Now I'm not quite sure what a "reverse component of the uniformed services" is, so I'll assume they meant to say "reserve" there. (To be fair, apparently Senator Hollings knows how to run a spell checker - the Senate version doesn't have the problems the House version has.)

Let's look at some numbers, shall we?

According to the 2000 census data, there are 34,507,653 people between the ages of 18 and 26.
At the end of FY-2001, there were about 480,000 people in the Army, 350,000 people in the Army National Guard, and 205,000 in the Army Reserve. There were about 172,600 people in the Marines (active duty) and another 39,200 in the reserves. In '03 the Air Force looks to have had about 370,000 or so active duty personnel, with about 108,000 or so in the Air National Guard (I can't find the actual number in the Air Force Reserve, but it's at least 74,000). The Navy seems to have had over 380,000 active and 156,000 inactive personnel. Adding all these numbers up, you get a total military size of around 2,334,800 people.

So if you were to assume that every single person in the military, active or inactive, were in the age range of 18-26 (which is clearly not the case, but let's just go with it), drafting everyone else in that age range would produce a military that's about 14.8 times the size it is now. Furthermore, assuming that every last additional person was a brand new E-1 making a whopping $1104.00 per month, you'd be increasing the military payroll by $35,518,829,712 per month, or $426,225,956,544 per year. (In reality, since E-1s get a raise after 4 months, it would be closer to $460,740,978,921 per year.)

Consider all the new tanks and planes and boats and guns you'd need to buy so that these people would have something to do. Consider the number of bases that would be needed to accomodate all these people. Consider the expenses that would be incurred training them all. If you were somehow able to come up with the total cost, it would make the current military budget look like a bargain in comparison.

That's, umm, really just not something that could we could afford, especially if you consider what would happen to the tax base with that number of people removed from it.


Ok, next scenario: Everyone just goes into the reserves.

Well, you still need to train them, right? You still need something for them to do, which means tanks and planes and boats and guns. You still need someplace for them to hang out when they're on duty. Which means it's still really, really expensive, but you don't need to pay that $460 billion dollar annually for their salaries.


Ok, last scenario: They all have to take civilian jobs in an area related to the national defense.

What exactly does this mean? Well, I can't see defense contractors like Boeing or Raytheon or General Dynamics hiring these millions of untrained kids to work on military contracts. They wouldn't have the skills or knowledge to do anything constructive.

These kids certainly wouldn't be taking the jobs away from the civilians that currently have jobs that support the military. For one thing they wouldn't be qualified for them, and secondly you really couldn't afford to have someone new to train for each and every such job every two years.

So would jobs have to be created for these people who, by law, would be forced to work in a given area? Doesn't sound real promising to me...


Furthermore, there seems to be no provision for phasing it in. That means that in the first year there would be 30-some million kids who would need to be employed in one of these areas. In the second year this number would go up by about 3.7 million (for all the new kids coming into the system - remember that you don't automatically get discharged after 26, you just can't be drafted after that age).

But the third year, well, all of a sudden those 30-some million kids would be eligible to quit, which would have a very interesting (profound even) effect on whatever activity they'd all been doing. After that point there would be something like 7-8 million kids required to serve pretty much continuously.


And what possible reason could they give for excluding kids who're enrolled in college? Hell, if they still want them to have to serve they could defer their service until they either graduate or reach a certain age (25 maybe), at which point their service would begin.

Nevermind that women still really aren't allowed in combat, so why specifically include them? Oh sure, I'm all for making the draft fair, but what're you going to do with 17 million people who you're not going to send overseas to fight?

Also note that it would compel foreign nationals who were in this country, for example, to go to college to serve in the US military. I'm not sure how good an idea that would be...


[my opinion]
Basically, these bills are written very, very poorly.

But wait, there's more! Take a look at just who introduced and co-sponsored them! Every single one of 'em is a Democrat. These bills were introduced as a way to scare people. They wanted people to worry that they'd end up having to sacrifice because of things like the war on terror or the Iraq war.

And if I remember correctly, they were introduced right around the time that somebody was claiming that a disproportionate number of the people doing the fighting were minorities. I recall hearing a lot of stuff along the lines of "we need to make sure that those rich white folks' kids have to fight too."

These bills were introduced with the sole intention of scaring the crap out of as many people as possible. They want people to think things like "gee, if things like the Iraq war are going to make me have to be in the Army for 2 years, then screw that!" And the people who wrote and sponsored these bills are having a grand old time. They get to wave the flag, saying things like how they're just doing what needs to be done to ensure that the military has the personnel it needs to do the jobs we're asking of it. But what they're really trying to do is get people to think "holy crap, we need to put a nice peace-loving Democrat in office so that this never happens!"

It's just one gigantic scare tactic by some Democrats in order to try to make a point. If you take just a few minutes to really think about things, it becomes a really stupid point. But they don't really have to worry so much about too many people doing that pesky "thinking" thing, do they? After all, a lot of people are worried, right?

There may come a time when they need to reinstitute the draft. But making military service mandatory for everyone between the ages of 18 and 26? Come on, that's just ridiculous.
[/my opinion]