A Volunteer's Lament

Newsweek runs the piece from Cpl. Mark Finelli, a noncommissioned Marine Corps officer who served in Iraq from July 2005 to February 2006. Finelli bemoans the failure of the Bush administration to institute a draft in the months after 9/11, or more generally to ask Americans to make any kind of sacrifice on behalf of the war.

The real failure of this war, the mistake that has led to all the malaise of Operation Iraqi Freedom, was the failure to not reinstitute the draft on Sept. 12, 2001-something I certainly believed would happen after running down 61 flights of the South Tower, dodging the carnage as I made my way to the Hudson River [I worked at the World Trade Center as an investment adviser for Morgan Stanley at the time]. But President Bush was determined to keep the lives of nonuniformed America-the wealthiest Americans, like himself-uninterrupted by the war. Consequently, we have a severe talent deficiency in the military, which the draft would remedy immediately. While America’s bravest are in the military, America’s brightest are not. Allow me to build a squad of the five brightest students from MIT and Caltech and promise them patrols on the highways connecting Baghdad and Fallujah, and I’ll bet that in six months they could render IED’s about as effective as a “Just Say No” campaign at a Grateful Dead show.

I’m a bit sympathetic to Finelli’s argument, especially because it comes from the right place: he doesn’t want a draft for the same reason the Charlie Rangel does, i.e. to turn people against the war, but in order to make the American military a more effective fighting force:

Democracies at war abroad cannot wage a protracted ground operation when the only people who are sacrificing are those who choose to go. This is the greatest lesson of my generation. Young Americans: you may not want to kill jihadists, but they are interested in killing you and your loved ones. Wake up.

Part of you has to love this guy. He thinks we can kill more terrorist through a draft. But still, I’m not sure his analysis is supported by the facts, and on at least one fact, the folks at Newsweek were asleep at the wheel, allowing Finelli to make a statement that is patently untrue. Finelli starts off with the subject of MRAP:

According to the Pentagon, no service personnel have died in an MRAP. So why isn’t every Marine or soldier in Iraq riding in one? Simple economics. An MRAP costs five times more than even the most up-armored Humvee. People need a personal, vested, blood-or-money interest to maximize potential. That is why capitalism has trumped communism time and again, but it is also why private contractors in Iraq have MRAPs while Marines don’t. Because in actuality, America isn’t practicing the basic tenet of capitalism on the battlefield with an all-volunteer military, and won’t be until the reinstitution of the draft.

Like in the first quote, Finelli seems to think that if only the sons of the rich were called to Iraq, the IED problem would miraculously solve itself. But that seems unlikely–and the fact is that American soldiers have died from IED blasts while riding in MRAP vehicles–at least three last fall in an incident that remains classified and six Canadian soldiers were killed riding in an MRAP earlier this summer. These are just two incidents I know off-hand, I suspect there are others–after all, American soldiers have been killed by IED blasts while riding in the much more heavily armored Bradley and Stryker APCs, and even in the M1-A1 Abrams. It’s just not true to that MRAP vehicles are a silver bullet to the IED problem, and the military is set to spend some $20 billion on the program anyway, because they do offer U.S. soldiers increased protection. If it’s a travesty that the military didn’t respond more quickly to demand for MRAP, then the current problem is just the opposite: a rush to field systems that may not be ready for combat and that may not be the best solution available. As far as the draft, again, I’m sympathetic. It’s unfortunate that the Bush administration failed to call upon the nation’s best and brightest to serve in the Armed Forces in the wake of 9/11. But conscription threatens to create problems that the military spent decades trying to solve: rampant drug and alcohol abuse in the ranks, low morale, etc. Finelli stipulates that the draft he wants would be different from the draft that created those problems in the Vietnam era, but he points to deferments as the source of those problem–there is no evidence to support his logic on that count. THE WEEKLY STANDARD ran a piece late last year by William Groom examining some of the problems with a draft:

Politics aside, let’s look at why so-called “universal military service” is a nutty idea: Presently there are about 50 million American men and women of draft age, between 18 and 28, with about 5 million more reaching draft age every year. (One must assume that women would be drafted equally with the men; in these times, how could they not be?) Now just ask yourselves: What on earth would the U.S. military do with all these people? They would all have to be housed, fed, clothed, transported, schooled, counseled, medically cared for–and you’d have to pay them something, wouldn’t you? Otherwise they’d be slaves. Those costs alone would dwarf all the current entitlement programs in America. And how could they even be trained and supplied? (At the very peak of World War II, the largest war in history, the U.S. military had about 16 million service men and women, and our relative taxes were higher than they had ever been.) And what about this: Presently there aren’t nearly enough training tools–tanks and other military vehicles, planes, ships, artillery pieces, missiles, rifles and other weapons, communications devices, etc., let alone instructors–to possibly begin to instruct and equip all those millions of people in the armed forces. So an additional taxpayer expense would, by necessity, be to multiply all of our present military bases (just when we’re trying to get rid of as many of these dinosaurs as possible) as well as to multiply all the above-mentioned equipment by about 500 percent. And we would go positively broke doing it, just as the Russians did. Even assuming this vast horde of 50 million–or let’s just say half of that, 25 million, by the time you’ve weeded out people for one reason or another–were all uniformed, trained, and ready to go fight, the question then becomes: Where is it they would go, and with whom would they fight? Fortunately, the threat of huge global land conflicts such as World War II, or some great war in Europe with the Soviet Union or in Asia against Communist China, has faded into oblivion. As it did, military planners tailored our fighting forces to the all-volunteer professional military we have today. Therefore, we would be left with this: Millions of newly drafted servicemen and women, languishing around U.S. bases, grousing about their two years of conscripted service, instead of being able to educate themselves or find useful and productive jobs.

The volunteer Army has problems all its own, but conscription isn’t the answer. And frankly, I think that Finelli sells himself and his comrades short–the five brightest guys from MIT and Caltech probably wouldn’t last five minutes on the road to Fallujah. We don’t need DARPA to solve the IED problem, we need more patriots like Finelli to go out and kill the bad guys emplacing the devices, and the best way to get them is to expand the volunteer Army. Update: Also see Murdoc.

A Volunteer’s Lament

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