Make national service mandatory for all.

• Author: Keisling, Phil

In 1973, the United States made a big mistake--and so did I.

That year, an unlikely coalition of anti-Vietnam War liberals and Milton Friedman-inspired conservatives convinced Richard Nixon and Congress to abolish the military draft. Also that year, I turned 18, drew a high lottery number, and wasn't about to volunteer for a military still fighting a war I strongly opposed.

But neither did I seriously think about volunteering for the Peace Corps, VISTA, or similar organizations. I told myself I'd get around to it someday--and then proceeded directly to Yale and built a career that now has included journalism, service in the state legislature, and election to statewide office in Oregon.

Twenty years later, the foolishness of both decisions increasingly gnaws at me. I have become convinced that the U.S.--like most industrialized nations--should enact a mandatory system of national service. But we should go much further than the draft ever did and even further than the systems widely used elsewhere in the world.

Such a system should be mandatory, not voluntary. It should be broad, not narrow, with exceptions based on inability rather than personal inconvenience. (Exceptions for prison inmates, for example, but definitely not for the college-bound or well-heeled). It should involve women as well as men, in stark contrast to our draft and the male-only service plans of most other countries. Eventually, it should ask something of all Americans, just as the jury system (at least in theory) does now.

Obviously, national service would be costly and raises a host of practical and logistical problems. For example, given that between 3 and 4 million Americans turn 18 each year, a full-fledged program might easily cost $50 billion a year, including living expenses, supervisory costs, and G.I. Bill-style benefits for additional education and training.

Participants would have to be properly trained and supervised. They would need to do real jobs, not make-work. Serious problems with discipline, drug and alcohol abuse, criminal behavior, and shoddy work would be inevitable. It would require the kind of well-planned, efficient government organization that most Americans consider highly doubtful if not impossible.

Considerable obstacles, to be sure. But we've risen to considerable organizational challenges before, from World War II and the sixties' space program to the recent flooding in the Midwest. And consider the costs, tangible and intangible, of not...