some drafts are worse than others

By now everyone has piled on to the draft idea floated by Sen. Rangel. To be honest, I don't think it's such a terrible idea. Not that I'd neccessarily support it, but I can see the merits. Israel, Switzerland, and numerous other countries have much the same thing.

The thing is that there are indeed benefits to military training and there owuld be a net positive social impact. So it isn't an idea I would easily dismiss.

Now, there's already one diary on the rec list about why the draft proposal is good politics, but let's actually talk about the draft in the context of policy instead.

The problem with Rangel's proposal is that it's too comprehensive. There are about 8,000,000 people in the US of age between 18 21, and paying them their salaries alone would be a quarter of a trillion dollars a year. But it's a good starting point for a debate about what a draft can look like and what purpose it could serve.

Let's first and foremost remember that a draft does not neccessarily mean combat. If we think of the draft as akin to national guard service, then suddenly the question of its purpose becomes a lot clearer.

I think a more reasonable proposal would be that all high school age kids be enrolled for a mandatory semester in basic (but not intensive) military training. Then, have a rotating system whereby everyone is called up for 3 months of service sometime during the ages of 18-21. They would simply report to their local National Guard office and for all intents and purposes be a part of the Guard for that period. Every five years, they would again be asked to spend three months of service thereafter.

The period of service would be tax free and would carry full health benefits. (this would also open the door to scaling up the VA system for health care to cover all uninsured, but that's a different topic).

What would you do during your service period? Everything that the National Guard does. Teach kids, save lives in disasters, build housing for the poor, provide security for major events, and of course respond to disasters. And once in a while, if the events warrant and we are faced with a truly global scale war for which the volunteer Army would be insufficient, then also provide rotating support. Terms of that would be a different matter of course. But the likelihood of it would be much lower than today, because it would need to be a World War scale conflict.

The benefit is that a lot of people who taste the military life might well choose to make it a career. It's not unreasonable to expect that a draft as outlined above would probably greatly increase the size of our volunteer army - and the extremely hard to recruit and train special forces.

At any rate this is an idea that we should consider and discuss, not reject out of hand.

(xposted to my Daily Kos diary, including a poll).

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