UNITED STATES: Political elite moving toward reactivating draft

Maria Voukelatos

US Senator John Kerry, now the sole Democratic Party candidate in this November's US presidential election, has called for an expansion of the US Army by an extra 40,000 “active service” troops. Kerry's call reflects a growing recognition by the US political elite that it doesn't have enough combat troops to successfully fight its bloody war of conquest in Iraq.

“Call-ups of part-time troops from the Army National Guard and the Army Reserve to fill the ranks in Iraq have intensified the bipartisan sentiment that the Pentagon doesn't have enough troops to fight an extended war on terrorism while keeping enough well-rested, well-trained troops ready for an emergency”, the December 12 USA Today reported.

In a speech delivered on February 29 at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), Kerry declared that “to replenish our overextended military, as president, I will add 40,000 active-duty army troops, a temporary increase likely to last the remainder of the decade”.

While Kerry has not spelt out how he thinks the US Army could add 40,000 combat troops to its ranks, there are currently two bills before the US Congress which authorise the US president to activate a military draft of men and women between the ages of 18 and 26.

Last November, Democrat Senator Fritz Hollings introduced Senate Bill S.89, which calls for the establishment of a compulsory two-year military term. A companion bill has been introduced in the House of Representatives by Charles Rangel, a New York Democrat.

Dubbed the Universal National Service Act, the bill “would re-institute a draft to compulsory military or alternative national service for men and women, aged 18 to 26, who are citizens or permanent residents of the United States of America”, according to a description on Hollings' web site.

Conscription was abandoned in the US in 1973, and registration for the draft was abandoned in 1975. The US military became an “all-volunteer” force — though, the voluntary part only extended until a person had signed up for military service. After that, except in unusual circumstances, servicemen and women were required under threat of imprisonment, to complete their terms of service — voluntarily or not.

In 1980, Democrat President Jimmy Carter reinstated registration for the draft for all men between the ages of 18 and 25 under an amendment to the Military Selective Service Act. Under the amendment, all male US citizen living in the US or abroad or male permanent residents in the US aged between 18 and 25 were required to register with the Selective Service System. Failure to register is punishable by up to five years in prison and a fine of as much as US$250,000.

In 2001, the US Congress passed the No Child Left Behind: Elementary and Secondary Education Act, which US President George Bush signed into law in January 2002. Under this law, schools are required to hand information on all grade 11 and 12 students to military recruiters, unless the student's parents objected. Government funding for schools would be withheld if this requirement was not implemented by school districts.

Venus Mesui, parent coordinator at the Street Academy, a small Oakland high school that has banned military recruiters from coming on to its grounds, said the recruiters' pitches centre on money. “It's hard for poor students to resist offers of signing bonuses and tens of thousands of dollars for college”, she told the November 13 Oakland Tribune.

“You know how the military is now. They're not coming home and when they do, they're coming home in boxes”, she added.

In November, the Oakland school district turned over names and phone numbers of almost 4000 students to military recruiters. Under the No Child Left Behind law, the Oakland schools stood to lose more than US$25 million in federal government funds if the district did not give out names to recruiters.

The district school board voted last year to comply with the law, but stressed that parents would be informed they could sign an “opt-out” form to keep their children's names and numbers private.

Some school districts have responded to the No Child Left Behind law by designing new consent forms. Unless parents signed them, information about their children would not be sent to the military recruiters.

Over the Christmas period, 20 California school districts — including those in San Francisco, Beverly Hills, Santa Monica, and Santa Cruz — were warned by the defence department that consent forms that automatically withheld student information from military recruiters did not comply with the law.

Some dissenting school districts are protesting even as they comply, inviting antiwar groups to speak at their campuses. School officials in Oregon have put a disclaimer on their consent forms that read: “We do not support or endorse the federal law requiring information to be provided to military recruiters, but will comply with federal law.”

From Green Left Weekly, March 17, 2004.

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