Several commentors have posted this
website for the Selective Service Administration. They are recruiting volunteers to fill the vacancies on local draft boards.
In Salon yesterday:
Oiling up the draft machine?
The Pentagon is quietly moving to fill draft board vacancies nationwide. While officials say there's no cause to worry, some experts aren't so sure.
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By Dave Lindorff
Nov. 3, 2003 | The community draft boards that became notorious for sending reluctant young men off to Vietnam have languished since the early 1970s, their membership ebbing and their purpose all but lost when the draft was ended. But a few weeks ago, on an obscure federal Web site devoted to the war on terrorism, the Bush administration quietly began a public campaign to bring the draft boards back to life.
"Serve Your Community and the Nation," the announcement urges. "If a military draft becomes necessary, approximately 2,000 Local and Appeal Boards throughout America would decide which young men ... receive deferments, postponements or exemptions from military service."
Local draft board volunteers, meanwhile, report that at training sessions last summer, they were unexpectedly asked to recommend people to fill some of the estimated 16 percent of board seats that are vacant nationwide.
Especially for those who were of age to fight in the Vietnam War, it is an ominous flashback of a message. Divisive military actions are ongoing in Iraq and Afghanistan. News accounts daily detail how the U.S. is stretched too thin there to be effective. And tensions are high with Syria and Iran and on the Korean Peninsula, with some in or close to the Bush White House suggesting that military action may someday be necessary in those spots, too.
Not since the early days of the Reagan administration in 1981 has the Defense Department made a push to fill all 10,350 draft board positions and 11,070 appeals board slots. Recognizing that even the mention of a draft in the months before an election might be politically explosive, the Pentagon last week was adamant that the drive to staff up the draft boards is not a portent of things to come. There is "no contingency plan" to ask Congress to reinstate the draft, John Winkler, the Pentagon's deputy assistant secretary for reserve affairs, told Salon last week.
Increasingly, however, military experts and even some influential members of Congress are suggesting that if Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's prediction of a "long, hard slog" in Iraq and Afghanistan proves accurate, the U.S. may have no choice but to consider a draft to fully staff the nation's military in a time of global instability.
"The experts are all saying we're going to have to beef up our presence in Iraq," says U.S. Rep. Charles Rangel, the New York Democrat. "We've failed to convince our allies to send troops, we've extended deployments so morale is sinking, and the president is saying we can't cut and run. So what's left? The draft is a very sensitive subject, but at some point, we're going to need more troops, and at that point the only way to get them will be a return to the draft."
Rangel and his colleauge Charles Schumer in the Senate have both introduced bills in their respective chambers to reinstate the draft. They are languishing at the moment, of course.
Those of you too young to remember the draft have no idea what kind of uproar it will cause if the draft is reinstated.
Rangel and Schumer have made their arguments for the draft based on principal: the Armed Services enlisted ranks are made up overwhelmingly of lower to lower middle class young people who need the job, are looking for help for college, or who see no other economic alternative. Rangel and Schumer argue that the burden of the defense of our country ought to be more fairly spread out across all economic lines. It's a decent argument, but both of them know that they would be facing political suicide if they pushed the issue.
If the draft were reinstated tomorrow, it would still take a year and a half to have a cohort ready for basic training.
Here is the rub: the Army is broken and will be for a number of years.
If we needed to move a large force into, say, the Korean peninsula, we can't. The numbers aren't there. The Reservists and stop-loss soldiers on the ground in Iraq will be getting out of the service as soon as they can after their deployments. Undeployed Guard and Reserves are unlikely to re-up when their current contracts come up. The Army is going to have a massive manpower crisis by next spring. Although they've been hitting their enlistment targets, the way the Iraq war is playing out demonstrates that our active duty Army force is too small and highly dependent on Guard and Reserve specialties to maintain a large deployment like Iraq. Secratery of State Rumsfeld ordered a complete force structure review when he entered office and, as usual, his assessment and that of his top brass don't agree.
The fact of the matter is that in order to assure that we still have a functional ground Army when the Iraq mess is over we'd need to institute the draft now. But Bush can't do that before the election. The move to fill the local Draft Board vacancies (it looks like the website went up in September) now is laying the ground work for what Bush will have to do immediately after the election in 2004, and even then it will mean that the Army won't be fully deployable for several years.
The president has made a real mess for himself. And for whoever wins next year, because if our guy wins, it means that he'll have to reinstitute the draft almost as soon as he's inaugurated, guaranteeing that he'll be a one term president.
A better way to do this would be to institute a term of national service for everyone, which is done in many other industrialized countries. But we know what Bush did to Americorps, don't we?