Military Service or National Service - Take Your Pick
There have been recent stories about the estimated 25% shortage of wildland firefighters for this wildfire season. The reasons for the shortfall are several. First there is low pay, hazardous working conditions and then in some instances, firefighters have to sleep in their cars since there are no beds in camps for them to use. Needless to say, this is very demanding physical work occurring within inhospitable conditions. Even with higher pay the ability to attract enough people is questionable.
Very recently in England, the British Prime Minister has announced his intention to enact a system of national service. That proposal spans voluntary military service for a year, to giving up one weekend a month for some form of civic duties and other options for learning new skills and contributing to the community.
Earlier in May I wrote the following Op-ed and submitted it to several publications. No one picked it up for publication. Likely too hot a topic to touch. Not that the British Prime Minister and I are on the same wave length, but the idea of what it means to be a citizen and contribute to one’s nation and community is faltering a bit. Generally, when I have the discussion with “older people” they like the idea. The younger generations that could be impacted have other ideas. In England Gen Z has generally derided the entire proposal—which is to be expected.
I’ll end with this before sharing the Op-ed below. One of the things about military service is that it can be a cross cultural mix of races, educational levels and economic status. It is rare today that we have that occurring in our own communities. People retreat to or are confined by their economic situation and we are living in “different camps” and there is little cross cultural sharing of who are as individuals. There are two different 1% communities. The very rich are 1% and those serving as volunteers in the military forces are another 1% bearing the burden of defending our nation.
When I ran for elected office as a Port Commissioner Candidate years ago I would tell prospective voters who said, “I don’t vote” that there are three requirements of citizenship. Citizens should vote, pay their taxes and serve in the military when called.
Bring Back the Draft
By Eric Holdeman
Selfless service is not something you hear being talked about these days. Today it is much more about me, me, me. Combine that with the fact that we have many more job openings than people to fill them, and you have a crisis developing in our military services which are falling way short of their recruiting goals. While no one is uttering these words, it is time to, “bring back the military draft.”
Coming out of the Vietnam War, in which the draft was such a contentious national issue, an “all-volunteer” military was deemed a good solution to the turmoil around wartime service. This volunteer military began in 1972. With the winding down of the Vietnam War and the dissolution of the Soviet Union United States military strength was drastically reduced from 3.5 million in 1968 to 1.5 million today.
Today only about 1% of our nation’s population is serving in our military forces. This means that the responsibility for serving and protecting our nation is put on the shoulders of a very small minority of those who could serve.
The military services have had an increasingly difficult time in recruiting young people to enlist, falling far short of their recruiting goals and even reducing their target numbers to match the candidates interested in serving.
The quantity of candidates is not the only problem facing the military services. The quality of potential enlistees is also an issue, due to either physical, mental and character requirements. They say that a little more than 20% meet basic requirements to serve. I’ve have observed this firsthand with US Marine recruiters working with high school students to try and get them in shape. I watched many who could not even run for one mile.
Because of the quality issue, one solution has been to reduce the education requirement in order to obtain more candidates. While a high school diploma or GED was once a requirement, other measures are being used to qualify someone to serve.
There are many ramifications for all of the above issues. The defense of our nation is born by a miniscule percentage of our population. Those who do serve have been stretched thin and bore the brunt of both the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, impacting them and their families along with their mental health.
Our last era of a draft was equitable in how it was administered, with each birth year having a lottery and each day assigned a number 1-365. For the record, it is the only lottery I’ve ever won with a “lucky 7” being assigned to me.
What was not fair is that there were many exceptions and deferments for education. Thus the Vietnam War was borne by many minorities and those without the economic means to obtain an college education deferment.
Still today there is a Selective Service registration requirement for eighteen-year-old men so the basic system remains in place. What is needed now is to return to having a military draft that does not have an education deferment that puts all young men, and potentially women, eligible to serve and it will broaden the ethnic, economic and cultural make-up of the personnel who serve in our military services.
To expand this even further would be to institute a two-year requirement of national service for all eighteen-year-old men and women. Yes, everyone would have “two gap years” after high school and there could be multiple ways of serving our nation or community from being in schools as assistants, wildland firefighting or working in our state and national parks, much as the Civilian Conservation Corps did during the Great Depression.
There would of course be howls of pain coming from all sectors of our society. Likely there is no federally elected official willing to provide leadership on such an effort. Thus, like all things difficult, we will muddle along until there is a crisis.
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Eric Holdeman is a former 20-year career army, airborne, ranger, infantry officer.
