Drafty
By Mitch Berg
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
There has been recent discussion about requiring women to register for the draft. Failure to register carries threat of prosecution, but nobody has been prosecuted in decades. Despite lack of enforcement, compliance is 99% in Idaho but only 34% in Washington, DC. We must address the factors causing voluntary non-compliance. If threat of prosecution carries no weight, how can we give young people a meaningful incentive to obey the law?
Joe Doakes
It’s time to end selective service registration. It will never be used, the military doesn’t want it (ever), and it’s major problem isn’t that we don’t draft women; the problem is that the draft puts the onus of defending the nation (especially in the enlisted ranks) entirely on those who don’t have the means to avoid the lottery.
“Selective” service is an abomination to a free society.
February 24th, 2016 at 7:40 am
It’s a jobs program for some Democrats. Can’t lose those voters so it’ll never go away.
February 24th, 2016 at 7:40 am
Have to agree, Mitch.
I went into the Air Force right as the draft lottery system ended in early 1972. My number was not picked, but, to the mystery of my friends and relatives, I enlisted.
Like me, many of my brothers in arms that came in before me, also enlisted. Some had their lottery number drawn, so they enlisted to avoid serving in the Army and possibly going to combat areas. Others were like me; they wanted to continue their education, but either didn’t know what career path to choose and/or didn’t have the money. As a gear head, I was happy to get aircraft maintenance as a career field and fully intended to obtain my airframe and power plant license, then go to work for either Northwest or North Central when I got out. Changed my mind after one too many nights on the flight line in Grand Forks when it was 30 below.
I saw both ends of the spectrum and everything in between related to enthusiasm for serving. Some were continual and deliberate screw ups, self id’d drug users or other medical issues, as well as homosexual in order to get out on medical or even dishonorable discharges.
Thankfully, the majority did their best, knowing that they had an end point.
February 24th, 2016 at 8:19 am
I am not sure how selective service works, but mandatory 2 year service for everyone – no deferment, no escape clauses for club feet or bad eyesight, – would do wonders for the youts of this country.
February 24th, 2016 at 9:15 am
JPA, I’m not sure. They’ve had it in most of the nations of Europe for a long time, and it doesn’t seem to have given them any more sense than we’ve got here. Rather they’ve been voting in socialists since the fifties and suffering the consequences.
If we were to have that here, the big problems–beyond the 13th Amendment–would be to avoid it being a kind of propaganda tool for the government like the Civilian Conservation Corps. Given history, I’m extremely skeptical about the possibility of that.
I am going to tell my kids, who are rapidly getting to selective service registration age, to register as conscientious objectors. I cannot endorse either my sons or my daughters going to the military with the idiots running the show these days.
February 24th, 2016 at 9:39 am
I am not sure how selective service works, but mandatory 2 year service for everyone – no deferment, no escape clauses for club feet or bad eyesight, – would do wonders for the youts of this country.
Nope. I’m not willing to have my kids give 2 years of their lives to the whims of Hillary Clinton, or Bernie Sanders, or Donald Trump. Screw that. Mitch is right. Abolish Selective Service and kill it with fire.
February 24th, 2016 at 10:05 am
Mr. D,
The theory, of course, is that a military where everyone’s kids – yours, mine, Hillary’s, The Donald’s – were serving in a tank unit or a combat engineer battalion, would be a lot more conservatively employed than one staffed by kids from Mississippi and Texas and Utah whose parents nobody’s every heard of. You don’t see the Swiss or Finnish or Israeli militaries galavanting around the world on whim.
But we’re not Israel. And by way of the original comment? The military is for breaking things and killing people. You want to do wonders for the yoots, send them to Outward Bound.
It is time to abolish selective service.
February 24th, 2016 at 10:18 am
I am not sure how selective service works.
In the US, from 1945 to 1973, it worked sorta like this.
All males registered at age 18. They got a lottery number. If their lottery number came up, they were inducted into the Army.
There were ways out of that.
So the deferment system favored the prosperous, the powerful, and the lucky.
February 24th, 2016 at 10:46 am
I’m not so sure, Mitch. I think I’d like our yoots to learn to break things and kill people so that there was a little more respect for the violence that those things do and the consequences of doing them. That’s something far too few people understand. It’s not a video game when you you see someone near you injured for being stupid with a weapon, or what a real bomb/shell can do to a target. It’s very different to see such things first hand than to see them on film or glamorized in a game where a mistake just means you head back to the respawn point.
In fact, I’d rather that mandatory 2 year service (if we have it) be required to be military service. Maybe not combat, but with military exposure. Your conscientious objector can be a medic, but they’ve got to see what it means to be a serviceman and understand what they’re asking someone to endure when they’re told to do violence in the name of the country.
February 24th, 2016 at 10:50 am
Yes, I knew about the lottery, but how does selective service work now? If there is no lottery and draft, what use is registering for it? It is not like conscribing, right?
I also understand deferment. In an ideal world, or at least BO, I still contend mandatory service without any favoritism is not a bad thing, but I do get Mr. D’s point. However, such nihilism means we are giving up on the Republic as it is – thank you BO for accomplishing in 7 years what Soviets failed to do in a generation. Defense of Second Amendment is becoming much more important if individuals are to protect their rights against the encroaching tyranny of the Big Government.
February 24th, 2016 at 11:27 am
At one time I researched WW2 draft evaders (I hate this whole ‘greatest generation’ thing. One of my grandfathers spent WW2 in Hawaii, teaching marksmanship and boxing to new recruits. He never saw the enemy and was never under fire).
Anyhow, more people were drafted during WW2 than enlisted. The margin was huge, like 3:1.
Getting an exemption was a little tricky, but if you really, really didn’t want to go, and the military had no special reason for wanting you, you got an exemption. One out of three exemption requests was granted during WW2.
The idea that there were no exceptions is false, at least officially. Peer and social pressure was immense.
I have another grandfather who was given a medical exemption from the service. His disability wasn’t obvious (‘bone spurs’, maybe:) ) He was a milkman. He got so much crap from the war widows who were his customers that he finally gave up and joined the marines — his first and only combat experience was the invasion of Guadalcanal.
February 24th, 2016 at 12:10 pm
One qualification of what I said; if we had county/city militia training, I could go for that. Get together, do some PT, hit the range, go out for dinner afterwards. But the draft has no place in a free society.
February 24th, 2016 at 12:17 pm
The draft in WWII was a pretty universal thing, but it operated in a very different social environment than we have today.
During WWII my grandfather got an (unasked for) exemption for most of the war for 3 reasons: he was close to the age limit of the draft spectrum, was a sole-employee business that supported his many young kids, and he had a physical abnormality that made the Army not want him (4F early in the war; and I understand why his abnormality put him far down the list of desirables despite not being terribly visible in general settings, but it was ironic since he was a Minnesota state rifle and pistol champion despite that). His number got pulled, though, as they got scraped towards the bottom of the barrel gearing up to invade Japan and he was heading towards basic on VJ day. So I will always be grateful to Truman for his decision to drop The Bomb.
The social norm at the time was such that asking for an exemption was frowned upon unless you had a really, really good reason. And that was an era when social ostracization was a real thing, with real consequences to your career and/or business if you shirked your duty. As BZ noted above, there were consequences for even appearing to do so.
The other grandfather was far too old to be subject to the draft and he was ancient by the time I got to know him. Both sides of the family view it as usual to get into the 90s.
February 24th, 2016 at 12:24 pm
[…]but how does selective service work now?
Selective Service now is just a database of young men just-in-case we need them. It’s also filter that serves to keep idiots out of police forces and many federal jobs (if you’re not registered with SS you can’t be hired in many/most cases).
February 24th, 2016 at 12:29 pm
Nerd….interesting what you say…..staffing up for the invasion of Japan. That may be the story behind a great uncle of mine. If I understand the story correctly, he was considered too old and had too many kids for the draft for most of WW2. But he was drafted anyway late in the war. I imagine by then there weren’t too many people left to draft other than those just turning 18.
February 24th, 2016 at 1:02 pm
Chuck: apparently what happened was Okinawa, and that changed the standards. Pre-Okinawa they’d been planning on only somewhat elevated levels of occupation soldiers for Japan over Germany. Germany they didn’t think they’d need too many because Germans tend to be pretty law-abiding.
Okinawa, though, changed the estimates and the number of occupation troops needed skyrocketed and even folks down in the F range were taken. And they were probably right, if you consider the revolt against the surrender even after Nagasaki. As First-Ringer points out elsewhere on this site, the rebels didn’t expect to come close to winning, they just wanted to make sure a few million more civilians died to protect Japan’s honor before finally surrendering. Hirohito was a war criminal, but he saved hundreds of thousands of Americans and millions of Japanese by surrendering personally. (And if you ever wonder why they didn’t put Hirohito on trial, consider how foreign the idea of the surrender of a God to barbarians is and what the reaction in Japan would have been to barbarians putting God on trial. The decision to neuter Hirohito and leave him as a figurehead makes sense when you consider the lessons of Okinawa.)
My grandfather was told that because of his disability and age he’d never be front line material, but he’d be serving in the occupation troops. Not that they viewed occupation troops as having easy jobs, just easier than the main combat troops.
February 24th, 2016 at 1:57 pm
I come from a long line of sketchy military types. One ancestor served as a substitute in the Union army in 1865. He was paid $300 to take the place of a rich draftee. He began his service in late April, 1865, after Lee surrendered. He was a ‘soldier’ for less than two months before he was discharged.
Another relative got a purple heart in WW2. He wasn’t shot by the enemy, he and a pal were drunk and fooling around with a gun and his pal accidentally shot him.
February 24th, 2016 at 3:23 pm
Bento, fun to mention that. I come from a long line of military heroes. One of my ancestors was so brave in the Revolution, he got a saber wound in the tuckus. Family still has the chair–very high for the time–that he used. Another group of them chased the Mormons from Nauvoo, and another one was 4F’d for being overweight in WWII. Still another decided to go into airframe maintenance after being told he wasn’t going to language school for Russian or German, but rather Hanoi dialect of Vietnamese. I wear all of the Medals of Honor and Bronze Stars they earned every day.
February 24th, 2016 at 3:51 pm
Bikebubba, my grandfather who taught marksmanship and boxing on Oahu during WW2 did eventually see action — sort of. After WW2 he got out, went to work for the railroad, got laid off and had to re-up in ’48 to pay the bills. They sent him to Korea in ’51 to fight — his marksmanship and boxing skills had deteriorated since ’41.
But by then he was a whiz at taking guns apart and fixing them, so they made him a ‘fighting gunsmith.’ As he told the story, he and his CO were taking a load of repaired officer’s sidearms out in the field, in Korea, to test fire them, and as they were driving around they flushed a pheasant. Grandad had a loaded pistol, so he shot it, one handed, with a strange gun, from the seat of a jeep rolling down a dirt road. Took its head off.
It was pure luck, but his CO was so impressed that he decided granddad was to good a shot to risk at the front line, so he sent him back to the states to teach marksmanship again.