Sunday, October 13, 2019
Time magazine makes a radical proposal to bring back low-level conscription, and offers curious parallels to arguments in my own DADT books and blog posts
Time Magazine has a “Special Report” Oct. 21-28, 2019,
which I could cover on my legacy “book reviews” blog, but today’s issue brings
up something I want to mention on this one, my main “legacy” blog on this
platform.
The report starts on p. 40 with “Trump and the Troops”,
but I wanted to call attention tonight to a special subchapter by Elliot
Ackerman that starts on p. 44, photographs by Gillian Laub, “Born into War”,
with the tagline “The way to end America’s forever wars is to bring back the
draft.” The report is quite lengthy an runs to page 57.
It recommends a “reverse engineered draft” (including women) which, if I
understand right, would be very small and only children of higher income
parents would be “eligible.” Draftees, “unlucky”
enough to be picked, could go only into combat arms. He argues that this works now because women are eligible for combat arms. Coincidentally, Lisa Lang happens to be covering women in Marine Basic Training at Camp Pendleton, CA on Sunday night on CNN.
There are other proposals for universal national
service, and Pete Buttigieg has even proposed them. Some proposals would call
for intermittent service even in retirement (maybe related to eligibility for Social
Security benefits).
But this proposal is particularly aimed at changing
the political calculus that leads to protracted wars in Iraq and Afghanistan,
and even the political dishonesty that seems to have been responsible for the
start of the Iraq war in 2003.
Wealthier parents will demand a much more careful
stance of getting into wars.
This may be harder to imagine with complicated
situations like Syria.
This story catches my eye right now because recently I
have been in some phone conversations with my POS publisher (Oct 8 post) and one
of the issues is whether an older non-fiction book (back to 1997-2000) can sell
again. There is a lot of material in my first book on Vietnam era conscription
and deferments (which would not exist in Ackerman’s proposal) and some unusual
application to the issue of gays in the military as it was under “don’t ask don’t
tell” until 2011. Ackerman is delving into the same viewpoints I examined twenty
years ago, and again after 9/11 (with correspondence with the now late Charles
Moskos).
There has been recent discussion of whether women
should be required to register for Selective Service and likewise whether the
Selective Service System should be abolished.
Were that to surface as a political issue in the 2020 election year,
that could give me more visibility, for better or for worse.
I seem to recall David Hogg (from March
for our Lives and the gun issue) mentioning Selective Service in a tweet last
year after he had turned 18. Ironically, the "real David Hogg",
an industrious "conservative" college student in North Carolina talks
about veterans issues a lot on Twitter.
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