Selective Service was gone for a while after the Vietnam draft ended. Jimmy Carter reinstated it in 1980. I was in high school and was quite annoyed at him.
I’d bet on a professional army over a conscription one any day of the week, without a doubt.
Hey, I’m not going to argue that a conscription army will be more effective. I just don’t think military service should be income-based.
One interesting possibility would be to make the military pay, oh, I don’t know, $100k to start. Might fix most of the problem.
Huh? What does that mean?
I just don’t think military service should be income-based.
How is military service “income based” in a way that every other freely selectable job isn’t?
You civilians show your ignorance of military life. New recruits get paid below the friggin’ poverty line.
What does that have to do with a draft?
Well, gee, they were just talking about income, man.
Midnight- Maybe you should do more than just scan for your list of liberal talking point words before jumping in to talk with the adults. McCullough isn’t saying that wars are fought by the poor because we don’t pay our soldiers very much, he’s saying that the people who become soldiers are generally poor. It’s sort of a Howard Zim thing, or he’s trolling.
McCullough- Are you trolling? In a non-draft situation, of course the military is going to be composed of the poor and uneducated, because it’s a shitty job that doesn’t pay very well. Are you serious about willingly trading combat effectiveness for nebulously defined social good?
In a draft, we shouldn’t be drafting the educated. Cruel as this may seem, but doctors have better things to do with their time than dig foxholes. Draft some loser with 2 years of high school, because we can always get somebody else to flip burgers part time if he bites it. We can’t so readily replace our supply of doctors and lawyers are shit.
Huh? What does that mean?[/quote]
Who do you think joins an AVF? It sure as hell isn’t a broad cross section of society.
Military service shouldn’t be income based because unlike every other job out there, you have a disturbing chance of getting killed. Yes, yes, I know, with the current bout of mostly peace it doesn’t matter; truck drivers probably have a higher fatality rate. The point is that in a real war you do have one.
On procedural grounds, in an income-stratified society like ours politicians will be a lot less cavalier about sending troops off to die when it’s not just the poor. I’m of the opinion that the reason Vietnam lasted so damn long was that the establishment didn’t have a dog in the fight; it was all careers and chess pieces on a board to them. I’m not saying they’re callous assholes; it’s just that “my son or my friend’s son might die in this” tends to focus the mind.
In a draft, we shouldn’t be drafting the educated. Cruel as this may seem, but doctors have better things to do with their time than dig foxholes. Draft some loser with 2 years of high school, because we can always get somebody else to flip burgers part time if he bites it. We can’t so readily replace our supply of doctors and lawyers are shit.
Yeah, that’s the American ideal right there - you’re worthless! Go get yourself killed to keep the doctors and lawyers safe!
Bullshit. If your number is called in a draft, you go. Then the army goes “shit, you’re a doctor! We can use you in a hospital…” If you’ve got a job that’s essential to the war effort, you get a deferment. This happened in WW2 if say, you were an aircraft designer.
And who really needs lawyers here anyway… to the trenches! Remember that awful Civ variant with the lawyer?
McCullough- Are you trolling? In a non-draft situation, of course the military is going to be composed of the poor and uneducated, because it’s a shitty job that doesn’t pay very well. Are you serious about willingly trading combat effectiveness for nebulously defined social good?
Have you met Jason? He’s always pushing some illconceived program to radically reform the social landscape to acheive some nebulous equitable ideal. Basically he’s a commie. He’s never so happy as when he’s advocating the government spend someone else’s money for some crazy idea that no one could say will work. Like a while back he thought we should force rich people to live next door to poor people. He had some bizarre idea that this would make them interact or something, and keep property values from becoming disperate between rich and poor areas. He’s kooky that way. He’s so over the idea of personal freedom. Witness his advocating the draft, something I’d consider unconstitutional. But we’ve had this argument before and he’s not convinced something is unconstitutional until a new amendment comes along expressly forbidding it. Up to that point he’s all about mob rule (you do whatever the mojority tells you!).
McCullough- Should cops and firemen and deep sea fishermen and all the other dangerous jobs get some sort of magic McCullough income equality treatment?
Ah, I see, that was a logical dead end you don’t even agree with. You think that having the wars being fought by the rich will stop war. I think our politicians are little more mature than that. They may be evil liars out for personal gain, but I don’t think they are that simple.
But yes, it’s insane to draft productive citizens. Doctors and lawyers and computer programmers are more useful to society than burger flippers. There’s nothing wrong with a draft that gives exemptions for being valuable to civilian society. Drafts are bad enough ideas as is.
To summarize the McCullough income-based draft plan:
Cons:
Society back home loses productivity
Morale of army suffers
Pros:
McCullough feels better about the issue
If we’re gonna use the poor as cannon fodder, then they’re not QUITE as worthless as current Welfare opponents would have you believe, eh?
LAZY BASTARDS ALL THEY’RE GOOD FOR IS STOPPERING A FOXHOLE WITH THEIR FAT DRUG-ADDLED MINIMUM-WAGE CORPSES
McCullough- Should cops and firemen and deep sea fishermen and all the other dangerous jobs get some sort of magic McCullough income equality treatment?
Oh please, the fatality rate in those jobs is not even remotely in the same class as the army during a real war. I also have a hell of a time believing you seriously consider “the way the state carries out its responsiblity to defend itself” comparable to “deep sea fishing.”
I’m also amazed by the naked rhetoric that comes out on this subject - “the lives of the rich are worth more!” Jesus. I also have to say it’s a miracle we won WWII, considering how incompetent draftees are and everything.
Anyway, a perfectly acceptable compromise to me would be paying soldiers an absolute fuckload of money. Somehow I bet that’s not ok, either.
Though the highlight is Grenz suggesting the draft is unconstitutional…
Oh, congratulations on reinterpreting my statement that politicians would be more careful if the best and brightest were at risk into a carte blanche opposition to war itself.
So what’s the fatality rate that makes income distribution relevant? As to paying soldiers more, uh, we don’t have a problem with our peacetime volunteer rates, so I’d say we pay just about the right amount.
Paying them more would just give us a bunch more soldiers, who all cost way too much. That might work in the old days where the only training you needed was “the sharp part goes in the other guy” and you’d send everybody back to their hut and field after the war, but current doctrine calls for a small army of well trained professionals.
It’s not about the value of a life, it’s about what’s best for society. If we have to send somebody to war, and one of them is a doctor and the other a burger flipper, I’ll keep the doctor home. If it makes you feel better, the US Army provides life insurance to it’s soldiers at pretty low rates given that they do have dangerous jobs.
Hey, and whatever happened to
Hey, I’m not going to argue that a conscription army will be more effective.
It’s kinda funny that you can value a war, but not those who actually fight it.
Oh, wait, I’d forgotten that we pay our soldiers in patriotic platitudes and the occasional overwrought speech – mere dollars are saved for the doctors and lawyers and CEOs.
I didn’t argue it’d be more effective; I just don’t think it’d make too much difference.
Though if you’re worried about effectiveness, I’ve got to wonder why you’d oppose paying them more - seeing how, you know, it’d attract people who are better able to perform the job, the same as every other market transaction. And I’m not following how paying them more leads to a higher number of soldiers, seeing how head count is set by Congress.
Edit: the more I look at just really raising their pay, the better it looks. About a million draftees, $37k average salary, so it’d cost $100 billion or so, which is around a 25% one-time increase in the Pentagon budget. Sounds like a good idea to me.
Oh, I just realized something: are you using “value to society” in a “necessary for the home front” type of meaning? Like, “doctors (if the military already has all the ones it needs) are more valuable to society at large to be home treating people, but you can’t really say the same thing about stockbrokers”? I could see that. My apologies if I misinterprated that into “rich people’s lives are worth more.”
That kind of reasoning led to the egregious Vietnam draft exemptions, though, so I’m not sure where to draw the line there.