There
is an old Washington maxim that holds: Personnel is policy. People do
matter. That is obvious with the news that the U.S. Army, the Army Reserve
and the Army National Guard will all fail to meet their recruiting goals
for fiscal year 2005.
This will be the third consecutive year in which the Guard fails to meet
its recruiting target, which is militarily important because today the
Guard and the Army Reserve together constitute approximately 40 percent
of all U.S. forces in Iraq.
These recruiting shortfalls recall a Jan. 19, 2000, speech at Harvard
given by the then-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Hugh Shelton.
He argued that if the United States were to send the nation's warriors
into combat and count on "the support of the American people as well
as the Congress" needed to sustain that national commitment, the
decision to go into battle first "must be subjected to what I call
the 'Dover test.' Is the American public prepared for the sight of our
most precious resource coming home in flag-draped caskets into Dover Air
Force Base in Delaware. ..."
The Bush administration simply chose to courageously duck "the Dover
test" by imposing a press blackout to deny any pictures of the military
honor guard in white gloves somberly delivering from the aircraft a coffin
covered by Old Glory containing the remains of their fallen hero to waiting
loved ones.
Casualties have obviously hurt enlistments. Asked to explain why earlier
this year even the Marines were most uncharacteristically missing their
monthly recruiting quotas, one Marine general told me, "Doonesbury
has it about right." He was referring to the biting strip of cartoonist
Garry Trudeau's, in which the older, wiser heads were effectively discouraging
younger characters from joining the U.S. military by reminding their juniors
about the downsides of danger and possible death.
You may have been just as surprised as I was to learn that the Young College
Republicans were not all abandoning fraternity row, homecoming parties
and interviews with investment bankers to sign up to fight in Iraq. Where,
when you so desperately need them, are all the youthful neo-cons who thought
Mr. Bush's war of choice was so historically peachy-keen?
Let's be blunt. Neither George Bush nor the Democrats have the political
will to seek a return to a draft without deferments that would, by definition,
inconvenience the well-orchestrated lives of young men from prominent
families -- i.e., major supporters.
One solution to the military manpower shortage seems to have been inspired
by the Jewish proverb, which holds that "if the rich could hire the
poor to die for them, the poor would make a nice living." Max Boot,
a senior fellow of national security studies at the Council on Foreign
Relations, rejects the option of a draft and instead proposes offering
"U.S. citizenship to anyone, anywhere on the planet, willing to serve
a set term in the U.S. military."
There you have it. We own nothing to each other or to our country. The
U.S. military today is 7 percent foreign-born, but why not an "American
Foreign Legion," which is 77 percent foreign-born? Does anyone else
remember the American Revolution and the British subcontracting the fighting
to Hessian troops?
During the Civil War, a citizen facing the draft could negotiate by privately
paying another individual to take his place as a "substitute."
But the Boot Plan would be wholesale, not retail. Go into battle, face
death, and if you survive, you become a citizen. It is true in the third,
bloody year of the U.S. war in Iraq that personnel really is policy and
traditional American patriotism, with rare and admirable exceptions, is
sadly missing in action.
