Jewish
Frontier

The U.S Army, is faced with a serious exodus of lieutenants and captains, the junior officers without whom it cannot function. In recent years, its enlistment and reenlistment rates have been so low that the Pentagon has become overly dependent on reserve and national guard units for overseas deployments. Yet, for the last three years, all the armed services except the Marine Corps have fallen short of their Reserves and National Guard recruitment goals.

All this while the U.S. assumes ever more global military commitments, commitments which, if these retention trends continue, the U.S. will not be able to honor.

Present law requires all males in the U.S. to register with the Selective Service Administration within 30 days of their 18th birthday. But nearly 20 percent of them do not, and, in any case, no one has been drafted into the armed forces for decades.

So, we Americans must revisit military conscription and debate again the wisdom and the morality of placing the responsibility for defending-and sometimes having to die for this country-only on volunteers. When we revisit military conscription, we ought to study the Israeli experience, which is instructive.

Except for small minorities on the secular left and the religious right. Israelis feel that the responsibility of defending and dying for one's country should never be left entirely to volunteers. Instead, they believe that national defense is a duty that must be spread as evenly as possible. It should not be determined by one's social and economic circumstances or by the unemployment rate, the wage rate, or any other aspect of the nation's economy. In short, Israelis adhere, in the words of Mordechai Bar-On, a former Chief Education Officer of the Israel Army, to "the sacred principle of the universal draft."

In our case, the history and philosophy are different. The vietnam War and its aftermath led Americans to an opposite conclusion: A universal draft is not sacred. And democracy demands, or so we seem to believe, an all-volunteer military force, even if the enlisted segments of that force are composed largely of citizens in the lower socioeconomic strata of American society.

I believe that America ought to refashion the draft along the following lines:

• In any given year, even if America needs only a few thousand soldiers, all able-bodied and able-minded 18-year-old men and women should have their names placed in a geographically neutral lottery and be drafted into the armed services in accordance with the military needs for that year.
• Then, the names of all the 18-year-olds who were missed by that lottery should be placed into a lottery for nonmilitary service in city or suburban slums, rural areas, Native American reservations, and the like. For these are the very places that suffer most when the economy is robust, when salaries are high, and when the unemployment rate is low.
• If the lottery happens to select a draftee for service in a nonmilitary program — say, in health care — requiring more prior education and training than the draftee possessed, he or she could opt for getting that additional education and training in the civilian world. But then, the draftee would have to agree to enter that nonmilitary program immediately after completing the civilian studies. There would be no exemptions, there would be no delays. There would be only deferments of limited duration.
• Those 18-year-olds who are unable to meet the requirements of the lottery-chosen nonmilitary programs — as well as those citizens who are too young or too old to serve in them — would by definition be recipients rather than givers of universal national service.

Now, it is always possible that in any given year the number of young people eligible for both the military and nonmilitary lotteries may exceed the need for their services. But if and when that happens — whenever any of our young people miss involuntary service by the luck of the draw — they will have done so more fairly and honorably than was true during the days of the Vietnam War.

The plan I am suggesting would harness the energy and the idealism of the nation's youth to the unmet nonmilitary needs of the nation. It would also tap more of the resources of the nation's women, heeding their demands for more sexual equality by making their obligations more consonant with their rights.

It would give the federal government much more flexibility in dealing with conscientious objection to wars in general and with selective conscientious objection to a specific war in particular. And it would be fairer to African Americans and other non-whites, who might stop viewing military service as just another kind of job choice, governed by economic incentives and disincentives.

Like all proposals, this one is based on assumptions: The first assumption is that it is proper for America to ask its youth for a period of service. And the second assumption is that it was right for President John F. Kennedy to declare, in the 1961 Inaugural Address, "And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you-ask what you can do for your country."

Involuntary service will be accepted by the nation's youth, but only if they perceive it as service that is objectively arrived at and equally applied, and only if it balances military against nonmilitary alternatives. Such service will appeal to all of our citizens, save those who selfishly believe that they owe nothing to the nation except what they alone choose to give it.