Politics: Don't Draft Anybody

Yesterday afternoon, Tapped took a novel stance on a Wall Street Journal oped by a soldier's mom lamenting the lack of upper-class white people in the armed services. Tapped agrees that reinstating the draft would be the only way to change the military's current format: poor southern whites and poor minorities from all over. Understandably, Tapped goes after the oped's author for bashing Harvard and the Ivy League for taking a liberal, anti-war stance and therefore somehow ruining the concept of service for America's elite.

Tapped says, don't slag Harvard, the Ivy League or even liberals for this problem. I say, this problem is more about economics and opportunity than anything else. But the unacknowledged corrolary to the discussion of the attitude towards military service is the Vietnam War. The conduct of the U.S. in that war, and the last thirty-some-odd years of dissecting and analyzing that conduct, have poisoned the attitude of many Americans toward service. To the young people then -- who weren't hippies or anything of the sort -- the war in Vietnam represented the government's failed policies, and the men and women who fought and died there represent unfulfilled potential ruined by the government's irresponsible conduct. The relative dearth of war in the years after then (and I'm not complaining) let that attitude linger. Military service became equated with going somewhere and getting killed for government policies that were without justification. We can fight somewhere else about whether that attitude is still relevant; what's true is that it lingers, and the military enlistment targets who don't get that trickling down through their families are the young, poor, and often opportunity-challenged people who make up our military today.