The
all-volunteer Army is not working. The problem with such an Army is
that there are limited numbers of people who will freely choose to
participate in an enterprise in which they may well be shot, blown up,
burned to death or suffer some other excruciating fate.
The
all-volunteer Army is fine in peacetime, and in military routs like the
first gulf war. But when the troops are locked in a prolonged war that
yields high casualties, and they look over their shoulders to see if
reinforcements are coming from the general population, they find -as
they’re finding now - that no one is there.
Although it has been
lowering standards, raising bonuses and all but begging on its knees,
the Army hasn’t reached its recruitment quota in months. There are
always plenty of hawks in America. But the hawks want their wars fought
with other people’s children.
The problem now is that most
Americans have had plenty of time to digest the images of people being
blown up in Baghdad and mutilated in Fallujah, and they know that
thousands of our troops are coming home in coffins, or without their
arms, or without their legs, or paralyzed, or horribly burned.
War
in the abstract can often seem like a good idea. Politicians get the
patriotic blood flowing with their bombast and lies. But the
flesh-and-blood reality of war is very different.
The war in
Iraq was sold to the American public the way a cheap car salesman sells
a lemon. Dick Cheney assured the nation that Americans in Iraq would be
“greeted as liberators.” Kenneth Adelman of the Pentagon’s Defense
Policy Board said the war would be a “cakewalk.” And Donald Rumsfeld
said on National Public Radio: “I can’t say if the use of force would
last five days or five weeks or five months, but it certainly isn’t
going to last any longer than that.”
The hot-for-war crowd never
mentioned young men and women being shipped back to their families
deceased or maimed. Nor was there any suggestion that a broad swath of
the population should share in the sacrifice.
Now, with the war
going badly and the Army chasing potential recruits with a ferocity
that is alarming, a backlash is developing that could cripple the
nation’s ability to wage war without a draft. Even as the ranks of new
recruits are dwindling, many parents and public school officials are
battling the increasingly heavy-handed tactics being used by military
recruiters who are desperately trying to sign up high school kids.
“I
started getting calls and people coming to the school board meeting
testifying that they were getting inundated with phone calls from
military recruiters,” said Sandra Lowe, a board member and former
president of the Sonoma Valley Unified School District in California.
She
said parents complained that in some schools “the military recruiters
were on campus all the time,” sometimes handing out “things that the
parents did not want in their homes, including very violent video
games.”
Ms. Lowe said she was especially disturbed by a joint
effort of the Defense Department and a private contractor, disclosed
last week, to build a database of 30 million 16- to 25-year-olds,
complete with Social Security numbers, racial and ethnic identification
codes, grade point averages and phone numbers. The database is to be
scoured for youngsters that the Pentagon believes can be persuaded to
join the military.
“To have this national data collection is just over the top,” Ms. Lowe said.
Like many other parents resisting aggressive recruitment measures, Ms. Lowe has turned to a Web site - leavemychildalone.org - that counsels parents on their rights and the rights of their children. She described the site as “wonderful.”
What’s
not so wonderful is that this war with no end in sight is becoming an
ever more divisive issue for Americans. A clear divide is developing
between those who want to continue the present course and those who
feel it’s time to craft an exit strategy.
But with volunteers
in extremely short supply, an even more emotional divide is occurring
over the ways in which soldiers for this war are selected. Increasing
numbers of Americans are recognizing the inherent unfairness of the
all-volunteer force in a time of war. That emotional issue will become
more heated as the war continues. And it is sure to resonate in the
wars to come.
E-mail: bobherb@nytimes.com
