Feeling Drafty

I've been meaning to write a post about the draft for about two months now, and while I've been stopping and starting it, the trickle of thoughts on the blogosphere has grown to a veritable flood. What was ridiculed last spring as election-year fear-mongering has become a bona fide issue, and rightly so: it's clear, now, that our present troop level in Iraq is insufficient, and the current administration has offered nothing even remotely resembling a viable plan for dealing with the shortage. And while John Kerry's blueprint for boosting the military by 40,000 troops is a step in the right direction, that still won't be enough if anything serious develops in North Korea, or Iran, or Syria, or any of a number of other unstable regions. Yet up to this point, no one, either liberal or conservative, has been able to have a real conversation about the draft, because it's been so firmly pigeonholed as "political suicide." Aside from the practical problems this off-limits status imposes, there's a serious ethical question here: in times of crisis, shouldn't the burden of national security be shared as equitably as possible? Our much ballyhooed "all volunteer" army is indeed a remarkable institution, but - not surprisingly - people are less inclined to volunteer when there's a strong possibility they'll be killed or wounded in action. When that happens, the people who end up "volunteering" are the ones who can afford it least: the poor, the uneducated, the disenfranchised. We're at a critical point here, both logistically (we need more troops) and morally (the burden of fighting should be shared proportionately across the socioeconomic spectrum).

So anyway, that's how my post was going to start. And apparently the folks at The Washington Monthly have been thinking along similar lines, and have crystallized their thoughts into a couple of provocatively sane proposals. You can link to them here, and I highly recommend checking them out. It's past time we started having a meaningful exchange of ideas on this topic, and this is a good start.