A Journal for Western Man-- Issue IX
G. Stolyarov II
The Democratic proposal to reinstitute the draft in the armed forces has not been as extensively circulated in the news as other issues of the moment, the forthcoming conflict against Iraq, the tensions in North Korea, and even Illinois Governor Ryan�s lame-duck clemency of death-row inmates. Yet it stands on the same level, perhaps a more significant one, in regard to determining whether America shall linger as a free country, or whether it shall collapse to arbitrary despotism.
Representative Charles Rangel�s statements concerning the desirability of draft re-implementation (still during peacetime, a proposition echoing the Selective Training and Service Act of 1940, signed by arch-bureaucrat Franklin Roosevelt), arrived with lightning swiftness, and, if we are to counter his dreary vision, we must with likewise tempo spread rational, objective counters to his fallacy-riddled vision. I shall here attempt to refute common arguments employed by advocates of the draft and present a principled, systematic philosophical foundation behind its immorality.
Regarding direct impacts, a draft, if we are to trust Mr. Rangel, is supposed to enhance the military readiness and efficiency of a nation when faced with such a blatantly menacing opposition as the terror networks throughout the world and the power-lusting, maniacal dictatorships of Saddam Hussein and Kim Jong Il. Yet let us examine historical characteristics of the most superbly performing military forces. Take, for, example, the mighty Roman legions of antiquity, the might of whose swords had carved out the entirety of the Mediterranean and Western Europe for their homeland�s empire. The Roman Army was a professional, contract-based service in which soldiers registered for some twenty-five years at a time, prepared to journey from battlefield to fortress to barbarian village on the outskirts as a matter of lifestyle. Roman soldiers were prohibited from undertaking such activities common to civilian life as marriage and gambling. Rome could permit its commanders to impose such stringent discipline for one reason: those who received it had implicitly consented to it, and were not dragged into it by force! Who could be separated from love and pleasure but of their own will? An army of men devoted with body and mind to the sword, capable of superbly holding formations, constructing roads, encampments, and fortified bases, could not have been raised from your ordinary townsfolk, as the Vercingetorix had attempted during the Gallic Wars. His rag-tag, barely trained army of a million men was quickly devastated before the firm advance of some 15,000 of Caesar�s elite legionnaires.
Or, in more recent times, glance into the military structure subordinate to the greatest strategist and commander of all time, Napoleon Bonaparte. Napoleon prided himself on a personal devotion to his men, an experiential bond formed from their earliest days campaigning in the Alps and Italy to their resolute stands in the deserts of Egypt against Mameluke squadrons ten times their number to the fields of Marengo, Ulm, and Austerlitz, where the most renowned fighting forces of Europe were decimated by Napoleon�s �iron men.� Napoleon�s charismatic addresses to his troops constantly reminded them of the causes for which they were fighting, the Republican ideals of the French Revolution, the overthrow of feudalism, the preservation of their reformist homeland against monarchist reactionaries. His armies were composed in entirety of volunteers, yet he had managed to assemble as many as 600,000 of them, through inspiration and generous pay, at any given time. His Grande Armee became the essence of military excellence and fueled Europe�s social progress for over fifteen years. Could Napoleon have picked up any random males, aged 18 through 40, from the streets, and conquered Prussia with them, with minimal training, massive logistical dilemmas due to the enormous amount of provisions necessary for numbers which would have ventured into the millions, and a sense of gnawing, grueling obligation instead of self-determination and privilege instilled into his ranks? Or would he then have been not loved, but scorned as a mass producer of cannon fodder?
Today the Roman Empire and the French Empire have ceased to unify the civilized world and have withdrawn into the pages of history. The task in safeguarding universal liberty and prosperity in a world of new barbarians, the fundamentalists, and new feudalists, the Third-World dictatorships, is one most encompassing the interests of the steadily globalizing United States of America. The United States can flaunt the most technologically and strategically developed military in the world, which historically has suffered the smallest amount of casualties on the battlefield than any other major army in history. It is also, however, the most compact. In an era where precision-guided missiles, tanks, mobile artillery, and aerial bombardments have replaced launching wave after wave of doughboys against entrenched enemy machine guns, it is essential not to produce your rank-and-file privates, but rather to train every serviceperson, be they the operator of a mechanized infantry vehicle or the pilot of a B-2 Stealth Bomber, in the intricacies of the ever-modernizing equipment that they must employ daily throughout their careers. Training constitutes not days, but years, and even what takes minutes to learn frequently requires a lifetime to master. Focusing a maximum degree of attention on the individual soldier, especially on the willing individual soldier, whose motivation to �be all that he can be� needs no artificial boost, is a surefire means to ensuring American global sovereignty for generations to come.
What of nations who, historically, had employed the draft? One such example is Russia throughout its centuries-long involvement in the military affairs of the Western world. Russian princes, czars, commissars, and bureaucrats, had successively uprooted entire peasant villages to impose twenty years of campaigning duty without rest upon all of their male occupants. Yet the Russian bear, despite its intimidating mass, usually possessed but claws for its defense. Decades behind its European neighbors in weapons technology and tactical finesse, Russia�s dismal performance was exposed on innumerable occasions, the most blatantly ruinous of those being the Seven Years� War, the Napoleonic Wars, the Crimean War, the Russo-Japanese War, World War I, World War II (which had resulted in the greatest death toll ever experienced by a military force), the Afghan War, and the futile centuries-long struggle against rebels in the Caucasus that continues to this day.
Consider the history of America�s wars to note that the smallest number of casualties was experienced during the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the Mexican War, and the masterpiece of modern technical and intellectual warfare, the Persian Gulf War. What do all the aforementioned conflicts have in common? No draft had been in force during their undertaking. Not one of those wars saw the destruction of more that ten thousand American lives. The Persian Gulf War�s toll was under two hundred. The more recent Afghan Liberation had witnessed the unfortunate peril of under ten individuals.
Quite to the contrary, during the Civil War, the Spanish-American War, World War I, World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War, during all of which the draft had been stringently implemented (to the point that Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes had deemed Charles T. Schenck�s proliferation of pamphlets in opposition to such a practice �a clear and present danger� in 1919), American casualties had reached at least fifty thousand, with the exception of but the Spanish-American War and the Korean War, both of which had nevertheless lost more troops to accidents and disease than to armed engagements. For the rest of the conflicts, however, if their veterans were to be told that only fifty thousand persons had perished, they would have been sorely insulted by the underestimating ignorance of the new generations. Vietnam had destroyed 58,000 American lives, the Civil War�750,000, World Wars I and II combined--- some 650,000. Is that the combat efficiency Mr. Rangel seeks?
Conscription advocates may argue that the military would create promising and simultaneously socially beneficial careers for many youths across the country. However, the distinction in treatment by a commander of a draftee as opposed to a professional is equivalent to the distinction in treatment of a slave as opposed to one�s subordinate at work. The military, in the status quo and in similarly humane periods of mankind�s history, had been treated as a specialized occupation not unlike any other in the fundamentals of contract negotiation, choice of entering or not entering the career field, and bountiful payment for an exacting task. It is, admittedly, a more significant threat to one�s life than, say, the career of a desk clerk, yet the average soldier is capable of compensating for the threat by conditioning oneself into a fitter physical state than that of the average desk clerk. The soldier, possessing the tools to do combat, derived from training and equipment, commits himself to a rational, volitional, calculated risk of engaging the enemy. The desk clerk, also rationally considering the matter, regards himself to be lacking in the aptitudes and capacities demanded by military service and spots more promising prospects for himself in the field of secretarial work. In terms of the fundamentals of free-market exchange (which include, by the way, protection provided by government from wanton aggression), both the soldier and the desk clerk are metaphysically equal and are thus treated with the same degree of courtesy and consideration proper to a human being by their employers (if the latter choose to retain their workforce!).
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