Why there is no draft (and won't be one)

As we all know, the U.S. Army is seriously hurting for manpower, to the point where they are accepting gang-bangers into the military. So it would seem reasonable to expect there to be a draft in our short term future, right?

Uhm, no. There's two reasons for this. First of all, our rulers learned from Vietnam that a draftee army simply won't fight a war that is deeply unpopular at home. During the last two years of our involvement in Vietnam, Nixon had to rely on the strategy of "Vietnamization", because the majority of the U.S. Army simply refused to conduct combat operations and "fragged" officers and NCO's who tried to force them to do so.

But secondly, and most importantly, our rulers learned from the fall of the Soviet Union. When the military junta declared that Gorbachev was "relaxing", the KGB wasn't on board, and thus the Soviet media immediately reported Yeltsin's assertions that this was a coup against the lawful government of the land and his call for massive protests. When the draftee Army of the Soviet Union was sent to crush these protests... they simply refused to shoot. Because the draftee soldiers were a cross-section of Soviet youth, not a self-selected minority self-selected for loyalty to their leaders, and a cross-section of Soviet youth were not interested in killing their fellow Soviet citizens. The Soviet junta had learned the wrong lesson from Tiananmen Square. The correct lesson to be learned from Tianamen Square was that any attempts to crush a popular uprising via force had to be accompanied by a large-scale media operation to demonize the protesters and by quietly shifting away any units that might sympathize with the protesters and instead bring in units comprised of soldiers who had an ethnic hatred for the protesters. But the lesson that the Soviet junta had learned, not being particularly bright apparently, was that the way to deal with protesters was to bring in the Red Army and order them to shoot the protesters.

It did not work, and it did not work because the Red Army was a draftee Army. In short, a draftee army threatens our ruler's rule over us because it is loyal to the nation, not to our rulers. WWII proves that a draftee army can be tremendously effective when engaged in a cause that is just. But the last time anybody attacked America with military force was on December 7, 1941. The chances of our military engaging in a "just war", one against a nation which has attacked us, is slim to none -- the closest we've come to that in the past 60 years is Afghanistan and the initial campaign to go after Osama bin Laden, a campaign which has mysteriously morphed into a campaign against the Taliban, which had nothing to do with bin Laden's attack against America. A draftee army is not effective when being used to fight unpopular wars or to repress internal popular dissent because it represents a cross-section of the nation and thus its primary loyalty is to the nation rather than to the government.

More on self-selecting: Let's face it, even if I were young enough to join the Army, I would not. I would not because I do not believe in the legitimacy of the current war that our military is fighting in Iraq and I have no loyalty to the current government of the United States, which I believe is acting in an illegal manner against the best interests of the nation and its people. I would not join the Army today because my loyalty is to the nation, not to the government. The people who join the Army today are those who are self-selecting for loyalty to the government. If they were not loyal to the government, they wouldn't join the Army -- like me, they'd stay home. They may be loyal for any number of reasons. They may believe in the rightness of the government, are at least neutral on that regard and are joining the Army for other reasons such as, well, the possibility of starving to death if they stay home, or because they're violent gang-bangers who just like the idea of cappin' some homies without any legal repercussions and what bigger gang can you join than one that has the atomic bomb? But the end result is that people whose first loyalty is to the Constitution and the nation which it defines are increasingly either leaving or being purged from the military (e.g. General Shinseki, Admiral Fallon, etc.), and instead our military being increasingly populated by those whose only loyalty is to themselves or to their leaders (Petraeus, the gang-bangers who are loyal to the notion of "cappin' some homies", the die-hard 21 percenters who believe Bush is God, etc.). And our rulers like it that way, because while a military comprised of thugs, gang-bangers, zealots, and toadies is a military that isn't particularly effective against other militaries, it is one that is loyal. As our military is increasingly purged of all those who are loyal to the Constitution and the nation which it defines rather than to the government, expect larger roles for the military in domestic "law enforcement" -- up to, and including, orders which require our military to fire upon unarmed demonstrators. Orders which will be followed, because one thing that history has shown -- no government ever has ever had a problem finding sufficient zealots, thugs and gang-bangers to follow such orders. All they have to do is lower their enlistment standards sufficiently to get the thugs into the ranks, and voila.

So: There will be no draft. There will simply be a continued lowering of standards to get more zealots, thugs and gang-bangers into the ranks. And that is a feature, not a flaw, as far as our rulers are concerned. Clear?

-- Badtux the History Penguin