by Liam Kloef

Created on: November 21, 2011

Due in great part to the very unpopular war in Vietnam, in 1973 the US of A suspended conscription and our all-volunteer force appeared. Since it is the U.S. Army branch of the armed forces that has the most personnel and does most of the fighting in wartime, we call it the all-volunteer Army.

These days, there is a good deal of talk about how unfair this all-volunteer Army is: only people that want to be in the Army are there, and so not everyone is pulling his (or her) weight. If we had a draft, people that didn’t want to serve in the military would be forced to.

I’m old enough to remember that charges of inequity were leveled at the draft: too many poorer people got drafted; and if you were a college student, married, or had any kind of “connections,” you could avoid being drafted. When people talk about reinstating the draft (often the same people that rail about “too much government” in our lives), they’ll never mention those unintended inequities.

Some people prefer to call this all-volunteer Army a professional one. Enlistees join, ostensibly, to because they want to serve and they want to learn what’s known as “the art of war.” Officers attend any one of the “service academies” or choose to go to an officer candidate school. But any volunteer can soon discover just what the old draftee discovered: that military life isn’t for him.

I doubt there would even be a debate between keeping our all-volunteer Army and reconstituting the draft if, sadly, our all-volunteer force wasn’t so badly misused as it has been since Vietnam. And it has been badly misused by the very people that are supposed to be the leaders: the generals (and admirals) and the career civilian appointees in the Pentagon.

Even when there was still a draft, the Army was misused by its own leaders.  Immediately after WWII, the services were decimated by people wearing stars, because a decision was made that we’d never fight another world war. So when war broke out between N. and S. Korea and the Chinese sent in its hundreds of T-34 tanks to N. Korea, we barely had an army to help defend S. Korea in that first major skirmish of the “Cold War.” To conceal that fact, a new term was invented: police action. We weren’t fighting a war; we staged a police action.

The Korean War ended in a stalemate, and we still keep troops stationed at the

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