Cross posted at the front page of My Left Wing.
Response to my piece from last Friday on Bob Herbert’s campaign to make two years of national service mandatory for all U.S. citizens suggests that the idea is growing in popularity. I am convinced that a national service draft would be a profound disaster, and believe it’s vital to point out the dire consequences that a universal conscription would produce.
Spiting Your Face
I want to believe that Bob Herbert’s heart is in the right place, but on this issue, his head’s in a place it wasn’t designed to fit into. Here are some snippets from remarks he made in September 2005 at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum.
I think that all Americans should do two years of national service. It does not have to be in the military. I’d love to see people out there in the community. You could work with the homeless, you could work with the poverty-stricken, you could do literacy work…
… So, that’s the kind of national service that I’m thinking of. It would include the military as well because, obviously, you have to defend the country. But if you’re going to fight wars, then you need to draw your warriors from a broader slice of the population than we’re doing now…
…One of the reasons we are not more outraged about what’s going on in Iraq is that there are not that many Americans who feel that they have a personal stake in what’s going on in Iraq.
Let’s be realistic. National service may “not have to be in the military,” but it will be if Uncle Sam decides that’s what he wants the national service to be. If everybody’s eligible for a national service draft, everybody’s eligible for military service. That means Uncle Sam can turn into Big Brother whenever he wants to, and build a military as big as he wants for as long as he wants to fight whatever perpetual wars he feels like fighting.
Even folks who would serve in non-military capacities would in essence be subject to something akin to the Uniform Code of Military Justice, under which Big Brother could ban all opposition to his wars and all other forms of dissent. Under a national service regime, virtually every citizen could be called to some sort of semi-active duty status, and every citizen’s constitutional rights could be permanently stripped.
You think that couldn’t happen? Take a look at what’s happening right now. Thanks to the passage of the Military Commissions Act of 2006, your President and your Secretary of Defense can declare you an “enemy combatant” and “disappear” you Joseph Heller style without so much as a by-your-leave from anybody.
A national service draft won’t draw our warriors “from a broader slice of the population.” It’s true that most of today’s rifle soldiers come from underprivileged and working class backgrounds, but guess what–that’s where most of the rifle soldiers came from during Vietnam when we had a draft. Don’t kid yourself into thinking we can have a “fair” draft by making it universal. Private Juarez will still be fighting door to door in some foreign hellhole while Second Lieutenant Bush passes out cocktails and peanuts on Air Force One.
If national service draftees work with the homeless, the poverty stricken, the illiterate and so forth, that will lead to all social, charitable and education organizations coming under direct control of the federal government. Do we not already have enough bloated federal bureaucracies? And do we not already have too much federal influence on what should be state controlled programs?
There Ought to be a Law
A national draft that extends beyond the scope of military service is arguably unconstitutional on two counts.
First, it doesn’t appear to be allowed by Article I. Section 8 of that Article authorizes Congress to “raise and support armies” and “provide and maintain a navy.” This, along with the legislature’s power to “declare war” supports the constitutional legality of a military draft, but it’s hard to find anything in the Constitution that supports the position that Congress can conscript citizens to work for the Red Cross or AmericaCorps.
More importantly, though, a universal conscription would make federal service a de facto condition of citizenship, and would clearly violate the Fourteenth Amendment’s definition of a U.S. citizen as “All persons born or naturalized in the United States.”
It follows that in order to establish a national service draft, we’d need to a) ignore the Constitution or b) write an amendment to the Constitution that expands the powers of Congress and redefines citizenship and the privileges and immunities that come with it under the Bill of Rights and elsewhere.
Either way, we’d be throwing the Constitution out with the junk mail, and pounding the final nail into the coffin of our cherished republic.
Kerosene on the Fire
I’m not sure where Herbert gets the idea that there’s not enough “outrage” over what’s going on in Iraq. Polls like the one taken by CNN in September 2006 indicate that opposition to the Iraq war has reached an “all time high,” and even Fox News concedes that the “2006 Election Is All About Iraq.”
If there’s not enough outrage over Iraq to suit Herbert, it’s not because most Americans aren’t “sharing the sacrifice.” It’s because the mainstream media has allowed the Big Brother Broadcast (Fox News, AM talk radio, right wing publications like The Weekly Standard, etc.) to bully them into being “fair and balanced” on the subject. Young Mister Bush is fond of blaming the unpopularity of his Iraq misadventure on the “images of chaos and carnage” shown on the news networks. But think about it: when’s the last time you actually saw a scene of chaos and carnage in Iraq on CNN, MSNBC, or any of the regular network’s nightly news programs?
If Herbert honestly thinks a universal national service draft will help end the war in Iraq, he’s as delusional as the neo-contrivers who started it. The populace can’t control the actions of the state by becoming vassal to it.
Adopting Herbert’s universal national service program wouldn’t just make the United States look like Stalin’s Soviet Union. It would make Stalin’s Soviet Union look like Shangri-La.
And whether he knows it or not, by advocating a universal draft, Herbert is playing right in to the neoconservative agenda of selling the American public on the Orwellian notions that “war is peace,” “freedom is slavery” and “ignorance is strength.”
Wake up and smell the totalitarianism, Bob.
#
Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes from Virginia Beach, Virginia. Read his commentaries at ePluribus Media and Pen and Sword.
You make an interesting constitutional argument, but I am not a lawyer and can’t really address it.
My father was drafted into the army, sent to Germany for two years, and then entered his professional life. I don’t see anything necessarily wrong with that, other than the inconvenience to him personally. Would have rather built homes for the homeless? Probably. I don’t think my father was really well suited to be a soldier, but he was well suited to serve his country in other ways. And I don’t see why that would have been a bad alternative for him. His service pre-dated the Peace Corp or AmeriCorp. But I am sure he would have enjoyed that kind of service more than he did working for some officer in Stuttgart.
You’re a veteran, so I will defer to you somewhat, but don’t you think the draft was instrumental in causing the college protests against the Vietnam War and the general counterculture wave of young people? Had Vietnam been fought with an all volunteer army would we have seen all that dissent? Would we have seen it as quickly? I don’t think so. That’s Herbert’s logic.
As for the government using the program to raise a massive army, they can do that at anytime anyway. All they have to do is reinstate the draft. Admittedly, that would require some transformative event that made the citizenry approve of such a measure.
We all know, just from gym class, that there are many, many people that are not suited to be soldiers. Why should they be exempt from service, though?
As for the rich evading national service, that would not be possible. They might decide to work in a non-military capacity, or they might all be issued into the officer’s programs. So be it. Somethings never change and cannot be changed. A fair draft is a universal draft.
We might even be able to use such a system as a way for illegal immigrants to gain their citizenship. Two years of service seems like a fair price.
I don’t see the problems with this idea that you do. But you might be right that it would be unconstitutional.
I can’t answer all your issues here–that’s the stuff of an entire ‘nother article.
I’ll just say for now that yeah, I think military service should be a fast track to naturalization, but what does that say about the U.S.? That we recruit foreigners to fight foreign wars that “we the people” don’t want to fight ourselves? I’m not wild about that idea. It sounds way too French for me.
As to gym class dropouts not being suited to military service–do you think not being able to climb a rope excluded excluded anyone in China or North Korea from from being part of the hordes that attacked UN troops in that conflict? Think about it–if you want to build a force of throw away troops, you don’t want to buid it from the flower of your youth. The guys you want to die are the ones you want to carve out of your national gene pool.
That leads to the idea of fighting optional wars with your underpriveleged and woking class segments of society, which is pretty much what we’re doing right now.
I look forward to further discussions on this subject.
Best,
Jeff
Jeff, you’ve hit the nail on the head. This bad idea is like a hydra that refuses to die. Maybe I’m just a tad cynical after the last few years (not to mention the Vietnam and Reagan eras), but I have no trust that the government will keep the “civilian” aspect of it doing maintenance in the national parks when there’s a war to be ginned up, by either party (Gulf of Tonkin resolution, anyone?)
Especially today, who’s to say that the domestic component won’t be put on domestic surveillance duties, as an “anti-terror adjunct to local police forces.” (Anyone remember East Germany?)
I suspect that your constitutional arguments are sound, ironically especially with a conservative-leaning court. And the arguments used to declare the CCC unconstitutional in the depression might also be recycled for this program as well.
…I don’t trust the government to keep something like this on the up and up. And I don’t just mean the Bush government–I mean any government under any party’s control.
I agree. It’s a bad idea, and I say this as someone predisposed to favour it. The United States is simply to big for this to be a good idea. It militarizes the population. The day when this could be done died in 1975. We will never again have a conscript army. The Europeans learned their lesson in 1914-18 and 1939-45.
National service is appealing. I worked in the Peace Corps administration during the Kennedy administration, and it was my goal upon graduating from college to become a PCV. We should make that kind of option attractive by making it part of a college financing package; but we shouldn’t make it mandatory. What Herbert desires can be achieved by other means. They are more costly, but you get what you pay for.
That is the other issue. The US cannot even fund the programs that they have in place (only one example: the VA), so I am not sure where Mr. Herbert believes the funding will come from from such a massive program that includes every of-age citizen. Additionally, we see how current programs are budget-starved, does anyone truly believe that any additional funding will privilage the “military-wing” of public service over the “civilian-wing”? Instituting a military draft will over-inflate the military, not only with personel but with the financial requirements that accompany them.
I believe Jeff is right, this is only a wolf in sheeps’ clothing IMO.
Bingo! We can achieve the kinds of things he wants to do without drafting everybody into federal service. If we used the same kinds of incentives for “other” programs that we do to attract kids to military service, man, we could get some amazing things done.