One Marine In Favor Of The Draft

There is a terrific article in Newsweek magazine written by Marine Corps Cpl. Mark Finelli. He makes his case for re-instituting the draft quite well.

The real failure of this war, the mistake that has led to all the malaise of Operation Iraqi Freedom, was the failure to not reinstitute the draft on Sept. 12, 2001—something I certainly believed would happen after running down 61 flights of the South Tower, dodging the carnage as I made my way to the Hudson River [I worked at the World Trade Center as an investment adviser for Morgan Stanley at the time]. But President Bush was determined to keep the lives of nonuniformed America—the wealthiest Americans, like himself—uninterrupted by the war.

Mr. Bush has tried for years now to say he is a war time president, but it's hard to say you're in a war when only one percent of the population is fighting it.

Consequently, we have a severe talent deficiency in the military, which the draft would remedy immediately. While America’s bravest are in the military, America’s brightest are not. Allow me to build a squad of the five brightest students from MIT and Caltech and promise them patrols on the highways connecting Baghdad and Fallujah, and I’ll bet that in six months they could render IED’s about as effective as a “Just Say No” campaign at a Grateful Dead show.

The soldiers and Marines fighting this war are never going to get the financial resources unless the ruling classes are involved.
It’s not hard to figure out who suffers. The 160,000 servicemen and women in Iraq are the latest generation of Americans to represent their country on the field of battle. And like their predecessors, they are abundantly unrepresented in the halls of power. As a result, they’ve adopted what I find to be a disturbing outlook on their situation: many don’t want the draft because they believe it will ruin the military, which they consider their own blue-collar fraternity.

We don't need a Vietnam type draft either, no future Vice-President should be able to get five deferments.

The draft would even hasten a weaning away from foreign oil, I believe, if more Americans felt the nausea that I do every time I go to the pump and underwrite the people who have nearly killed me five times. This war on the jihadists needs to be more discomforting to the average American than just bad news on the tube. Democracies at war abroad cannot wage a protracted ground operation when the only people who are sacrificing are those who choose to go. This is the greatest lesson of my generation. Young Americans: you may not want to kill jihadists, but they are interested in killing you and your loved ones. Wake up.

Until the sons and daughters of our elected officials are in the field with the offspring of the captains of industry fighting this war for the survival of our way of life then no one is going to take ownership of the success or failure of this misbegotten war, or the next one.

It is time for the effete, superior, pansy bastards running this country to step up and make some sacrifices. To defeat this enemy sacrifices must be demanded of the American people and the only way for the Republicans and Democrats to do that is be willing to make some sacrifices themselves.

Jim Martin