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?

[caption id="attachment_5076" align="alignleft" width="192" caption="Boeing's C-17 Globemaster"][/caption] Via ProPublica, Ben Elgin and Keith Epstein have a really terrific piece in Business Week about the struggle to rid the defense spending bill of expensive, largely unnecessary Cold War-weapons projects. A few things caught my eye here, first a breakdown of how spending on weapons changed from the last Geroge W. Bush administration Pentagon bill to the first Barack Obama administration miltary budget (which the president signed Wednesday)

The New York Times' Christopher Drew takes a look at the World Series of defense contracting: the Air Force's seven-year attempt to reward a contract to either Boeing or a combo of EADS (a European company) and Northrop Grunman to build mid-air refueling tankers or "gas stations in the ...

Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan might be a bigger blotch on the U.S. human rights record than Guantanamo Bay. Now the military might own up to past abuses as it undergoes a review of detention practices in Afghanistan including at Bagram, reports Eric Schmitt ...

The F-22 Air Force raptor jet has not once been used in Iraq and Afghanistan and has been deemed irrelevant by Defense Sec. Robert Gates. It's the poster child for the Pentagon spending billions on Cold War weapons at a time of a historic economic crisis and national debt.

And ...

The Wall Street Journal took a minimalist approach yesterday to Secretary of Defense Robert Gates' ambitious plan to reshape the nation's military budget.  Today it's following up with a look at one specific weapons project, the F-22 Raptor fighter jet.  August Cole sees the F-22 as a symbol ...

The Los Angeles Times' Julian E. Barnes had a good piece yesterday about Lockheed Martin's use of the recession as a weapon in their fight to preserve $62 billion for the F-22 fighter plane. The Raptor, as the F-22 is called, was created in the ...

The Washington Post's Ann Scott Tyson reports that while Robert Gates will stay as Secretary of Defense, Barack Obama will likely bring in new personnel for other cabinet political appointments. Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England is among the top officials expected to go.

This doesn't ...

The Wall Street Journal's August Cole reports that a federal court overruled an Air Force contract that exclusively gives Boeing Co. the right to supply midair refueling tankers or "gas stations in the sky." The relatively small Alabama Aircraft Industries Inc. successfully ...

Any break in this Friday's newspaper from the inability to agree on a bailout of Wall Street is not likely to bear any better news: greenhouse gas emissions are building up in the atmosphere faster than predicted, ageless Sen. Ted Stevens started his corruption trial, and the Pakistan-Afghanistan border is ...