A Volunteer Military or a Draft? - Izzit.org

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TRANSCRIPT
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Critical Choices:
An All-Volunteer Military or a Draft?
Transcript
For a list of additional resources to use with this video go to
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SGT. CHANDAN RANDHAWA: Joining the Army is a very, very big life decision. It's not like going
to McDonald's or working nine to five.
GREG LAUTNER: The Army likes an all-volunteer force for several reasons: one, it lets the Army be
more selective, and we can focus more on quality.
MARTIN ANDERSON: What do you think about being drafted if you don't want to go? How about the
women?
PETEY GILMADOR: Women have the same political rights then they should be expected to have the
same duties.
ANDERSON: We let women vote on this, but they can't be drafted.
STAFF SGT. KIMBERLY GLEATON-STALLINGS: My reason for joining the Army was just to
basically serve my country. Honestly, it was.
GILMADOR: The government should be able, in a sense, to require or demand certain things of citizens.
DAVID KENNEDY: In ancient Greece, for example, you could not be a full citizen unless you were
ready to shoulder arms.
MIKE SPEARTOS: You're already being made to do things for your government. Opt-in, buy-in.
You're part of the country. Deal with it.
BYRON RUBY: I think the most important thing is the individual's right to choose what they want to do
with their life since, after all- that is why we have democracy in the first place.
RANDHAWA: I'm caught right in the middle because I believe everybody should want to serve their
country at least a couple of years.
KENNEDY: Well, historically, there's a very strong linkage between the obligation of the military
service, on the one hand, and possessing the full rights of citizenship on the other. In Ancient Greece, for
example, you could not be a full citizen unless you were ready to shoulder arms and, indeed, in many of
the Greek city states you were expected to bring your own arms to the field, your own shield and sword
and horse, or whatever it might be. Well down into modern history this - this linkage between citizenship
and service - has been very, very strong.
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In the nineteenth century, the era after Napoleon, most of the European countries had massive conscript
armies. The United States did not. It was a distinguishing characteristic of the society and it is why many
immigrants came here - to avoid military service in Europe.
The one exception to that in the nineteenth century is the Civil War, when both the Confederacy and the
Union then had to resort to obligatory force, to military conscription, in order to fill out the ranks of their
armed forces. The draft was administered by military officers who actually came in uniform into districts
and forced people into service- and there was plenty of resistance to that. The most notorious example is
in New York City. There were major draft riots when largely Irish immigrants, who had come to this
country not anticipating military service, refused to serve. Dozens of people were killed.
Contrary to a lot of mythology, there was plenty of resistance to the draft in the First World War. There
were some 300,000 identified draft evaders. The people that ran the draft in the First World War learned,
or thought they learned, from some of the mistakes in the Civil War, and instead of having military
officers go into districts and recruit people or enlist them, they set up civilian draft boards.
Advertising was just becoming a big business, the techniques were being learned and developed, and
indeed, the military service, or the draft, in World War I was just one of many areas where the
government employed the techniques of this infant industry of advertising to achieve its goals.
The public was heavily propagandized, and indeed, even the conscription system was called “selective
service,” thus putting the word “service” at the heart of the matter and trying the best they could to
preserve the fiction, as Woodrow Wilson said, that the nation had volunteered en masse for the war,
which was just patently not true, but they tried to perpetuate that idea nonetheless.
This country mustered sixteen million men, and a few hundred thousand women into the armed forces in
World War II, and again, folklore to the contrary and notwithstanding, the great majority of those people
were drafted. It meant that the country really had to buy into this deal. Millions of people had to
somehow feel their being pressed into service was legitimate. The country as a whole had to accept as
legitimate the diversion of forty percent of its production to wartime purposes, rather than civilian
purposes.
PRESIDENT FRANKLIN DELANO ROOSEVELT: Members of your government are gathered here
in this federal building in Washington to witness the drawing of numbers as provided for in the Selective
Service Act of 1940.
KENNEDY: Once we break that link between massive citizen participation and the actual conduct of the
war, then we raise all kinds of very troubling questions about how easy it is to go to war, whether the
public’s assent is really any longer even necessary for the deployment of military force.
World War II, in many different senses, ended an era in the history of warfare. It was the last war that
was fought, and I believe ever will be fought, between large, huge, massive conscript armies fighting on
the basis of a deeply mobilized industrial economy at home in a protracted war of attrition.
For a period of about - almost 30 years, from the late ‘40s into the early ‘70s - the draft was an enormous
presence in the lives of millions upon millions of people in this society, including me.
The Cold War got hot in Vietnam, and they had an actual shooting war, and a lot of people who’d just as
soon to not be shot at, found themselves conscripted in the service. The draft became a focal point for
resistance to the war, protest against it.
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ANDERSON: A lot of people didn't think we should have a draft. The people that were being drafted
were absolutely sure we shouldn't have a draft.
PRESIDENT LYNDON B. JOHNSON: I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my
party for another term as your president.
KENNEDY: In 1968, Richard Nixon became the Republican presidential candidate. And advising the
Nixon campaign there were some quite unlikely champions of those kids out in the streets burning their
draft cards. One of them was Milton Friedman, a very controversial figure, but someone who eventually
won the Nobel Prize in economics.
MILTON FRIEDM AN: I talked to quite a number of SDS groups, and I always got along very well
with them, because it was clear that our objectives were the same. And what we were talking about was
not objectives, but how you achieve those objectives.
KENNEDY: On those grounds he had long called for the end of the draft, and for the creation of
something that many people considered impossible-namely, an all-volunteer army.
FRIEDMAN: The use of compulsion is repugnant to our society except in cases of dire emergency. It is
long past time that we return to our basic heritage, and got rid of the compulsion in our military service,
and return to a voluntary system.
KENNEDY: Nixon wins the election of 1968- but it was a squeaker.
ANDERSON: He only won by a little, tiny fraction. And I think we can say that if he had not said that
he would get rid of the draft he would not have been President of the United States.
KENNEDY: And once he was elected president, Nixon almost immediately created a commission to
consider the idea of creating an all-volunteer force. One major question the commission had to wrestle
with was whether a volunteer force would, in effect, become the equivalent of a mercenary army.
Historically, people have feared mercenary armies, not least of all because of the whole prospect of
severing the link between military service and citizenship with all of its rights and privileges. Two of the
people on Nixon’s commission were Milton Friedman and Alan Greenspan.
ALAN GREENSPAN: A general who came before us in testimony made the case as to why the draft
would be a mercenary army and unacceptable to the American culture, and indeed, for military efficiency.
FRIEDMAN: And so I spoke up and said, “General Westmoreland, would you rather command a slave
force?” and he said, “I don’t like to hear my drafted soldiers referred to as slaves.” And I said, “I don’t
like to hear my patriotic volunteers referred to as mercenaries.”
GREENSPAN: Milton sat there and took his arguments apart piece by piece - never raised his voice.
FRIEDMAN: In any event, General Westmoreland, you are a mercenary general, and I am a mercenary
professor. We are served by a mercenary lawyer. We are served by a mercenary doctor.
GREENSPAN: The general got redder and redder- and at the end of this little set of dissections, the
mercenary argument was thoroughly demolished.
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FRIEDMAN: And that was the end of the discussion.
KENNEDY: Shortly thereafter Nixon’s commission voted unanimously to end the draft, and in 1973, it
became official.
Now the army was competing for employees with every other business in the country, which forced
improvements in military salaries and benefits.
When the all-volunteer force came into being in the 1970s, the military actually hired advertising agencies
and public relations agencies to advise them on how to fill the ranks, and to persuade people that military
service was something they wanted to do.
COMMERCIAL: ……”Hey, Sergeant-Major!” “How are you, sir?” “Good. Hey, this is the action we
talked about”……
BRIGADIER GENERAL SEAN J. BYRNE: We’re in a market economy and we understand that. And
we have what I think is a great product.
RAY DETHORNE: Advertising for the armed forces is much more complicated than it is for a consumer
product. Going into the armed forces, it’s a life decision. We began crafting ads to reach influencers and
specifically parents…..
COMMERCIAL: …“Dad, there’s something I need to tell you.” “How much is this going to cost
me?”……
DETHORNE: … even more specifically mothers……
COMMERCIAL: …“Mom, please…”
DETHORNE: It’s the mom that basically stands in the door and says “Whoa, wait a minute.”
COMMERCIAL: “…knowing right from wrong, believing in myself, wanting to go to college – all that
came from you”…
DETHORNE: So what we want to do is make sure that the parents understand what the benefits
service is, how it is a life-changing experience for their child.
BYRNE: What we’re showing in the advertising is really what it’s all about. We’re not trying to varnish
over any kind of issues. It’s tough. You can’t tell them a lie because all they have to do is watch TV at
night and they know what the Army is about.
The difference today is we’ve got five hundred and two thousand - five hundred and two thousand -
volunteers in the Army. These are people that have asked to be in the service. They are here during a time
of war because they want to be.
KENNEDY: I think the principal worry about the all-volunteer force is precisely its capacity to be used
without the civil society in whose name it fights having any very focused or felt interest in the actual use
of the force.
ANDERSON: Would you like to have a draft?
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SPEARTOS: A draft makes it harder to go to war because - because the debate is more reasoned- people
are more invested.
KENNEDY: As long as we have an all-volunteer force, no one is required to pay attention, and no one is
required to put their lives or their sons’ and daughters’ lives on the line.
SPEARTOS: We get into our cars, we isolate ourselves, the war happens over there. I don't know a
single person in my life who is fighting in Iraq, not one.
ANDERSON: Go to the high school and get the ones that are 16 or 17 years old, say, “Hey, what do you
think about going to Baghdad if you don't want to?” Say there are 50 people in the class. They know
there are three or four that might like to go in the military. And if they did, they would be really good at
it. Okay. Is that better than taking by the scruff of the neck someone that does not want to go into it and
not be any good at it? It's much easier to run a bad war with a draft than without it. You just call the
person in charge of the draftees and say, I want 50,000 more, and he will get your 50,000 more, and if
they don't turn up, they go to jail.
KENNEDY: That kind of authority vested in the government, that kind of capacity to command the lives
of citizens is only legitimate in the face of a truly dire threat to the very existence of the country, on the
scale of World War II, let's say. I'm not sure World War I really qualifies, as a matter of fact. The Civil
War certainly qualified. But absent a threat on that scale, it seems to me that we ought to be very wary
about granting the government the right to control our lives down to that level, and to that degree.
RANDHAWA: My father served 24 years in the U.S. Air Force, and my grandfather served 28 years in
the U.S. Army. So I figured it was my turn to do my part.
GLEATON-STALLINGS: I can’t understand why no one wouldn't want to go out and, you know, serve
their country, protect themselves, protect their families, and to do what other forefathers have done for us-
to get us to where we are now.
RUBY: I would only want to be drafted if I would believe the war would be just.
SPEARTOS: You're already being made to do things for your government. Opt-in, buy-in. You're part
of the country. Deal with it!
LAUTNER: I don't want just anybody on my team - only those that are physically qualified, mentally
qualified and academically qualified.
RANDHAWA: We have the right to choose. That's what makes America so great. We have the freedom
to choose.
For a list of additional resources to use with this video go to
www.izzit.org/products and click on the Volunteer Military or a Draft? video.
5

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