Saturday, November 08, 2003

A Post-Election 2004 Military Draft?

David LindorffThe question of whether the U.S. government will reinstate the military draft was one of the topics of conversation on CNN’s “In the Money” program on Nov. 8. The guest was David Lindorff, a regular contributor to CounterPunch and a correspondent for Salon.com. Lindorff recently wrote a piece for Salon entitled Oiling up the draft machine? in which he reports that the Pentagon is quietly moving to fill draft board vacancies nationwide. Here’s some of what Lindorff had to say on the issue during the CNN program. I’ve paraphrased the questions, but Lindorff’s answers are verbatim. – Mark Hand

Q: How close is this draft idea to becoming a reality?

Lindorff: I think what we’re seeing here with the call-up of the reserves and marines to go back into Iraq is being presented as kind of a desperate move now in the Times today because they simply don’t have the bodies to go in there next year.

Q: Who in Congress or Washington would ever support such an idea?

Lindorff: I can’t see them doing it in an election year. I think that the work they’re doing now is really because if they need it they’ll have to be able to move to it quickly after the election. You basically could see a situation come November – if they keep tamping down the numbers for now as long as they can during a campaign – to suddenly needing to get those troops in there if things are turning worse. So they have to a have the machinery ready. It takes six months to go from the actual start of a call-up to getting the first guys delivered to boot camp.

Q: What about the argument that the draft would not supply qualified people to operate in today’s military?

Lindorff: I think what we’re finding out is that’s a myth. The new McNamara is Rumsfeld who’s been pushing this idea of the super high-tech army with very few actual people on the ground. And we’re finding out that that doesn’t work. Take a look at the helicopter shoot down. That tragic event occurred because a basic rule of helicopter landing sites was ignored. And that is that you secure the area because helicopters are so vulnerable going up and down. That site was not secure because they did not have the personnel on the ground to simply secure the perimeter. And the other thing is that we’re talking now about a low-intensity conflict, an occupation, which requires bodies. If you don’t have the bodies to do the occupation through selective use of force, you have to use overwhelming force, and then you end up killing lots of civilians and angering more people, and that’s what we’re doing now.

More from Mark Hand

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