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No, you won’t have to move to Canada

I was in Late for the Train the day after the election and I happened to overhear someone in their 20’s comment that they were thinking of moving to Canada so they wouldn’t get drafted.

Sigh. I hate election years.

I wanted to write about something else this month, not spend my 900 words debunking leftover election lies. But here goes.

The short answer is that there isn’t going to be a draft. It just doesn’t make sense any more, the world has moved on. It was election year nonsense. You won’t have to move to Canada.

Unconvinced? Well, in order to talk about the draft, we have to talk about how our armed forces are structured, and how they need to be structured.

Right now, our armed forces are setup to fight the Soviet Union in West Germany. There’s a small problem with that plan. Neither of those two countries even exist anymore. West Germany is now just Germany, having absorbed East Germany, and the Soviet Union is now Russia, a democracy.

Now in the context of fighting the Soviet Union in West Germany, a draft makes a certain amount of sense. You can take an average American off the street, use 9 of the 104 weeks of service for a training course (i.e. Boot Camp), and you have a rifleman useful for 95 weeks.

Of course, that’s for fighting the Soviet Union which, as I said, doesn’t exist.

For fighting the wars of the 21st century, you need something different. While riflemen are useful, they’re not that useful in a modern army. Modern armies are made up of specialists; specialists that have a lot more than a couple of months of training. If you do the math, by the time you got a draftee trained, their 2-year enlistment would be half over.

The Draft doesn’t make any sense.

Now you might have heard about a “back-door draft”. Well, that’s just rhetoric. It sounds good, but the real issue is that the armed services have found themselves with the wrong types of soldiers. What the armed services need in Iraq are 150,000 policemen, not 150,000 riflemen. So the DOD turned to the National Guard and Reservists who are also trained as policemen. (If you think about it, the last time you saw a National Guardsman was at some sort of public event, providing security.) They didn’t do that because they didn’t have enough soldiers: There are 4 million people in uniform in the US, but only 150,000 in Iraq. If it was just a matter of warm bodies, it would easy to send 150,000 more troops to Iraq without a draft. It takes 6 months to train a policeman, and if you’re going to train a policeman, you might as well train an Iraqi policeman.

So there’s not going to be a draft. What there will be is “transformation”.

You might think that the government would have spent the 90’s thinking about this, and changed the military to reflect the realities of the post-Cold-War world.

Nope. This is the government we’re talking about, and the Department of Defense is one of the largest government organizations around. They don’t do anything quickly, and in order for them to change, Congress has to get involved, weapons programs contracts have to shift, a whole bunch of things that take a whole bunch of time. Clinton wasn’t really interested, and it would have been pretty much his job to do something. Clinton wasn’t alone, most of the NATO countries didn’t even do the minimal changes Clinton made. One of the reasons that coalition contributions in Iraq were so small is that they didn’t really have any of the right types of soldiers.

After Kosovo, by the time President Bush came into office, it was obvious that we had the wrong sort of military. Immediately upon coming into office, Rumsfeld started what he calls “Transformation”. While it might seem that Rumsfeld’s primary job is pissing off the Europeans, the part of his job that takes the most time is changing the entire military to reflect the challenges of the 21st century. That’s quite a challenge because the military is very conservative, and very resistant to change. But it has to be done, as Iraq has shown; there isn’t a commander in Iraq who wouldn’t trade 10% of his soldiers for half that number of Arabic translators. So Rumsfeld is trying to change the personnel, the weapons, the tactics and the training of the entire Department of Defense.

That’s one of the reasons Rumsfeld doesn’t bother me. There’s a reason Rumsfeld is an asshole. He has to be. He has to push and scream and shove at the military, at Congress, and at we the citizens in order to do his job. Sometimes, its good to have someone who can kick some ass where and when it needs to be kicked.

So there won’t be a draft any time soon, because it just doesn’t make any sense. We can and should expect to see changes in the military to reflect the realities of the 21st century: more peacekeeping units, more units trained for intervention in places like the Sudan, units trained for disaster relief, etc. These are the missions for the military of the future. To staff those missions, the military will get more pay, and I expect we’ll see even more “we’ll pay for college” advertisements on TV, but no draft.