Sunday, January 28, 2007
Do we need a draft?
McClatchy has a report on the various sides of the debate about bringing back the draft. With Our Dear Embattled Leader's Glorious Little War promising to continue until he has left office, the problem of finding the manpower to continue for 2+ more years is becoming acute.
The Army had 732,000 active-duty soldiers during the 1991 Persian Gulf War, which occurred three years after President Reagan left office. The Army now has about 512,000 active-duty soldiers....It is something that needs to be debated now, but I think it is something that we should have. If people have a "dog in the fight" they pay much more attention to how and when and if you fight.
... The Bush administration recognizes that there's a problem and has promised to add 92,000 service members to the Army and the Marine Corps over the next five years.
But that means Army recruiters will have to sign up another 7,000 men and women every year, when they're already struggling and standards have been dropped to meet the current quotas.
Gen. Peter J. Schoomaker, the Army's chief of staff, has suggested that part of the answer is increasing the incentives to enlist. The Army already offers as much as $40,000 to recruits, however, and personnel costs are taking a larger chunk of the defense budget every year.
In the meantime, Defense Secretary Robert Gates has outlined plans to call up the National Guard and Reserves more frequently. But the more the military relies on its citizen-soldiers to fight the war, the less attractive the Reserves become to those who don't want full-time military careers.
There are concerns that overusing the Guard and Reserves could strain those forces as badly as the active-duty ranks.
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