Service call.

• Author: Cachion, Peter
• Position: Letters - Letter to the Editor

Phillip Carter and Paul Glastris's "The Case for the Draft" (March) is a valuable contribution to the debate over ameliorating the military "manpower crisis." I believe, however, that the conscription proposal and its alternative--the military or civilian service requirement for admission to a four-year college--need a lot of work before they might be practical.

As Carter, a former Army officer, knows well, there's no such thing as a "two-year enlistment," as the article seems to imply. Under current law, all initial enlistments are for eight years. The portion of the eight years not served on active duty remains an obligation for reserve service: if not in a unit, then in the Individual Ready Reserve (IRR). This continuing commitment, which many of my fellow reservists have found is no longer pro forma, would need to be retained in the authors' plan. Indeed, an extended reserve service commitment is the whole point of their plan--"a massive surge capacity of troops in reserve to quickly augment the active-duty force in times of emergency."

If there's political resistance now to a wholesale call up of reservists, imagine how much more there would be if most reservists were conscripts or collegians who will have served their two years, and who will be extremely reluctant to return for a wartime deployment (possibly being yanked out of the four-year college they'd already served two years on active duty just to get into). We might end up with a much larger but less well-trained reserve component comprised of soldiers far more resistant to being deployed than those we now have.

Under the proposed serve-if-you-want-to-go-to-college plan, class tensions in civilian life would likely be exacerbated because a four-year college degree would become a six-year degree (with the first two spent peeling potatoes, emptying bedpans, or patrolling the streets of Baghdad), leading the college grad cohort to consider itself even more of an...