Draft Realities
An unpopular truth.

Mr. Kurtz is also a fellow at the Hudson Institute
October 24, 2001 8:50 a.m.

he day after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, I put up a piece on NRO called, "Revive the Draft." Actually, I wasn't calling for a resumption of the draft so much as I was trying to break the taboo on public discussion of the issue. We may be able to successfully fight this war without a draft, but that is far from certain. My fear is that, even now, political worries about a draft are limiting the president's options. And precisely because even raising the issue of a draft strikes terror into the hearts of America's politicians, we cannot take the silence of Congress and the administration on this topic as proof that there's no problem here.

President Bush himself has said that the war against bin Laden's network in Afghanistan may take as long as a year or two. If we're lucky, that will tie down only a portion of our special forces. But it's easy to imagine a scenario in which a substantial section of the regular army has to play a role in suppressing rebellion in the Afghan countryside-and in bucking up whatever government succeeds the Taliban-for some time to come.

And given the fact that Sen. Daschle may already have received a bit of Saddam's handiwork through the mails, it would be foolish to delay the conquest of Iraq for the year or two it may take to root the al Qaeda network out of Afghanistan. (In view of Saddam's willingness and capacity to deploy weapons of mass destruction, of course, we'll need to remove him whether Iraq was directly tied to the attack on Sen. Daschle or not.) This means we're facing the probability of simultaneous war in two countries. And conquering Iraq, replacing its government, and securing the post-war political arrangement is going to be a massive and daunting operation.

In the meantime, we could easily be hit by fundamentalist rebellions in other Muslim countries. Imagine that we had regular troops deployed to stabilize a new Afghan government, special forces rooting out al Qaeda in the mountains, and a massive invasion force entering Iraq, when all of the sudden Pakistan's government fell to fundamentalists enraged by the "war against Islam." Given Pakistan's proximity to Afghanistan, and given the fact that it possesses nuclear weapons, we would have little choice but to intervene. If we couldn't restore a friendly government, we might at least have to take out Pakistan's nuclear capability, just to prevent a fundamentalist government from getting hold of the bomb.

If this nightmare scenario begins to play out (and there is nothing implausible in what I've said so far), then it's quite likely that there would be fundamentalist rebellions in more than one state, each of which might also require at least limited intervention. And what if North Korea, seeing how tied down we were in the Middle East, picked just that time to move in on the South Koreans? That last prospect is less likely than the rest, but by no means impossible. But even without a Korean complication, a broad-based war in the Middle East would stretch our forces past the breaking point, and almost surely force the president to ask the Democrats to join him in imposing a draft. (Remember that our armed forces are considerably smaller today than they were at the time of the Gulf War.)

But it takes months to turn raw recruits into soldiers. Given the political dangers of a draft, the likelihood is that the subject will only come up when it is obvious to everyone that we are in a major war in several countries at once. By then, we will already be at a disadvantage. The time to prepare for the all too real possibility of a wider war is now, while there's still time to build up the forces that might be required. And again, the scenario I've played out is not at all far-fetched. Things may not go that badly, but it's entirely possible that they will.

Up to now, the media has portrayed the administration's internal battle over whether and when to expand the war to Iraq as a conflict between the hawks and Secretary Powell's impulse to coalition building. But there may well be something else at work. The president probably understands that going after Iraq sooner rather than later has every prospect of stretching our force structure to its limit, while also perhaps provoking a wider rebellion in several Muslim countries. And he knows that the only way to protect against that possibility is a draft, the political consequences of which he rightly fears. So it turns out that our national will to fight a war is already a critical factor in the military equation, even if our leaders won't tell us that in so many words.

The other day I went to a talk by that great student of American politics, Walter Berns, whose recent book, Making Patriots, could not have been better timed. Berns said that after Pearl Harbor, America's men simply took it for granted that they would serve. In fact they were eager to fight — to strike back for what had been done to America. For all the flag pins and patriotism, no such enthusiasm reigns in America today. Yes, there has been a welcome spike in recruitment in the wake of the attacks. But the truth is, many young people no longer share the eagerness of the "greatest generation" for battle. Berns said that, in his day, few of the young who enlisted after Pearl Harbor had any idea of what war was all about. But today, in the wake of Vietnam, with the hyperrealism of war film, and years of disparagement of the ethos of military honor and heroism, talk of a draft is political poison.

Then again, the attack upon America may even now be working a profound change in our national spirit. The Vietnam syndrome may soon be a thing of the past. Many people have suggested as much in recent weeks, but we won't really know that it's true until we begin hearing honest public debate and discussion about the need for a draft.