Young people, especially young people of color and young workers, have always fought America’s wars. Whether through mandatory service or after being enticed into a professional Army, young people have been killed and done the killing from the US invasion of the Philippines up until the bombardment of Fallujah in Iraq today. US imperialism has always used young people to do its dirty work.
As American soldiers keep dying alongside Iraqi civilians, it seems that the war on Iraq has also turned into a war on youth here in the US. But could the Bush administration launch a full out attack on young people in the US–by authorizing a draft?
The Selective Service System, created in 1940, requires all men to register with the government at the age of 18. Failing to register is a crime – and even more significantly (since criminal investigations are rarely pursued), men who fail to register are denied federal financial aid and educational loans for college. Using the SSS list of young men, the military actively drafted young men from 1948 until the draft ended in 1973.
In the sixties, when the US invaded Vietnam, the SSS used a lottery system to determine who would be called up from the list to serve in the military. One out of every ten who were sent to Vietnam were killed or wounded.
Following the massive public opposition to the US war in Vietnam, the mandatory draft was ended in 1973. But in 1980, Selective Service once again began mandatory registration. The old Vietnam lottery system is still in place, ready to be activated “in an emergency,� according to the Selective Service System’s website.
Now, many fear that current military shortages and the prolonged occupation of Iraq have created exactly that kind of ‘emergency’ for the US military, and that a draft is right around the corner.
But it would not be so easy for Bush to reinstate the draft. An active draft means many more young people going to war in Iraq. It also means the likelihood that the average American knows the kid returning home in a bodybag. Tod Ensign, a lawyer for the GI rights group Citizen-Soldier, maintains that the draft “registers an impact on the body politic which is just too intense. They will do anything to avoid that.� With millions already taking to the streets demanding, ‘Bring the troops home!’ a draft would likely further turn US public sentiment against the war.
Milton Friedman, an economist better known for his writings in defense of capitalism, drove the point home to the Nixon administration that the draft had driven much of the opposition to the Vietnam War. Why did he say so? An ‘all-volunteer force,’ he argued, would make it much easier for the government to go to war at will, without worrying about popular unrest. Today the US military is an all-volunteer force.
It seems more likely that the military will attempt to solve their manpower problems without implementing the draft. Senator John Kerry and President George W. Bush, the two likely presidential candidates in 2004, have both publicly announced their opposition to such a move. US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who in 1969 as a US congressperson introduced the first bill to abolish the draft and establish an all-volunteer military, has repeatedly said that it would not be “appropriate or necessary to re-institute the draft.� And Selective Service ran this announcement on its website: “Notwithstanding recent stories in the news media and on the Internet, Selective Service is not getting ready to conduct a draft for the US Armed Forces — either with a special skills or regular draft.�
SPECTER OR SPECULATION?
The idea that the return of the draft is imminent or even inevitable has made its way into newspapers, emails, and conversations. A popular email message warned that a draft will definitely begin in 2005. The Village Voice ran a May cover story asking, “Old Enough to Vote—Old Enough to Die?� Local newspapers are eagerly covering developments at the Selective Service System (SSS).
But groups that have monitored Selective Service carefully for decades believe that a military draft is not in the pipeline, and that such reports are based on based on inaccurate or misinterpreted statistics. In a conversation with Dynamic, Citizen-Soldier’s Ensign called much of the speculation “spurious and empty.�
For instance, one Internet report warned that Congress had just voted to add $28 million to the Selective Service budget. In fact, the figure was simply the agency’s regular annual funding request. Congress only approved $26.1 million for the coming year, well within the Selective Service’s normal budget. The same report claimed that a draft was scheduled to begin March 31, 2005. That date did show up on the funding request, but only as the deadline for the agency to report back to Congress on the year’s activities.
An announcement on the Selective Service website calling for applications to fill positions on draft boards–the local bodies that would be responsible for calling up young people to fight in a draft situation–caused a reporter for the online magazine Salon to speculate whether the Pentagon is “oiling up the draft machine.�
The Committee on Militarism and the Draft, a California-based peace organization, distributed an article critical of the Salon report arguing that SSS has worked to fill draft board positions before and has “essentially been readying itself for the last 24 years.�
Some recent news could indicate that the SSS is thinking harder than ever about how to shape its draft plans to the military’s current needs for maintaining occupation in Iraq. On May 1, 2004, newspapers around the country reported that SSS director Lewis Brodsky proposed to the Department of Defense that any upcoming draft include young women as well as men.
The agency has also been updating its plans for various ‘critical skills’ drafts that, if implemented, would force young people with needed scientific, medical and engineering skills into active military duty. A health care personnel draft plan already exists and could be put into motion by Congress at any time. The new proposals are to create models for computer and language skills drafts. (Potentially, this could mean the rounding up of Arab Americans for detention could be replaced by the rounding up of Arab Americans for military service.) SSS is also recommending that people registering at age 18 be required to list these skills, and to update their registration if they become computer or language-proficient later on.
At the same time, top Democratic Party legislators have been calling for the return of the draft.
Expressing concern over the unprecedented deployment of the National Guard and Reserves in the current war, Representative Charles Rangel of New York and Senator Fritz Hollings of South Carolina introduced a bill that, if passed by Congress, would create compulsory national service. Under this legislation, all US citizens – men and women – between the ages of 18 and 26 would have to either serve in the military or perform some form of civil service.
In April, Senator Chuck Hagel broke ranks with his fellow Republicans and said he thinks a draft could be necessary, asking, “Should we continue to burden the middle class, who represents most all of our soldiers, and the lower-middle class?� Other Republicans have also voiced concerns about the way troops are deployed in Iraq and insinuated that the government needs new sources of manpower.
The legislation doesn’t seem to be going anywhere. A year and a half after its introduction, it still only has 13 co-sponsors, and is widely viewed as a protest measure to raise awareness of inequalities in service. When questioned about the bill’s continued relevance, a Rangel spokesperson was noncommittal, answering most questions with assurances about the congressman’s patriotism and conceding that a promised analysis of race in the military had stalled in the General Accounting Office.
The proposed legislation is partly why, despite the sketchiness and inconclusive nature of facts surrounding SSS plans, the notion that the draft is returning has managed to gain widespread traction. But fears of the draft are also fueled by a general perception that this administration is gung-ho about pursuing their war policies, arrogant enough to do it in a wildly unpopular way–and desperately overstretched abroad.
BUSH & CO. DODGE THE DRAFT
A common criticism of the war in Iraq is that the Department of Defense, ignoring calls from the military establishment, has too few troops on the ground in Iraq to achieve the Bush administration’s stated goals of reconstruction and security. “Basic math,� writes Dave Lindorff in the online magazine Salon, will force the Pentagon to put pressure on Congress to activate the draft—it’s a simple matter of needing ‘more muscle’ to achieve the military’s goals in Iraq.�
While more American troops are likely to produce, not reduce violence and postpone Iraqi independence rather than facilitating it, the US is having trouble maintaining a state of occupation. On the ground, soldiers find themselves exposed and without backup. Attacks on US installations and Iraqi officials continue to escalate.
The US has found itself without substantial troop support from the international community. While some countries had agreed to send troops to Iraq to assist the US invasion and occupation, many are having second thoughts. The last Spanish soldiers left Iraq on May 21. Norway, Kazakhstan, South Korea, Bulgaria, Poland, Honduras, the Dominican Republic and Japan all announced various kinds of reductions in their military commitment in recent months.
“The government is in a bit of a box,� military analyst Ned Lebow told Salon, and “that leaves the draft� as a solution to a manpower shortage. It’s true that traditional sources are drying up. In April, May and June of 2004, as the death toll in Iraq continues to rise, several Army bases are reporting a sharp drop in post-enlistment rates: soldiers are not signing up again after completing their tour of duty. Recruiters are feeling the pinch, having re-enlisted only 57 percent of their quota at Fort Carson in Colorado Springs and similar numbers elsewhere.
Will the crisis in Iraq mean that Congress will be forced to either call for universal national service, as in Rangel’s bill, or restart a draft lottery using SSS registration lists? Not necessarily. The Pentagon has developed a range of strategies to supplement the 138,000 troops currently in Iraq.
On May 18, the Washington Post reported on US plans to move 3,600 troops from South Korea to Iraq. And on June 2, the Army announced that tens of thousands of soldiers would be staying in Iraq past their discharge dates. This is yet another time this year that the military has used the ‘stop-loss’ policy Bush authorized after 9/11. Under this policy, soldiers are forced to extend their active duty beyond their original time commitment.
In a way, the stop-loss policy is a draft. As Andrew Exum, a former Army captain, wrote in the New York Times, soldiers ordered to stay on “will no longer be voluntarily serving their country.�
The US is also drawing on new, non-traditional sources to try to plug the Iraq-shaped hole in its foreign policy needs. In the first Gulf War, not a single National Guard member was deployed to the Middle East. In the current war, 30% of the troops are from the National Guard. Another new development is the activation of the Individual Ready Reserve – veterans or National Guardsmen who have already served their terms; college students on scholarship. These people are not currently in the military, and Exum points out that they are supposed to be called up only in the case of a “catastrophic national emergency.�
Of course, the military could go to increased privatization. Much of the military support work that used to be ‘in-house’ now goes to private corporations. Private security guards, not military police, stand at the gates to Fort Bragg. Goodwill Industries washes the dirty uniforms and towels at Great Lakes Naval Base.
The use of mercenaries in Iraq began attracting public attention when employees of the firm CACI International were implicated in the torture at Abu Ghraib prison. But it is a major feature of this war, and a relatively new development in US strategy: Ten times the number of private companies are operating in Iraq now as there were in the first Gulf War.
THE POVERTY DRAFT: A BLACK HOLE
Besides these relatively new or stepped-up methods, recruitment remains a powerful tool.
The Bush administration diverts funds from public education while pouring billions into obsolete and unnecessary military hardware. This grotesque inversion of priorities at the White House exacerbates the vicious cycle known as the poverty draft: the economic and social pressures that position the military as one of the few options for poor and working class youth. The poverty draft, as it works right now, might still be effective enough to snare hundreds of thousands of young men into military service.
The federal government works hard to make sure that military recruiters have easy access to high schools and colleges. For example, Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act, which purports to benefit education, bases students’ futures on bogus standardized testing while failing to provide for basic needs. It is this very same No Child Left Behind Act that requires public schools to provide private information about their students to the military for recruitment purposes.
According to the Committee Opposed to Militarism and the Draft, the Department of Defense is “deepening its involvement� in recruitment in high schools and colleges. Pentagon presence in young people’s lives can take many forms.
Asif Ullah of Revolution Out Of Truth and Struggle (ROOTS), a counter-recruitment program of the War Resisters League, cites the ‘Army of One’ campaign – a media blitz that cost the government 150 million dollars in 2001 alone. He also indicts the relationship between the Pentagon and Hollywood for creating images that “glorify war and the military,� and emphasizes that the advertising and messaging is carefully crafted according to studies of what young people want out of life. The goal is to send the message that through military service, out-of-reach dreams can come true.
But a high school or college student has to dodge more than ad campaigns from the military. JROTC (Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps), a military training program in high schools run directly by the US Army, zeros in on public schools in poor communities. If a school decides to accept the ROTC presence, it is responsible for contributing a good chunk or sometimes all of the funding for the program.
Recruiters, charged with meeting quotas, hound their young targets. High school students receive telephone calls from “their� recruiter, who will offer to drive them to school or take them out to pizza for a chance to “talk� about the military option. The magazine Mother Jones quotes Major Johannes Paraan, head US Army recruiter for Vermont and northeastern New York, as saying “The only thing that will get us to stop contacting the family is if they call their congressman. Or maybe if the kid died, we’ll take them off our list.� Recruiters are persistent, partly because they are offered incentives, like use of the fancier military vehicles at the base, to meet monthly quotas.
And throughout the US military’s history, reports, sometimes resulting in lawsuits, have circulated that recruiters routinely lie or withhold information about the kinds of benefits and educational aid available, and whether the recruit will have to face combat. Undoubtedly this practice continues: A recent New York Times profile of young people about to join the military quotes a father saying of his daughter, “We don’t think she is going to be in a battle zone. Sergeant Purdie has kind of made us feel comfortable.�
Recruiters are placed wherever youth get together – in schools, but also at parades, picnics, and concerts. The Village Voice reports that the Army Strategic Outreach for the US Army Accessions Command is kicking off its plans for summer 2004, which include a nationwide not-so-covert operation to target Black and Latino youth. Military personnel will roll into urban Black and Latino communities armed with Hummers and hip hop, possibly sponsored (as in the recent “Campus Combat� recruitment events at colleges) by The Source magazine. The Bud Billiken Day Parade, a Chicago African American pride celebration, and the Puerto Rican Day Parade in New York City are major stops on the tour.
This combination of aggressive recruitment practices, manipulation of young people’s dreams of the future, and clever advertising makes for a formidable military arsenal. The Village Voice reports that recruitment quotas have been met ahead of time for the past four years. And twenty-one percent of military personnel are black, compared with 12 percent of the general population.
But the most persuasive element in the recruiter’s bag of tricks remains the desperate prospects facing youth after high school: unemployment and disappointment. Ullah calls these combined pressures a source of ‘negativity.’ He says, “Wanting to leave the neighborhood where you grew up is a realistic thing for a lot of people. But let’s look at why you want to leave your neighborhood – a lot of that is negativity. There’s no money or job prospects, and the military offers money for college and the possibility of going to school.� Ullah comments that these economic and social pressures to join the military are greatest in communities of color.
In the 1960s and 70s, when men could get out of serving in Vietnam if they were enrolled in college, the draft amounted to a racist system of military service. In a country where whites and the rich are more likely to be in higher education, it’s easy to see where the inequality comes in. Rosalio Muñoz, who served as co-chairman of the Chicano Moratorium in the seventies and was himself a draft resistor, remembers that youth of color were judged “ineligible for higher education, and thus ineligible for the draft deferments available to other college age youth.� Blacks and Latinos went to kill and die in Southeast Asia. Rich kids (like George W. Bush) stayed in college or took safe stints in the National Guard. Tod Ensign tells the story of a psychiatrist at Princeton University who wrote over 3,000 letters for clients who wanted to be judged unfit to serve. Such a letter, of course, cost a lot of money.
During the Vietnam War, the children of the wealthy and well-connected found a million-and-one ways to stay away from the fighting. Today’s poverty draft replicates this cruel inequality: Blacks and Latinos are currently serving in Iraq at higher rates than whites, although death rates are about proportional to the US population.
WHAT’RE WE FIGHTING FOR?
Rosalio Muñoz told Dynamic that in his opinion, “you have to fight the draft and the war together.� With Rangel, Hollings, and assorted Republicans invoking sacrifice and patriotism, counter-recruitment activists and peace groups point to the geopolitical context in which politicians would be asking young people to die for their country. With troops in 156 countries and a newly aggressive pre-emptive war policy, ‘defense of country’ hardly describes the function of today’s US military.
A growing resistance movement along these lines already exists. GIs and military families who have resisted being used in Bush’s war are outraged at troop deployment practices and at problems like the lack of protective supplies for soldiers. But ultimately their critique, like Muñoz’s, comes down to bad foreign policy – they don’t believe that the US military should be in Iraq in the first place. The anti-war group Military Families Speak Out has accused Bush of wasting the lives of their sons, daughters, brothers, sisters, and cousins stationed in Iraq. As an activist with Veterans for Peace recently explained, “We don’t care if there’s a draft – we’re against the war itself!�
Significantly, servicemembers who feel the brunt of Bush’s policies on the frontlines are increasingly looking for ways to get out of this war. The Center for Conscience and War (part of the GI Rights Hotline) reports that since the beginning of operations in Iraq, the volume of calls from people in the military, particularly regarding conscientious objector status, has significantly increased in the last year. And the Center estimates that hundreds of people go AWOL – absent without leave – every week. The People’s Weekly World reports that nationally, the GI Rights hotline has been getting an average of 3,000 calls a month so far this year, up from a 2,400 monthly average last year.
Sgt. Camilo Mejia, in an interview with Dynamic (see page 22), says that his conscientious objector application was rejected because he was “too political�– because he “looked at the reasons the government gave for going to war.� Mejia explains that he believes the government went to war for ‘oil and geopolitical power.� Other National Guardsmen and soldiers, like Brandon Hughey, Jeremy Hinzman, and Stephen Funk, have also refused to be used to further Bush’s war-on-the-world policy.
Counter-recruitment activism is also on the rise. Local parents and students groups around the country have fought the various forms of military presence in their communities. In 2001, the Brooklyn community group Make the Road by Walking forced military recruiters out of Bushwick High School. Recently, United for Peace and Justice, the national anti-war coalition, has taken up a counter-recruitment campaign.
THOSE PRETTY THINGS THEY SAY
Will there be a draft in the near future? Probably not. But the fears currently being expressed point to the ever-present danger of a draft so long as Selective Service continues to function, so long as eligibility for federal educational aid depends on registration with Selective Service, and as long as the US continues throwing its weight around the map.
In a way, the danger of a draft has become a symbol for the danger the Bush administration poses to youth. Whether or not a re-elected Bush would turn to this particular ‘solution’ to the crisis it created in Iraq, the specter of even more young men and women being called up to fight for Halliburton brings home the most pressing arguments for ending the brutal occupation and defeating Bush. It forces a debate on the merits of the war: Bush’s deceptive platitudes about ‘fighting terror’ come short when it comes to actually dying for what Camilo Mejia calls ‘those pretty things they say.’
The current war on Iraq has escalated the military’s assault on youth and students. The poverty draft, stop-loss orders, and underhanded recruiting – all these could intensify. The reality since the Vietnam draft time has not changed that much: Young people’s lives – especially young Black and Latino lives – are expendable, while corporations and politicians reap the profits of war.
Keren Wheeler is Dynamic’s distribution manager. She lives in Brooklyn, New York. Keren says: subscribe to Dynamic while it’s still cheap!
ROOTS:
www.warresisters.org/Roots/newsite5.html
Committee on Militarism and the Draft:
www.comd.org
Committee for Conscience and War:
www.nisbco.org
United for Peace and Justice:
www.unitedforpeace.org
National Youth and Student Peace Coalition:
www.nyspc.net
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