Posted on 10/27/2004 1:52:20 PM PDT by FreeKeys
President Bush may or may not have a secret plan to reinstate the draft. But this is beside the point. The deteriorating facts on the ground in Iraq, plus the Bush doctrine of acting pre-emptively and unilaterally against hostile regimes, will soon leave him no choice. If he is re-elected, he will have to restart the draft.
We do not have enough people in uniform to meet current needs in Iraq and Afghanistan, much less to deal with a confrontation with Iran or North Korea. Morale is suffering. Enlistments and re-enlistments are down. The Army National Guard fell 10 percent short of its 2004 recruiting goal.
What if all-out civil war breaks out in Iraq? What if a newly re-elected Bush decides to act pre-emptively against Iran, Syria, or North Korea? Where would he get the manpower to pacify Iraq while pursuing the next phases of his doctrine of pre-emptive, unilateral war? There is only one viable option: a reinstated draft.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailyiowan.com ...
What a load...
I love how all of these reports think they know so much more than the experts in the military.
What a liar. Sad that the Democrats have to stoop so low.
> deal with a confrontation with Iran or North Korea
Correct me if I'm wrong, but in those cases, the likeliest cause for actual warfare revolves around nukes, yes? Doesn't take too many boots on the ground to use B-1s and B-2's to nuke the bejeezus out of the enemy.
This is by TOM HARKIN!!!!
Well, golly gee...what a shock!
Shows you their desperation.
Old Sarge is a recruiter, he will tell ya
Morale is so low that 75% percent want Bush reelected huh Tom?
The hi-tech nature of the new military makes a draft unlikely. However, should circumstances call for it, so be it. Period.
Funny how liberals WANT war when it comes to Iran and/or North Korea. But they just can't have an "illegal, immoral, unjust, baby-killing war" in Iraq.
Morale is suffering
This is why 75 to 80% of the military are going to vote for Bush. Obviously because they are very demoralized by his policies and can't stand him. Yup... that's why the demoralized military will vote Bush all right...
Too funny. This who idea assumes that we want to wage a house to house battle in places like sadar city. We don't have to fight the war this way.
Wednesday, October 27, 2004
Kerry more likely to reinstate draft
By BRUCE CHAPMAN
GUEST COLUMNIST
Of all the upside-down, misreported issues of 2004, the phoniest is the Kerry camp's assertion that a re-elected George W. Bush will bring back the draft. The case is much stronger that John Kerry himself would do so.
Military conscription was abolished more than 30 years ago by Richard Nixon (yes, that's right) after a six-year campaign by Republicans to replace draftees with volunteers attracted to service by decent pay and better living conditions. I know, because my book, "The Wrong Man in Uniform," in 1967, helped launch a movement for reform that borrowed heavily on the ideas of economist Milton Friedman and was led in Congress by a young Illinoisan named Donald Rumsfeld.
Fighting on the other side of the issue were Democrats led by none other than Ted Kennedy. President Johnson's administration had resisted draft reform and Kennedy and company wanted to retain conscription and make it more universal. Since only a small share of each age cohort of young men was needed to serve in the armed forces, Republicans sought to enlist that share with positive incentives while the Democrats proposed to draft everybody for "National Service," a new kind of conscription that could be fulfilled in the military, but also in various government-assigned jobs.
The volunteer military was a political victory by libertarian conservatives against social-engineering liberals, and its success, as nearly all military leaders acknowledge, has been a significant factor in improving the quality and motivation of America's armed forces in the years following the draft-driven (and protested) Vietnam War.
But liberals have never given up the idea of national service. Funded by fat grants from major foundations, a long parade of studies and schemes to introduce the idea has marched forth in a seemingly endless column from think tanks and academia. In the face of the military's own desire never again to rely on coerced recruits, such organizations as the Brookings Institution have proposed instead an ever-expanding realm of paid voluntarism in the social service sector.
President Bush, like his father, has supported voluntary service, too, even with government funds, but nothing like the scope and cost envisioned by such liberals as Kennedy, and now John Kerry. Candidate Kerry wants to enlist a half million people in his plan, many doing "service" for indirect pay, such as schooling grants, that taxpaying citizens perform now, or could perform if compensated.
But always lurking in the background for liberals has been the idea of getting "service" out of everybody and the full awareness that that will entail coercion in the form of conscription someday. Democrats are the main backers of comprehensive national service proposals in Congress and two Democrats, Charles Rangel and Jim McDermott, were the sponsors of the bills on the draft that the House voted down recently.
Meanwhile, the military (despite misreporting to the contrary) continues to meet and exceed its recruiting and re-enlistment quotas, even as the total size of the armed forces has been increased somewhat. Only the National Guard has failed, in August this year, to fully meet its re-enlistment quotas, largely, one suspects, because of recent unanticipated extensions of service in Iraq. The latter is a concern, though temporary, but it does not bear on the case for and against a resumption of a draft. Much more serious threats to enlistments and re-enlistments were experienced in the Clinton years when pay scales and health services were allowed to erode.
If anyone doubts what is going on here, he might simply examine who backs Kerry, and he will find that almost all the longtime advocates of national service (including many who wish to resume a draft) are among them. On the other stand nearly all of us who worked to introduce a volunteer military in the first place and have worked ever since to preserve it.
Polls show that military families will vote for Bush over Kerry by ratios of up to 3 to 1. Among other things, they know who wants a competent professional fighting force and who would allow it to degrade to the point that a draft became necessary.
It is demagogic, therefore, for Kerry to claim that it is Bush who would like to bring back the draft, not him. It is even more reprehensible that Kerry's friends in the media have refused to explain the background on this issue to a generation of voters who are too young not to be gulled by campaign propaganda.
Bruce Chapman, a former director of the U.S. Census Bureau, is president of the Seattle-based Discovery Institute.
I don't think a draft will be or "is" in the works -
just my thought - other options probably will be explored - but - no one can clearly see what the future holds - and that is why I believe the people will support anything President Bush does to protect the nation as a whole -
The draft will happen if KERRY is elected because so many people in the military will refuse to re-up....
Where is Kerry going to gete his add'l 40K troops then?
Oh, Tom Harkin,
So a fraud military expert claims to be smarter than the real military experts.
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