ignt rn's List: Military Draft

• 2008 September Public Forum Debate Topic:
   Resolved: That the United States should implement a military draft.
• 2008 April Public Forum Debate Topic:
   Resolved: That the Economic Stimulus Act of 2008 will successfully mitigate economic slowdowns over the next year.

• John McCain believes that the answer to these challenges is not to roll back our overseas commitments. The size and composition of our armed forces must be matched to our nation's defense requirements. As requirements expand in the global war on terrorism so must our Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, and Coast Guard be reconfigured to meet these new challenges. John McCain thinks it is especially important to increase the size of the Army and Marine Corps to defend against the threats we face today.
• Washington would not be limited by personnel concerns when considering military adventures around the globe
• increasing federal outlays for defense and further exacerbating the national debt
• violation of the Constitutional rights of those drafted. Specifically, the draft violates the Thirteenth Amendment’s prohibition against involuntary servitude and the Fourteenth Amendment’s protection of life and liberty without due process of law.

2 more annotations...

• 1. CONGRESS AND THE PRESIDENT AUTHORIZE A DRAFT. A crisis occurs which requires more troops than the volunteer military can supply. Congress passes and the President signs legislation which starts a draft. It should be noted that the President cannot initiate a draft on his own. Congress would first have to pass legislation (both the House and Senate), and the President would have to sign the bill into law.

    2. THE LOTTERY. A lottery based on birthdays determines the order in which registered men are called up by Selective Service. The first to be called, in a sequence determined by the lottery, will be men whose 20th birthday falls during that year, followed, if needed, by those aged 21, 22, 23, 24 and 25. 18-year-olds and those turning 19 would probably not be drafted.

• 1. CONGRESS AND THE PRESIDENT AUTHORIZE A DRAFT. A crisis occurs which requires more troops than the volunteer military can supply. Congress passes and the President signs legislation which starts a draft. It should be noted that the President cannot initiate a draft on his own. Congress would first have to pass legislation (both the House and Senate), and the President would have to sign the bill into law.

    2. THE LOTTERY. A lottery based on birthdays determines the order in which registered men are called up by Selective Service. The first to be called, in a sequence determined by the lottery, will be men whose 20th birthday falls during that year, followed, if needed, by those aged 21, 22, 23, 24 and 25. 18-year-olds and those turning 19 would probably not be drafted.

    3. ALL PARTS OF SELECTIVE SERVICE ARE ACTIVATED. The Agency activates and orders its State Directors and Reserve Forces Officers to report for duty.

• 4. PHYSICAL, MENTAL, AND MORAL EVALUATION OF REGISTRANTS. Registrants with low lottery numbers are ordered to report for a physical, mental, and moral evaluation at a Military Entrance Processing Station to determine whether they are fit for military service. Once he is notified of the results of the evaluation, a registrant will be given 10 days to file a claim for exemption, postponement, or deferment. For details, see Military Enlistment Standards. It is possible that Congress could decide to lessen the standards during a draft. However, Congress would have to do so by either including the changed standards in the draft legislation, or by separate legislative action.

    5. LOCAL AND APPEAL BOARDS ACTIVATED AND INDUCTION NOTICES SENT. Local and Appeal Boards will process registrant claims. Those who pass the military evaluation will receive induction orders. An inductee will have 10 days to report to a local Military Entrance Processing Station for induction.

    6. FIRST DRAFTEES ARE INDUCTED. According to current plans, Selective Service must deliver the first inductees to the military within 193 days from the effective date of draft legislation.

1 more annotation...

• More than 25 percent of the homeless population in the United States are military veterans, although they represent 11 percent of the civilian adult population, according to a new report.

  <!--startclickprintexclude-->                                                                                                                                                            <!--endclickprintexclude-->

  On any given night last year, nearly 196,000 veterans slept on the street, in a shelter or in transitional housing, the study by the Homelessness Research Institute found.

• About 44,000 to 64,000 veterans are classified as "chronically homeless" -- homeless for long periods or repeatedly.

  Other veterans -- nearly 468,000 -- are experiencing "severe housing cost burden," or paying more than half their income for housing, thereby putting them at a high risk for homelessness.

• A new Gallup Poll released by Fannie Mae showed that nearly a quarter of veterans, or 24 percent, report having been concerned they may not have a place to live. Eighty-six percent of poll respondents believe homelessness among veterans is either staying at the same level or increasing.

  <!--startclickprintexclude-->

   

   

  

   

  <!-- ADSPACE: us/intg_story/lft.180x150 -->  <!-- CALLOUT|http://ads.cnn.com/html.ng/site=cnn&cnn_pagetype=intg_story&cnn_position=180x150_lft&cnn_rollup=us&page.allowcompete=yes¶ms.styles=fs|CALLOUT --> 

      

   

   

  <!--endclickprintexclude-->

  In addition, 61 percent of poll respondents believe veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts are at least as likely to become homeless as veterans of previous wars.

1 more annotation...

• Rest assured that if the military offered a compensation package of say $50,000 to $100,000 a year, they could get all the soldiers they wanted. Thus, lesson number one is that whenever there's a draft you know that the wage is too low to get a sufficient number of people to voluntarily supply their labor services.  Senator Fritz Hollings said, "One way to avoid a lot more wars is to institute the draft." That's a statement that reflects gross economic ignorance. In terms of incentives it produces the opposite effect. Why? The draft is used because the wage the military offers isn't high enough to get what's deemed as a sufficient number of people to volunteer. Here's my no-brainer question: under which scenario is war cheaper for the Defense Department - the volunteer army or the draft? Obviously, it's the draft since the Defense Department doesn't have to pay the higher wages to get men to sign up voluntarily. Since the Defense Department has a smaller manpower expense, the draft disguises the true cost of war, and one would expect more not less military adventurism.

    

  Waging war requires much more than soldiers. You need tanks, bombs, bullets and aircraft. Have you heard a call to draft $15 million F-15 fighter jets or $4.3 million M1 Abrams Main Battle Tanks? I haven't. The reason is that the government pays the kind of prices whereby producers voluntarily supply these products. Of course, if the Pentagon was willing to pay McDonnell Douglas only $5 million for an F-15 and General Dynamics only $1 million for a tank, it would have to draft (read confiscate) jets and tanks.

• Under his bill, the draft would apply to men and women ages 18 to 26; exemptions would be granted to allow people to graduate from high school, but college students would have to serve.

• The nation had a draft in place between 1948 and 1973. It grew to become the center of controversy during the Vietnam War, 1964-1975, an undeclared war that was the most unpopular conflict America has fought. 

       

   Anger over the war led many young men to flee to Canada and elsewhere to avoid the draft, and violent protests were rampant. When the draft ended, the United States set up an all-volunteer military. 

       

   Since 1980, the Selective Service has required men 18 to 26 to register to give the government a pool of men it could draw from in case troops were needed in an emergency. 

       

   As of October 31, 14.1 million men would be eligible for a draft, said Selective Service spokesman Pat Schuback. Twenty-year-olds would be called up first, followed by others -- year by year. In the age group 20 to 26, 11 million would be eligible. 

       

   The average number of men registered per year during the Vietnam War era was 18.4 million. That covers the period from July 1, 1964, through June 1973.

• To provide for the common defense by requiring all persons in the United States, including women, between the ages of 18 and 42 to perform a period of military service or a period of civilian service in furtherance of the national defense and homeland security, and for other purposes.

• To provide for the common defense by requiring that all young persons in the United States, including women, perform a period of military service or a period of civilian service in furtherance of the national defense and homeland security, and for other purposes.

• From correspondents in Washington

       

  August 11, 2007 09:40am
• Separately, the US military said the army and marines met their recruiting goals in July and were on track to meet their recruiting targets for the year.
• Currently there are 162,000 US troops in Iraq, the most there has been since the US invasion of Iraq in March 2003.

1 more annotation...

• • To be sure, the $515.4 billion 2009 overall Department of Defense budget was criticized for being miscalculated, misrepresented and misleading, causing Winslow Wheeler, the director of the Center for Defense Information's Strauss Military Reform Project, to write that "the more you look into the numbers, the more things become unclear, very unclear." Wheeler points to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) calculation, which corrected the Pentagon's math on their own budget, putting the Pentagon's request at $518.3 billion, a difference of $2.9 billion in mathematical errors. Even that number is incomplete, since it doesn't include the $70 billion supplemental funds for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan--a number that, in Wheeler's opinion, ought to be tripled. Nor does it include the $17.1 billion for nuclear weapons research and storage under the Department of Energy's budget.
• the Army, because of low numbers of new recruits, was forced to refashion its enlistment criteria over the course of the last few years, allowing them to say at this moment that they were meeting their 2008 recruiting goals of 80,000 in the active Army and 26,500 for the Army Reserve.
• raising the maximum enlistment age from 35 to 42, permitting those who are overweight or have physical injuries, granting entry to those with a criminal record and lowering the aptitude standards. A study by the National Priorities Project released in January determined that just over 70 percent of new recruits joining the active-duty Army in 2007 had a high school diploma, falling nearly twenty points below the Army's goal of 90 percent. The Army has long known that high school graduation is an important factor, not for performance but for retention.
• 2009 Department of Defense (DoD) budget proposal put a $20.5 billion line in the budget for recruiting, nearly doubling it from 2008. In 2003, the budget was $4 billion.
• As William Hartung, Director of the Arms and Security Initiative at the New America Foundation, points out, "The Pentagon has no incentive to broadcast how much they're spending, since it is an indicator of yet another devastating consequence of the Iraq war--the increasing possibility that the US may have a hard time sustaining a high-quality, volunteer military in the wake of Iraq."
• Winslow Wheeler, the director of the Center for Defense Information's Strauss Military Reform Project
• "The recruiting budget has skyrocketed due to: (a) increased number of recruiters; (b) increased recruitment bonuses; (c) increased payments to Madison Ave advertising companies who are coming up with the marketing and research to put behind this; (d) increased outreach to 'influencers' like parents/coaches and increased pay, travel and expenses for the recruiters."
• Wheeler told The Nation, "A draft would be an excellent way to share the burden of war."

6 more annotations...

• Cato Policy Analysis No. 214  August 15, 1994

• 2007 Aug 13-16   

       

        18

       

        80

       

        2

• research has shown that military personnel with more than four years of service are 1.5 times more productive in certain jobs than personnel in their first term
• on net, the result could be budgetary savings. With a less experienced force, spending on pay and benefits would be lower; those expenditures would decline further if the level of basic pay was cut. Spending on recruiting—such as advertising, numbers of recruiters, enlistment bonuses, and education programs—might be reduced as well.
• force would not be as effective as if the same increase in end strength was achieved using only volunteers, because average seniority would fall. Producing an equally effective draft force would require having higher end strength than in an AVF, which would necessitate larger draft calls than those considered in the above scenarios.
• Total spending on basic pay—and on other types of pay or benefits that depend on members' length of service or rank—would decline. In addition, a smaller proportion of entering soldiers would remain in the Army until retirement, so less money would have to be accrued for military retirement pay and retiree health care.⁽⁹⁹⁾ Moreover, some elements of military pay, such as the basic allowance for housing, depend on family status. Because a less senior draft force would probably have a lower proportion of families than an AVF, spending on those elements of compensation would also decline. Under the draft scenarios discussed above, if the basic-pay table remained the same, declines in the average experience level of the force could save the active Army between $800 million and $1.1 billion a year
• CBO estimates that reinstating a draft under the scenarios above could result in additional costs of $150 million to $650 million for initial and occupational training and for construction and operation of barracks.
• CBO estimates that it would take 10.5 months to 14 months after recruits entered the military before they would be fully trained and available for deployment.
• Those times would be identical for draftees and volunteers.⁽¹⁰⁵⁾ However, because draftees are assumed to serve for two years (as prescribed in current law), some inductees assigned to occupations that required the longer training times would not be available for a full one-year deployment. That limitation would exacerbate problems for the Army, which recently increased the typical deployment length from 12 months to 15 months.
•  The General Accounting Office (now the Government Accountability Office) conducted several studies estimating the budgetary costs and savings of moving to a draft force in the 1980s. As detailed in one of those studies, The Military Draft: Potential Impacts and Other Issues (March 1988), returning to a draft could generate either net savings or net costs depending on the assumptions used in analyzing the issue.

6 more annotations...