Conspiracy theories be damned.
From Rolling Stone:
Richard Flahavan, spokesman for Selective Service, tells Rolling Stone that preparing for a skills-based draft is “in fact what we have been doing.” For starters, the agency has updated a plan to draft nurses and doctors. But that’s not all. “Our thinking was that if we could run a health-care draft in the future,” Flahavan says, “then with some very slight tinkering we could change that skill to plumbers or linguists or electrical engineers or whatever the military was short.” In other words, if Uncle Sam decides he needs people with your skills, Selective Service has the means to draft you — and quick.
Unless Selective Service is desperate for a website clad in pin-ups designed by a young, belligerent, anti-war feminist, I think I’m safe.
Not necessarily: “experts on military manpower say the focus on drafting personnel with special skills misses the larger point. The Army needs more soldiers, not just more doctors and linguists. ‘What you’ve got now is a real shortage of grunts — guys who can actually carry bayonets,’ says McPeak. A wholesale draft may be necessary, he adds, ‘to deal with the situation we’ve got ourselves into. We’ve got to have a bigger Army.'”
Theorists expand further on the notion of a draft:
The politics of the draft are radioactive: Polls show that less than twenty percent of Americans favor forced military service. But conscription has some unlikely champions, including veterans and critics of the administration who are opposed to Bush’s war in Iraq. Reinstating the draft, they say, would force every level of society to participate in military service, rather than placing a disproportionate burden on minorities and the working class. African-Americans, who make up roughly thirteen percent of the civilian population, account for twenty-two percent of the armed forces. And the Defense Department acknowledges that recruits are drawn “primarily from families in the middle and lower-middle socioeconomic strata.”
A societywide draft would also make it more difficult for politicians to commit troops to battle without popular approval… Charlie Moskos, a professor of military sociology at Northwestern University, says the volunteer system also limits the political fallout of unpopular wars. “Without a draft, there’s really no antiwar movement,” Moskos says. Nearly sixty percent of Americans believe the war in Iraq was a mistake, he notes, but they have no immediate self-interest in taking to the streets because “we’re willing to pay people to die for us. It doesn’t reflect very well on the character of our society.”
Experts acknowledge that in a contemporary draft all adults within the selected age range would be required to register, men and women, college students and working people, parents and singletons alike.
More at Daily Kos.
via Unscrewing the Inscrutable