What do Napoleon, America’s Army War College and the liberal media have in common? The centuries-old belief that conscription is the “vitality of the nation”. With the US military hamstrung by a catastrophic personnel problem, the “draft” is being handed a new lease of life. Maybe, murmurs the DC think-tank circuit, conscription could provide America with the proverbial shot in the arm it needs: polarised internally and beset by a multitude of external challenges, the expedient of compelling young Americans to pick up rifles in service to their nation could kill two birds with one stone.
But almost all discussion of conscription today falls into a standard narrative, a just-so story that is both simple to grasp and seductively credible. America could have a draft if it wanted to, the story goes: no doubt it would work and be effective. The problem, however, is that people have grown too self-absorbed for such harsh measures. Previous generations worked hard and sacrificed willingly, while kids these days just want to play videogames.
Such a narrative is increasingly dangerous. The fatal issue with a potential draft is not that people would get very angry about it — though it’s fair to say that they probably would. The entire reason America abandoned the draft in the Seventies was because the Vietnam War was slowly tearing society apart, leading to protests, riots, and an epidemic of enlisted soldiers murdering their own officers. Any attempt to reinstate conscription would likely bring with it a “Vietnam syndrome” far worse than the original one. But in some ways that is beside the point.
Right now, even if America wanted a draft, the entire administrative apparatus required to actually implement it no longer exists. Just as Rome eventually forgot how to muster its legions or maintain its roads and bridges, so too has the US government forgotten how to quickly gather hundreds of thousands of men under arms. The systems necessary to do so have been destroyed through decades of malign neglect, and they probably can’t be brought back at all, let alone repaired on short notice.
To understand just how impractical a draft is, it’s necessary to understand how it might work. Eligible Americans, upon reaching the age of 18, are supposed to be registered in the Selective Service System (SSS) database. Once a draft happens, the draftees chosen by lottery could then be sent notices, ordering them to report for service. When they have been given the chance to appeal or seek deferments, the remainder would report to the US military, which would train them and send them to war.
Today, every piece of this chain is broken beyond repair. The first step — the registration of eligible candidates — seems like it would be the easiest to get a handle on. But nothing could be further from the truth, for the simple reason that no single federal agency even attempts to keep an up-to-date record of every American’s actual place of residence. Take it from the horse’s mouth: according to the Chair of the House Armed Services Committee himself, “absolutely nobody” bothers to notify the SSS when they move.
Moreover, the SSS doesn’t even know whether the names they have on their lists are eligible Americans in the first place. As a result, it’s forced to rely on borrowing information from other federal and state agencies to figure out where young Americans live. But not only are states not required to keep address information up to date, but people who cannot be drafted, such as those with student visas, get included in these rolls. Moreover, several states, such as California, refuse to be a part of this system. Other states offer Americans the choice to put an “X” in the gender field on their driver’s licence, which excludes them from SSS data collection.
All of this might seem like a minor technical quibble, but it’s really not. The inability to actually keep track of where citizens live doesn’t just mean that people might be slow to show up to basic training — it would completely undermine the government’s ability to actually prosecute anyone for draft-dodging in the first place.
To pursue these draft-dodgers, the federal government would have to clear a legal bar that is essentially impossible to reach unless the draftee decides to wilfully self-incriminate. To wit, the government has to prove three things beyond a reasonable doubt: that it sent the notice to the correct address, that the draftee actually read the notice and understood its meaning, and finally, that he made a conscious decision to refuse to show up for service after having fully understood his responsibilities. Today, a majority of Americans are essentially immune to being prosecuted without any intention on their part: they’ve simply moved away from their parents without notifying the SSS, and now the government has no idea where they are. But even when the government does, it’s not a crime for parents to rip up induction notices. And if that doesn’t work, they could claim that the mailman hid it, or their dog ate it. The ability for the federal government to prove otherwise is essentially nil.
All of this was already a big enough problem during the Vietnam era, where the government could only manage to convict some 8,000 people for draft offences, out of a total caseload of nearly 600,000. The idea of today’s administration doing any better is laughable. In 2021, the SSS made almost 250,000 referrals to the Department of Justice for failures to comply with registration laws. The response from the DOJ was to announce that it had no intention of actually enforcing these laws, and that the SSS should stop asking them to.
But even putting the issue of sending draft notices aside, does the US military have the institutional capacity to absorb and train hundreds of thousands of recruits on short notice? Can America produce the additional equipment that would be needed to actually give the sons (and perhaps daughters) of America a fighting chance? Does America still have the ships and planes to transport all those draftees to where they would theoretically be fighting in, say, Asia? The answer to all of these questions is no.
The idea that everything is possible as long as you will it to be so is seductive, but it doesn’t match up with reality. To organise a draft, or repair a bridge, or build a fighter aircraft, you don’t just need a can-do attitude: you need institutional knowledge, you need money and resources, and you need people. For smaller countries such as Sweden, which already uses a draft, this is much less of a problem: there, the government hasn’t yet lost the institutional capacity to keep track of its citizens. But in America, that ship sailed years ago.
Indeed, even if the federal government were to try and force a draft into existence, the result would be disheartening. Inevitably, the burden would fall on local sheriffs and police departments, and trying to push through a blatantly illegal and unconstitutional draft would almost certainly guarantee that several states would refuse to comply. From that point, it would only take a handful of them to declare this new “streamlined” draft illegal, and offer up their own territory as safe havens from “federal tyranny”, for the US to descend into a constitutional crisis.
American pundits, think tanks, and government apparatchiks can complain all they like that the young aren’t conscientious enough to support a draft over Iran or Taiwan. But this is little more than projection. To truly understand why conscription is a non-starter, they need only look upon their own mighty works — and despair.
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Source: UnHerd Read the original article here: https://unherd.com/