By Norman Kelley

With America deeply involved in two wars and with our troops spread all over the world, is it time to dust off the idea of a military draft?  Soldiers, sailors, and airmen and women are being sent back time and again to Middle East danger zones, with an increasing number of suicides attributed to the stress of these constant rotations.  All this is unfolding despite the existence of a massive list of possible replacements – the 14 million names collected and tracked by the U.S. Selective Service System (SSS).

Finding replacements through the Selective Service would mean reviving the draft, an idea that now sounds more like a distant echo of the 1960s than a real tool of U.S. policy.  Yet taxpayers are paying $24 million per year to keep the Selective Service System, and its 2000 draft boards around the country, at the ready in case of a draft.  When billions and trillions of dollars are the stuff of daily headlines, $24 million may not seem like much.  But is there any reason for the continued existence of the Selective Service System?

Ending the Draft

President Richard Nixon formally ended the draft in 1972 at the height of the anti-war movement, but registration for a possible draft was reinstated in 1980 by President Jimmy Carter in response to the Soviet Union’s 1979 incursion into Afghanistan. Nevertheless, since the Nixon era, the entire United States Armed Forces has been an All-Volunteer Force (AVF). The AVF, to all extents and purposes, is the U.S. military today, augmented only by members of the National Guard Units and from the reserves of the Army, Navy, Marines, and the Air Force.

Except for draft registration, which is mandated by law, most Americans have a fleeting, at most, relationship with military service. By law, every male born after 1980 must register with the Selective Service System at the age of eighteen and remain “active” on the agency’s list until the age of twenty-five.  Avoiding registration is a crime, and those who don’t send in their paperwork can end up in jail for up to five years and be subject to significant fines.  A draft – in which anyone on the list can be called up for service – can be initiated by Congress and the President if deemed necessary.

This means that the Selective Service System is a stand-by agency.

The Way it Works

Headquartered in Arlington, Virginia, the Selective Service is essentially one large database consisting of 14 million names.

The agency’s operating structure is divided into three national regions: Region I (HQ: North Chicago, Illinois); Region II (HQ: Smyrna, Georgia); Region III (HQ: Denver, Colorado).  The agency’s master data management center is located in Palestine, Illinois.

With a modest operating budget of $24 million and 130 employees, the SSS is devoted, as Acting Director Ernest E. Garcia explains, to “identifying young men when they turn eighteen and registering them as mandated by federal law.”  Registrants stay on the list until they’re 25 “in the event that conscription is authorized by the Congress and directed by the President of the United States.”  To handle the demands of a possible draft, the SSS has 10,000 draft board members who would roll into action if universal conscription were to be reinstated.

According to Acting Director Garcia, at the heart of any possible draft is another word straight out of the 1960s – the lottery.  Garcia notes that “we have that same system in place today – and ready – so that if and when” there is a military event requiring a draft “we’re able to respond to the direction of the president of the United States.”

After a lottery, draftees would be vetted by draft boards, which assess draftees to decide who should receive deferments, postponements, or exemptions from military service based on federal guidelines.  Those who do not receive deferments enter one of the armed services.

But there doesn’t appear to be any movement towards military conscription to relieve the country’s current combat forces, despite onerous multiple deployments. So, what, a taxpayer might ask, is the purpose of budgeting $24 million to maintain a list of 14 million potential conscripts if the list is never used – even after eight years of continuous war?  Garcia explained that implementing the draft is not the province of the Selective Service System.   “Congress would debate this and we would respond to their directive,” he commented.  “We’re here to execute that policy, whatever that policy might be.”

No Help Wanted

Oversight of the Selective Service is carried out by U.S. House of Representatives Subcommittee on Military Personnel.  The subcommittee is chaired Rep. Susan Davis (D-CA), with Rep. Joe Wilson (R-SC) as the ranking member.  (Repeated calls to Rep. Davis’s office for comments were not returned.)

Matt Daack, military legislative fellow to Rep. Wilson (R-S.C.), argues that the draft isn’t needed because the All-Volunteer Force works.

“The bottom line is that an all-volunteer force is an important key to the success of the military,” he said.  Daack, a major in the U.S. Air Force, says that AVF members “have chosen to sacrifice for our nation” and achieve “high unit morale and high unit effectiveness” because they have chosen to do so voluntarily.

If so, why, still, is the United States spending millions of dollars to house the names of 14 million potential draftees?

“You can note from history,” said Daack, “that the federal government has chosen to institute a draft in the past, and I suspect that’s why they keep the database – in case we find ourselves in the position where we have to institute a draft in the future.” But according to Daack, “that’s not something that the federal government would like to do or foresees doing in any conflict in the near future.”

Military conscription is such a nonstarter that even President Bush’s first secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld stated, during the height of the Iraq War, that a draft was not needed. ON the other hand, it has been argued that the war in Iraq was undersourced from the start.  In 2003, Gen. Eric Shinseki, then Army chief of staff, said that

something on the order of several hundred thousand soldiers are probably, you know, a figure that would be required. We’re talking about post-hostilities control over a piece of geography that’s fairly significant, with the kinds of ethnic tensions that could lead to other problems. And so it takes a significant ground-force presence.

But a draft was never seriously considered, and according to Matt Daack, there isn’t any likelihood that the SSS, under Congressional and presidential direction, would initiate one.

“There is zero political support for resuming conscription,” says Andrew J. Bacevich, professor of history and international relations at Boston University and author, most recently, of The Limits of Power: the End of American Exceptionalism.“That is the simple answer. The generals don’t want it. The eighteen, nineteen year-olds don’t want it. The parents of eighteen, nineteen year-olds don’t want it. The Congress doesn’t want it.”

Bacevich, a former Army officer who served in Vietnam and whose son died serving in Iraq, believes that the army’s generals are entirely wedded to the AVF concept:

When Nixon ended the draft, he did it over the objections of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. At that point in the early 1970s, the generals believed that without conscription they wouldn’t be able to adequately man the force, but the experience of subsequent decades has ended up persuading the officer corps that the military’s own interest is best served by relying on long-service volunteers.

“The generals,” Bacevich explained, think that “draftees would be more trouble than they are worth.”

Regarding the Selective Service, the former army colonel “doesn’t think there is a rational explanation for why registration continues,” and the $24 million budget of the selective service system is just enough to below the fiscal radar screen not to warrant scrutiny or debate.

Rather than calling up a draft, with all of its serious domestic political implications, the Pentagon instead uses a “stop-loss” policy to insure that servicemembers of the All-Volunteer Force are constantly rotated in and out of combat tours. This policy, which can’t help but wear down even the strongest soldiers over time, has been linked to an alleged increase of suicides in combat infantry forces. DOD Sec. Robert Gates has called for “stop-loss” to end in 2011.  Debate continues about whether to send 40,000 more troops to Afghanistan.  In the meantime, the U.S. agency that could provide relief for overstressed servicemembers – the Selective Service System – remains on permanent standby.

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