[jyl]

I asked this question in another thread but it got sort of buried, so I'll re-post it here.

I have been thinking lately that maybe we should bring back the draft. This is probably a topic for another thread, but here is what I am thinking. Currently it may be easy for some part of the American population to dismiss the casualties in Iraq since the soldiers volunteered for it and the large majority of American families know their kids will never serve anyway. For quite a large part of the population, the casualties are "someone else's problem".

Perhaps a draft would make more Americans pay close attention to how the military is being used, because it will potentially be their own kid in harms' way. I understand the concerns that a draftee Army may be of lower-quality than an all-volunteer force, but perhaps the answer is to select the highest-quality of the draftees for service - to have more of the Harvard-bound kids serving.

I should have clarified, by the way, that what I am thinking about is a real everyone-is-equal draft - no deferments for college students, for parents, for women. And possibly the draft could be extended to the Reserves, in some manner.

Admittedly there is politically not much chance of this happening. But, still, what do people think? Crazy? Stupid? Sensible?

I admit that I haven't done a lot of research about this. For example, I have not compared the demographics of today's all-volunteer Army to the previous mixed draftee/volunteer Army. And I don't know if today's Army can actually train a soldier and integrate him/her with a unit within a 2-year (let's say) draft period. Maybe the whole idea is impractical - let's hear your thoughts.

By the way, I'm not bringing this up as some roundabout liberal attack on Bush. What's motivating this is the feeling that the responsibility and experience of serving in the military shouldn't be something that becomes an utterly foreign concept to the majority of the population.