Few election campaigns have featured as many silly charges and countercharges between the candidates as the current one. The recent salvos over who is more likely to reinstitute the military draft are particularly silly.
While there are some good arguments for conscription, a renewed draft clearly is a political nonstarter. Mustering a majority in either house of Congress would be nigh impossible. Neither presidential candidate exhibits the courage or political leadership necessary to change that.
So, young people can stop worrying about who might draft them. Unfortunately, the schoolyard bickering — “Bush will start the draft” and “No, Kerry will” — has distracted attention from a more fundamental issue facing our nation and its military: How many people do we really need in our armed forces right now and what policies will we follow to secure those needed people?
As a recent Knight Ridder series published in this paper demonstrates, insufficient manpower from the outset thwarted our efforts in Iraq. Defeating the shell of Saddam’s once-powerful army was not hard. But, as former Coalition Provisional Authority chief Paul Bremer and others have noted, we never had enough soldiers to maintain public order, secure Iraq’s borders, and seize control of the 1 million tons of munitions scattered around that California-sized country.
As two senior Knight Ridder correspondents discussed on a call-in radio program Wednesday, uniformed officials in the Department of Defense had settled on some 380,000 troops in early 2003. But Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his assistant Paul Wolfowitz overruled them.
Historians and voters eventually will render judgments on such decisions, and they are likely to be harsh. (You can listen to the Minnesota Public Radio program at http://news.minnesota.publicradio.org/programs/midday/listings/md20041018.shtml#1. The Knight Ridder series ran Sunday, Monday and Tuesday in the Pioneer Press.
Meantime, we need to go forward. Both presidential candidates emphasize they will stay the course in Iraq, at times implying that substantial U.S. forces will remain in that country for five years of more. Many of us are skeptical, but in any case, substantial numbers of U.S. troops will not leave Iraq for some time to come.
The lack of uncommitted forces clearly hampers U.S. credibility in dealing with other problem areas including North Korea, Iran and Syria. Many defense experts, including senators from both parties, call openly for manpower increases of as much as 250,000 rather than the 40,000 grudgingly agreed to earlier this year by the administration.
At the same time, both the active and reserve components are encountering increasing difficulty securing personnel. While the armed forces hit most of their recruitment goals for the fiscal year just ended, Army active and reserve enlistments reportedly are falling off sharply in recent months. Moreover, as many as one-third of Individual Ready Reservists ordered to active duty are failing to report.
If we need more troops and do not want a draft, then we clearly have to increase the monetary compensation offered to those willing to serve. Despite much hand wringing about budget pressures, our nation clearly can afford to spend more on defense. We are spending less than half the proportion of gross domestic product on defense now compared to during the Vietnam War. At the same time, per-capita incomes are twice as high for most households as they were 35 years ago.
What is lacking is political will, both in Congress and in the White House — regardless of who wins the election in two weeks. Neither presidential candidate is forthright about the need to increase uniformed strength or to spend the money necessary to accomplish that. Few congressional candidates are either.
Pre-election dissembling on the need for a larger military is not new. William McKinley did it. So did Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. Most had the “courage” to reverse their pre-election stances once the election was past.
Businesspeople know that the budget for an organization gives a truer picture of its priorities than do slogans and mission statements. If the “war on terrorism” is important and will last a long time, then we need to face reality and spend money accordingly. In all previous wars, that meant raising taxes, and it should in this one, too.
© 2004 Edward Lotterman
Chanarambie Consulting, Inc.