Subcultural engagement for the 21st Century...
Barbelith is a new kind of community (find out more)...
You can login or register.

Underground > Switchboard >

The spectre of military draft.

Page: 1 2(3)

14:01 / 27.05.04

Hmm... Good point Jack.
I've heard a variation on that one before, essentially the argument that if the army was full of draftees the people of the country's involved would have much more of an investment in the conflict. Which would obviously lead to a stronger anti-war sentiment amongst the general populus and an incentive to end the conflict sooner rather than later, the drafted population of the army acting as an observer of the practices of the "privatised" army.

I'd rather that we don't have to send terrified, coerced young people to combat to achieve this though.

Anyway, the draft didn't help stop the human rights violations in the Vietnam conflict did it? You could argue that sending draftees to the conflict will actually increase the human rights violations. Scared young people thrown into conflict in a culture they are totally unfamiliar with does not fill me with confidence that they will automatically empathise with the "enemy", but maybe I'm a pessimist.

Tryphena Absent

16:32 / 27.05.04

Well Jack that's very nice but really as an outsider let me outline what a draft means in your culture. The US is extremely violent, you retain institutionalised killing within the boundaries of your nation, you can own guns and thus have an absolutely insane number of deaths by shooting every year, you lock citizens up and refuse them access to the possibility of justice, your police beat up peaceful protestors despite the promise of free speech within your country and now you wish to reimpose a job on your citizens- absolutely outside of the realm of choice- and that imposition is not only violent but could lead to their deaths. This is not going to fix anything about your culture, it will just perpetuate a system that is inherently aggressive and nasty.

Your military's problem is 1)a lack of occupationary training, 2)acceptance of violence by your culture and 3)no real human rights laws. Those are things that can be fixed but are never properly addressed in the USA.

18:50 / 27.05.04

Not sure what point you're trying to make with that little screed, Anna... are you saying that the problem with the American military is not with military culture per se, but with the American culture at large?

So nothing like this could ever happen with the British military, right? Because it's funny: before those Guardian photos were revealed to be a hoax, there were an awful lot of people who seemed prepared to believe that they were real...

The underlying fallacy in your (frankly grotesque) oversimplification is the assumption that the US is some sort of monoculture--which it's manifestly not. In fact it could be argued that you've got the cart before the horse--that the sort of folks who do fit your stereotype are grossly overepresented in the US military, largely for socioeconomic reasons--that military (and law-enforcement) culture is what it is despite the civilian culture(s), not because of it/them. At the very least, it's undeniable that opinions about this war (as well as about gun control, politics, etc.) are far more diverse on America's streets than within the ranks of her military.

A draft could change military culture, simply by putting more opinions and ideologies into the mix. Because it's a two-edged sword: if They can take anyone, that also means that They have to take everyone. That alone could prevent atrocities in the field--the inidvidual conscience being the "weak link" in the chain of command. Not all conscientious objectors have stayed out of the military: some didn't even know they were COs until they were given orders that they could not bring themselves to obey.

Neither I nor anybody else is claiming that a draft would be a magic bullet, but surely any solution is worth some thought and consideration, yeah? Can we can look at the opinions and argue the big issues without being either patronizing or snarky?

19:59 / 27.05.04

Jack:
1. A few months back, on another board, they were asking what our platforms would be were any of us to run for president. One of my planks included two years of mandatory national service. Not necessarily military -- research, parks corps, whatever else -- just national service. I really like that idea.

2. I think your description of two cultures -- a military culture and a civilian culture -- might be true, but I don't think a draft will change that.
Here's why: the real double culture is between the civilians and the career military. Most of the grunts (and even some officers) are just in for a couple years plus some reserve time to get through college. I have a couple friends who fall into this category. The only career military guy I knew was retired and passed away a few years ago -- he lived next door to my parents, tutored me in math in junior high and was a Naval captain at Guantanamo during the missile crisis. He (and, moreso, his Marine son) had different perspectives on international events and politics than I and my family did. I mean, sure, there's a certain sense in which new recruits are indoctrinated into a culture, and the occupation of "soldier" bears a certain set of traditions and expectations with it, but generally, the temps kinda go through the motions while the lifers, well, make a life out of it. And, I think, it's the lifers who establish and maintain the culture.

00:02 / 28.05.04

The problem here is that the military as currently formulated is a brainwashing organisation, designed explicitly to install certain belief and thought patterns, and that it's used by those who command it as their international enforcement brigade.

True, conscription would provide many more candidates who were resistant to that - in a volunteer army, such people would drop out early - but centuries if not millennia of experience have proved that conscripts armies are quite able to commit appallingly vicious war crimes.

Long-term, perhaps universal conscription *would* be a good idea in that it would force every citizen to confront the reality of the military actions which they support. But I can't see that happening. The emphasis these days is on insulating citizens from what is actually going on, providing convenient excuses for them to ignore the effects of what they vote for, and no government is going to want to change that.

Quite apart from any "they're all part of the establishment" rhetoric, people don't want to be informed. They want to believe that every country that is invaded was an immediate threat, that the money their country receives through colonialism is justified because they're harder working than everyone else. Who wouldn't want to believe that? Christ, I'm not on the streets Fucking Shit Up, am I? Clearly I don't have as much of a problem with the status quo as I could.

04:50 / 28.05.04

Jack - just a side issue really, but before those Guardian photos were revealed to be a hoax, there were an awful lot of people who seemed prepared to believe that they were real...

Firstly, and perhaps most importantly, the photos in question were published by the Mirror, not the Guardian... outside of that there is a very specific reason why neither the PM or the Defence Sec. slammed those photo's as a hoax from the get-go - it because they had a very strong incling that the events depicted in the images had occured... and while we are discussing the Queen's Lancashire Regiment, it would seem that they have been involved in a controversial death in custody...

05:09 / 28.05.04

WhatI find frightening isn't so much the army, but private contractors Coalition forces, particularly the US and Britain are employing in increasingly large numbers. Most of these are ex-career military. We are talking mercinaries and freelance torturers who operate outside the military chain of command.

I really have a problem bringing the market into the army - who do you complain to id Guns-for-hire PLC burned down your village and raped your sister whilst she was being interogated? The industry regulator?

13:26 / 28.05.04

How does the notion of a military (or even a career military) monoculture square with individuals like Zinni/Shinseki?

15:42 / 28.05.04

The biggest problem with a draft is that an all-volunteer army is more effective than a draftee army. Better to fight with soldiers who want to than with those that don't. But I guess that's almost a moot point if half the soldiers are going to be used as prison guards or in some other non-fighting fashion as the US conquers the Middle East.

16:19 / 28.05.04

And a for-profit healthcare system operates more efficiently and effectively than nationalized, free, universal healthcare... by some metrics.

And private vigilante justice may be more effective than the criminal justice system when it comes to keeping order, because it isn't bothered with pesky things like presumption of innocence, the rights of the accused, or the rule of law.

How do you define an "effective" military anyway? What criteria do you include in that definition, and what do you leave out? And, in the end, is "effectiveness" the primary thing we're looking for in a fighting force?

12:39 / 05.06.04

Just an aside here--an interesting Mother Jones article on how Rumsfeld and Cheney have used the tactic of replacing civil servants with corporate contractors when fighting a war--only this was 35 years ago, and the war was The War On Poverty.

Page: 1 2(3)