CATCHING
A DRAFT
Any
attempt to determine the most ridiculous thing said by an American
cabinet official would have to be a titanic competition. But,
at least since the beginning of the year, Secretary of Defense
Donald Rumsfeld has been threatening to run away from the field.
One need only refer to his thoroughly unnecessary warning that,
“we will not foreclose the possible use of nuclear weapons
if attacked”; or his characterization of France and Germany
by way of that jaw-dropping redundancy, “old Europe,”
(as opposed to those frisky young things like Spain and Poland).
But
Mr. Rumsfeld topped even himself when he responding to a proposal
by Rep. Charles Rangel that the United States return to a military
draft during the current, national emergency. The secretary of
defense pointed out how many men were able to obtain exemptions
from selective service during the Vietnam War, and added that
“what was left was sucked into the intake, trained for a
period of months, and then went out, adding no value, no advantage,
really, to the United States armed services over any sustained
period of time, because the churning that took place, it took
enormous amount of effort in terms of training, and then they
were gone.” He concluded by declaring that there were no
plans to revive the draft.
To
be fair, Rumsfeld apologized for his remarks, after veterans’
groups raised a hue and cry (France and Germany are still waiting).
No doubt, the secretary’s comments reflected in part his
efforts to move the Pentagon away from what he considers an old-fashioned
form of warfare, overly dependent upon large armies and heavy
weaponry, to a lighter, futuristic style of combat that would
depend more upon electronics than on G.I.’s.
Mr.
Rumsfeld is not the first man to be driven to distraction by the
Pentagon’s glaciate response to change (Just why do
we need four separate air forces?). The historical question, though,
was left hanging: Were American draftees all but useless
in Vietnam?
For
starters, the whole issue is complicated by how one decides what
a “volunteer” is during an age of universal conscription.
Of the 27 million men eligible for the draft during the years
of our involvement in Vietnam, only some 2,215,000 were actually
drafted, while another 8.7 million enlisted. Many of these had
obviously signed up because they were going to be drafted anyway
and wanted to ensure their choice of service, or because they
wanted to have a better shot at becoming an officer, or even because
a judge gave them a choice of the army or jail—something
that used to be a common practice. (Over 16 million able-bodied
men managed to escape the draft altogether, some through such
devices as, say, going to England as a Rhodes Scholar or enlisting
in an elite air National Guard unit, where one’s service
to country could consist mostly of volunteering for Republican
political campaigns.)
Still,
the age of the average American soldier in Vietnam was only a
little over 19, as opposed to 26 during World War II. Moreover,
as William S. Turley writes in The Second Indochina War: A
Short Political and Military History, 1954-1975, by 1965,
“The [commanding officer, Lt. General William] Westmoreland
strategy relied partly on the sheer magnitude of U.S. resources.”
This meant the sort of massive deployment that only a conscription
army could provide. By 1969 there were 543,000 U.S. troops in
Vietnam—and some 62 percent of battle deaths were sustained
by draftees. By 1970, 88 percent of all the riflemen in country
were conscripts.
Nevertheless,
this citizen’s army won every signficant engagement
it fought in Southeast Asia. In the course of the Tet Offensive
it virtually annihilated the Viet Cong as fighting force. While
our troops did enjoy huge advantages in supplies and firepower,
they were fighting highly motivated, seasoned troops and cadres,
on their own terrain. By the end of the war, U.S. forces had suffered
almost 59,000 fatalities—while inflicting perhaps as many
as 950,000 deaths and over 2 million total casualties on the enemy.
Surely, at least some of the draftees who were shuttled through
Vietnam were doing something right.
Of
course, as Loren Baritz points out in his history, Backfire:
Vietnam—The Myths that Made Us Fight, the Illusions that
Helped Us Lose, the Legacy that Haunts Us Today, “Fighting
before and after 1969 was markedly different.” Stuck in
a war that the rest of the country had all but given up on, led
by an increasingly inexperienced officer corps, and fighting to
preserve a regime whose own people would not rally around it,
American troops in Vietnam became openly demoralized. The last
years of the war were characterized by unprecedented numbers of
desertions, assaults on officers, and even atrocities against
civilians.
But
even this only shows what a bellwether military conscription has
always been—and herein lies the larger point that Mr. Rumsfeld
and the administration he serves have so far failed to grasp.
When an undeclared, unwinnable war was pawned off on the poorest,
the darkest, and the least well-connected, neither the draftees
nor anyone else could do much good.
In
a similar vein, our very first national draft, imposed during
the Civil War in 1863, contained a provision that allowed any
conscript to buy a “substitute” for $300—then
about a year’s salary for an average workingman. This bit
of “class warfare” immediately set off the worst riot
in American history—and brought in relatively few draftees.
Out of some 776,829 men whose names were drawn to fight for the
Union, only 46,347 actually ended up being inducted. Another 73,607
“substitutes” were provided, and hundreds of thousands
of more did enlist under threat of the draft—but many of
these turned out to be “bounty-jumpers,” riff-raff
who had to be shipped South in irons and under armed guard, lest
they desert and sign up again to procure another enlistment bounty.
In
the twentieth century, the draft was usually instituted only with
wide public support, and the results reflected it. Drafted men
fought both world wars, and fought well, and soon after the Second
World War the draft became an accepted, if never beloved, fact
of life in postwar America.
The
difference between war and peace had become ever more tenuous,
and in a time of interminable proxy wars and “police actions,”
when we could all be targeted for destruction, it did not seem
too steep a sacrifice for young men to devote two years of their
lives to defending their country. Our citizen military continued
to perform well, containing the Soviets at Cold War outposts around
the globe and fighting a much larger Chinese force to a standstill
in Korea.
In
return for that sacrifice, beginning with World War II, our veterans
were rewarded with an array of unprecedented benefits. The G.I.
Bill alone provided some 12 million returning veterans with cash
up front and medical benefits for life. Some 4.3 million took
out home loans, while another 2.3 million enrolled in college,
and 5.5 million used the bill for job training. It was a social
contract that jump-started the modern middle class, and transformed
American life forever. (It was also good business. One Department
of Labor study even estimated that the government made money on
education benefits, considering how much more the average male
with a college degree made at the time).
But
more than all this, military service became an experience that
in and of itself ameliorated some of the worst inequities of our
democracy. It soon became untenable to have a military that was
made up of all of us, fighting for all of us—and yet remained
segregated by race. Despite some loud protests from the brass,
President Truman desegregated the armed services near the beginning
of the Cold War, and the result was probably our most successful
experience in integration. Not only do blacks and other minorities
make up over one-third of the armed forces (as opposed to only
one-quarter of the general population), but women, as well, now
play an integral role in protecting our country. Demands that
military service be fair and equitable even helped to bring down
one of our worst demagogues, Senator Joe McCarthy, when he and
crony, Roy Cohen, tried to bully the army into giving preferential
treatment to another one of their henchmen.
This
sense of duty and fair play broke down during the Vietnam War,
as did much of the Cold War consensus—but even this served
a democratic means in the end. Presidents who had launched and
executed wars without declaring or even fully explaining them
would now find it impossible to finish them without a mass, conscript
army, willing to fight.
This
seems to me the point most pertinent to our current situation.
If we are now to engage in a great global war against out-and-out
evil—a conflict that we are told will be of indefinite scope
and duration—shouldn’t the whole country
be involved, instead of simply cheering from the sidelines while
we lap up tax cuts?
Since
the abolition of our last draft, near the end of the war in Vietnam—and
despite many ominous predictions to the contrary—the record
of America’s all-volunteer army has been exemplary. It has
successfully completed any number of complex, post-Cold War missions,
from the first Gulf War, to peacekeeping in Bosnia, to “nation-building”
in Haiti.
This
war, though, promises to be engaged on an entirely different scale.
For all that Secretary Rumsfeld envisions a new, “lite”
form of warfare, the conflict that lies ahead will most likely
be “a long, twilight struggle, year in an year out, ‘rejoicing
in hope, patient in tribulation,’” as President John
F. Kennedy characterized the Cold War. Surely, such a struggle
will require large commitments of men (and women), on the ground,
if we are truly to root out terrorism, and sow democracy. And
if, in the event, that is not the case, and we are happily disappointed,
the new draftees could be channeled into a domestic program of
national service; one which would enable them to earn benefits,
do needful work, and bind our country together all the tighter
in this time of looming crisis.
To
do anything less is to undermine our own strategy and resolve,
and if this is the case, as in Vietnam, all of us will soon discover
the consequences.
