US Military Draft

Why the United States will not have a draft.

May 13th, 2006

There will not be a draft. We are not even close to needing one. I will take the reserve/guard question first.

Every action of call up is in their contract, nobody’s rights are being violated. I find it just plain wrong to think we would have hundreds of thousands reserve/guard members out their drawing pay and benefits for up to 30 years in some cases and have no expectation of a call up. “But I only joined to pay for college” is like saying I only wanted to get married for the sex.

Now the “back door” draft notion. The individual ready reserve (IRR) and fleet reserve (FR) are also contractual and understood. The IRR is contracted the day you initially sign up. It is the initial 8 year obligation each member has when you enlist, your active contract may be anywhere from 2-6 years but your total contract is 8. Up to the conclusion of the 8 years you can be recalled to serve in the same capacity in which you were first discharged. The IRR has been used before, many times. The FR is the time between a members leaving active duty with retirement benefits until a total of 30 years have past. So if I transferred to the FR today, I could still be recalled for another 6 years.

Now what if we exhausted all the IRR/FR and reserve/guard, had them all working and we just needed more people to serve. We have standards that currently turn away more than HALF of the people who apply to serve, even now all services have a waiting list (Delayed entry program), the Navy’s for example has most of our FY-05 mission already identified. We could increase the list of any service by decreasing our self imposed standards, which like I said turn away more than HALF of those who want to serve, call any recruiting station and ask then if you could lower the ASVAB AFQT to 24 as an example for everyone including those with a GED what impact that would have. Ask what the impact would be if the HT/WT standards where relaxed by even 2% to 24%BF or even to the very old standard of 26%. The military is currently congressionally capped at only 10% non-high school graduates. And in the final analysis we do not want any person who does not want to serve. I would rather have an obese, mentally challenged, multi time felon who wants to than a person forced to.