For a very long time I’ve been warning that the policies of this administration (and the Obama admin) would lead to a peacetime draft.
Well while some might question if we’re in “peacetime” or not we’re finally seeing it being discussed publicly.
Today, the military needs only about 160,000 youth from an eligible population of 30 million to meet its recruitment needs. But after two decades of war — both of which ended unsuccessfully — and low unemployment, many experts believe the all-volunteer force has reached a breaking point. And American confidence in its military is at a low.
The fastest and most effective way to resolve this recruiting crisis is to change how we recruit.
Instead of an “either an all-volunteer force or a fully conscripted force” model, I propose a both-and solution.
We should have our military recruiters sign up new troops for 11 months out of the year, and then have the Selective Service draft the delta between the military’s needs and the total number recruited.
The most interesting about this article to me personally is it twists a point concerning the military that I made almost 20 years ago at Instapundit the very first time leftists called me a Nazi:
While the all-volunteer force had the effect of lowering discipline problems and professionalizing the force, it also created a vast gap between American citizens and those who serve — effectively creating a military warrior caste that now appears more like a multi-generational family business than an organization that represents the true makeup of our democratic republic
emphasis mine
Seriously? The people who have been volunteering for decades and fought when others stayed home are the problem? Well if the goal is a strong military that can stop China then I guess it is.
Kurt Schlichter sums the reality up as to why people have not been joining:
Let’s look at the attitude of the military towards the people who they want to enlist. Many are white males who know which bathroom to use, but if you’re a white male who knows which bathroom to use, you’re an extremist and a racist and an enemy and you’re going to get passed over for promotions and assignments for people based not on anything that you did, and not because of merit, but purely because of your race, sex, and normality. “Come, join an organization that actively hates you!” is not much of a sales pitch.
I can see how this might put a damper on recruiting from military families (Funny how Col Plenzer the author of the piece never mentions this as a possible cause of the numbers falling short.) On the bright side for Col Joe this might decrease the number of those icky military Caste people there.
Kurt Closes thus:
Here is the hard reality. If you choose to join this military, you’re putting your lives in the hands of people who, at the highest level, don’t care about you at best and hate you at worst and are grossly corrupt and grossly incompetent. When you die, likely because of their utter failure to adequately perform their duties at even the most basic level of proficiency, your families going to get shafted and you’ll be forgotten or disrespected. And if you think this makes me happy to write, you’re dumb or dishonest enough to be a modern general or admiral.
The real question is this:
You can have an elite fighting force of motivated volunteers or a draft army lead by woke leaders, you can’t have both. The Biden/Obama admin has demonstrated most emphatically it does not want the former
The only question is: Are they doing this because of ideology, because of payment or both.
I’m betting both.
