On the draft

Jo-Ann Mort at TPMCafe revisits the notion of conscripted national service, using the standard argument that universal service will make it politically harder to send people to war. This issue keeps cropping up from time to time in liberal intellectual circles. I'm not sure exactly how I feel about a draft, but I have three comments.

First, I find the spectacle of middle-aged pundits advocating a draft for young people rather suspicious. It reeks of the same somebody-else-pays mentality that the draft supposedly eliminates. If we're going to have universal national service, then let's make it really universal: make everybody eligible for the draft, except for retirees and people who have previously served. The military's so-called "tooth-to-tail" ratio --- i.e., the proportion between the number of "tooth" soldiers serving on the front lines, and the logistical "tail" that supports them --- is something like one to seven. There are plenty of support occupations, both stateside and overseas, that don't require great physical exertion. Anybody of reasonably sound mind and body could fill those roles, not just the young. This becomes even more true if we adopt the proposal, favored by many liberal draft proponents especially, that national service could encompass civilian service.

I don't really buy the usual arguments for drafting the young only. Do older people have careers that might be interrupted? So do young people, who often have once-in-a-lifetime opportunities that they'd be forced to pass up; consider what would have happened to Sergey and Larry if they'd been drafted in 1997, when they were in their mid-twenties. Do older people have families to support? So do many of the younger people who'd be drafted (a point that may be lost on pundits because children of the mandarin class tend wait till they're approaching thirty). And is it better for a parent to be absent when the child's learning to speak than when the child's in high school? Six of one, half-dozen of the other, it seems to me.

Furthermore, all the arguments for universal service for the young become even stronger when you expand the draft to all ages. It will be even harder to go to war, because an even larger fraction of society will be affected. Society will benefit even more, because there will be even greater mixing, not only among social classes but between generations.

Now, I've elided some distinctions here, and I should un-elide them. One can envision two forms of universal service. First, one could have a deterministic universal service requirement, akin to what Israel currently has --- i.e., mandatory national service, at a certain age, for everybody in society. Second, one could have probabilistic universal service, which is what happened to people 18-25 during the Vietnam draft --- i.e., you live your life as usual, and someday your number might come up. My proposal above, for universal service for all ages, could be interpreted in several ways:

1. Adopt deterministic service, but use probabilistic service as a transitional proposal to "grandfather in" all the people who never had to serve.
2. Adopt probabilistic service for all time; this proposal comes with two variations:
   1. Permit everyone to avoid the draft by volunteering anytime before their number comes up.
   2. Disallow some fraction of people born in each year from volunteering before their number comes up.

Proposals (1) and (2a) are relatively self-explanatory, and would probably work out fairly similarly in practice. Most people would take their service early in life, and at a time chosen so that they could control the disruption involved, in order to avoid being hit by an unpredictable draft.

The final sub-option --- disallowing some people from volunteering --- is, I think, the most interesting. The reasoning goes like this. When only the young serve, the burden of war falls disproportionately on the young. (Yes, people have families, but still, going to war personally is an even greater life disruption than sending someone in your family to war.) This disadvantage still holds when service is universal: although everyone serves, the current cohort of older people at any given time knows that it will not have to serve in any war that society undertakes. Therefore, one should always "hold back" some people from every cohort, preventing them from taking their service when they're young, so that every age group contains some people who might be drafted in any given war.

Next, my second point. Some people will always be able to avoid dangerous combat, one way or another: witness G. W. Bush and the National Guard. The point of a draft isn't to institute perfect universal service, but to drive a wedge between the extraordinarily well-connected and the merely well-to-do, or in other words between the top 0.1% and the top 2%, a split that (sadly enough) would have huge consequences for American politics. I confess I'm not entirely comfortable with using human life and death as a political instrument, but I also suspect that my analogues speaking for the top 0.1% don't feel the same squeamishness.

Finally, my third point: instituting a draft doesn't mean being forced to fight in unjust wars. Even if a draft were instituted, you would always have a principled way to avoid fighting in a war that you oppose: go to jail. That may not sound like much of a choice, but as a protest of last resort, it is always available.

Lectures on "aggressive policies" for detention and interrogation

I've linked previously to a bunch of lectures from the Cybersecurity and Homeland Security course I attended last quarter, but I haven't yet linked to a couple of the most important and disturbing. On November 30, the course organizers persuaded speakers from the U.S. Dept. of Defense to speak. The two principal lecturers were an historian in the employ of the Pentagon and a U.S. Army interrogator respectively.

Lecture links (as usual, you'll want WebViewer for an optimal experience, but you can also page through the slides manually):

Brian Del Monte, "Detention Operations Policy & the Global War on Terrorism":

PowerPoint slides, Windows Media video, streaming WebViewer, downloadable WebViewer archive

Christina Filarowski Sheaks, "Interrogation Policy & the Global War on Terrorism":

PowerPoint slides, Windows Media video, streaming WebViewer, downloadable WebViewer archive

By and large, the first lecture's infuriating, and the second lecture's chilling and surreal, a quality that is not mitigated by the fact that Ms. Sheaks, the United States Army field interrogator, is a soft-spoken woman wearing a low-cut dress.

I don't have a whole lot more to say --- the lectures almost speak for themselves --- except that it's worth noting how careful the speakers are to emphasize that they're speaking for the Department of Defense only, and (in Ms. Sheaks's case) addressing interrogation policy only. This leaves two elephants in the room. First, most of the recent "aggressive interrogation" incidents were allegedly performed by the CIA, which isn't part of the DoD. Second, the abuses at Abu Ghraib were not, in fact, performed as part of interrogation procedures --- they were performed, as far as we can tell, for no purpose at all.