:11:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=30707"},"modified":"2012-07-10T09:12:22","modified_gmt":"2012-07-10T13:12:22","slug":"ricks-draft-our-kids","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=30707","title":{"rendered":"Ricks: Draft our kids"},"content":{"rendered":"

So, in the New York Times<\/a>, Tom Ricks echoes Stan McCrystal’s call<\/a> to bring back the draft. Ricks is two days younger than me, but our life experiences are quite different, apparently, because his vision of a draft is decidedly not to support our warfighting capability, and contrary to McCrystal’s plan to have every American community have “skin in the game” in the next war, Rick’s sees it as a jobs program and to provide cheap labor – an Army of janitors;<\/p>\n

These conscripts would not be deployed but could perform tasks currently outsourced at great cost to the Pentagon: paperwork, painting barracks, mowing lawns, driving generals around, and generally doing lower-skills tasks so professional soldiers don\u2019t have to. If they want to stay, they could move into the professional force and receive weapons training, higher pay and better benefits.<\/p>\n

Those who don\u2019t want to serve in the army could perform civilian national service for a slightly longer period and equally low pay \u2014 teaching in low-income areas, cleaning parks, rebuilding crumbling infrastructure, or aiding the elderly. After two years, they would receive similar benefits like tuition aid.<\/p>\n

And libertarians who object to a draft could opt out. Those who declined to help Uncle Sam would in return pledge to ask nothing from him \u2014 no Medicare, no subsidized college loans and no mortgage guarantees. Those who want minimal government can have it. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Then, it’s not really a draft is it? We already have a cheap workforce tending to lawns, building maintenance, and paperwork – that’s why the buildings at Walter Reed were criticized by the Washington Post five years ago – a cheap workforce. When their draft service came around, there’d be tons of teen aged libertarians who don’t care about whether they’d get Medicare in 50 years or not – that’s why Obama has to force them to buy health insurance.<\/p>\n

And if they’re not going to deploy, where’s McCrystal’s “skin in the game”? If your child has been drafted and you can be reasonably sure that they won’t deploy, why would you be invested in a decision to go to war?<\/p>\n

I think Ricks just thinks that sending millions of high schoolers to basic training would teach them to pull their pants up over their underwear instead of Ricks and the rest of the liberals summoning the testicular fortitude to tell them to hike up their drawers. Or something.<\/p>\n

Obviously, the liberals, like Ricks, don’t have any idea how much time would be invested in shepherding people who don’t want to be in the Army. It’s hard enough with volunteers.<\/p>\n

Having read some of the discussions on Facebook of the Ricks’ piece, I’ve noticed that the only supporters of the proposal are people who wouldn’t be drafted anyway.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So, in the New York Times, Tom Ricks echoes Stan McCrystal’s call to bring back the … Ricks: Draft our kids<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[84],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-30707","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-military-issues"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30707","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=30707"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30707\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=30707"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=30707"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=30707"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}