Not by draft alone, but by deed
Mon Nov 20, 2006 at 08:59:49 PM PDT
My spouse doesn't have a dKos account. He did once, but sometime back before the switch to Scoop, he pissed off Kos enough with his anti-Dean rants (for Pres that is, we love him as DNC Chair) that Kos banned him. He was okay with that, as he wasn't much of a blogger anyway.
But then he started for fill in for me at Wampum when I ran for the Maine Leg in 2004, and the blogging bug bit pretty bad. He's been writing over there ever since, often on military matters (as a Vietnam-era Navy vet, having grown up at the Naval Post Graduate School (where his mom taught until retiring recently.)) A few hours ago, he wrote something I thought deserved a much greater audience than our pre-Koufax-period pulls, so am using my daily diary to do just that. It's rather short, but sweet. His words, below the jump.
A year or so ago when I first heard Rep. Charles Rangel think out loud about reinstating the draft, I was opposed. Today I think its simply not enough. There are nearly a thousand flag rank officers in the armed forces. Few have gone on record as opposed to either overtly illegal orders, or overtly unsound policy, or overt looting. There are three service academies, between a quarter and a half of the enrollments are Congressional appointments who's primary qualification is membership in a cult, and which waste a quarter of all student classroom time on quasi-criminal hazing and criminal sexual abuse. There are 14 ballistic missile submarines, and several wings of B-52s, B-1s, and B-2s, and strategic missile forces consuming budget and not decrementing the former Soviet throw-weight, and "missile defense" is both corporate welfare and abandonment of the divisions of troops stationed in Korea.
Yes. Institute the Draft, but not simply to change the labor rules for the intake of the enlisted, but as part of a program to put an end to the Professional Military as an American institution. Close the service academies for a year, then re-open them, with entry by competitive examination from all the ROTC programs at the land-grant colleges. There is no reason why the best midshipmen at Berkeley can't transfer to Annapolis should they want to attend the service academy, they are schools for future officers, and nothing more than that. We need gays and lesbians in uniform, and we need women soldiers in combat arms. And we need early retirement for senior officers who are gung ho for every bad idea that happens to float their particular boat.
If we're going to fix it, let's fix it.
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