A military conscription proposal for Obama’s new decades-long war

America the Vulnerable appears to increasingly lack the national will to stop the president’s latest journey into war. So I was delighted yesterday to watch the clip of Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) bringing a challenge to Secretary of State John Kerry’s new strategy against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). Kerry and the president are exercising “the worse judgment possible,” said Corker. His challenge to Kerry left Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) “shaking and trembling,” she said. But today, Corker stands alone between America and spiraling mayhem.

Lonely are the brave who speak up at the beginning of a war, and never has one moved so quickly as this. But worst judgment is ahead. Another decades-long war will certainly require military conscription. It has already been proposed by a variety of military experts and it is just waiting around the corner.

{mosads}”Why not create a tiered system of military service? While our expeditionary forces — Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines — would remain volunteer and professional, the reserves — particularly the National Guard — might be rebuilt through some form of conscription,” Ken Allard recently wrote in support.

But there is always the fear that military conscription may not be equitable. Yes, we should have drafted out of college, they said after Vietnam, so as not to have put the historic burden placed on the more willing and patriotic working-class. If it is of any consolation, I was drafted out of college. And all ethnic groups must certainly be included. But structurally and constitutionally, we are not a country of ad hoc ethnic groups and competing classes. We are a nation of states. Equity is indeed a draft issue and if we are to have a draft the burden must be a shared state by state.

But before they start sending out draft notices, they might refer to an op-ed by Danielle Allen of the Institute for Advanced Studies on military service. By the end of the draft in 1973, she writes in The Washington Post, “military service was distributed pretty evenly across regions. But that is no longer true.”

“The residential patterns for current veterans and the patterns of state-level contributions of new recruits to the all-volunteer military have a distinct geographic tilt. And tellingly, the map of military service since 1973 aligns closely with electoral maps distinguishing red from blue states,” she writes.

Incredibly: “Over the past four decades, which states have disappeared from the top 10? California, New Jersey, Massachusetts and Illinois, all big blue states that have voted Democratic in the past five presidential elections. These states and another blue state, New York, which ranked 12th in 1969, are among the 10 states with the lowest number of post-Vietnam vets per capita. New Jersey comes in 50th of the 50 states; just 1 percent of current residents have served in the military since Vietnam.”

I have a proposal here for an equitable draft and I’d be delighted if Corker entertained it, as he has thankfully taken the initiative in this fight which reaches this time to the soul of America.

In order to have fairly distributed military service among states and insure that each state carries its own weight, we continue with the successful and honorable all-volunteer army. But if a state does not reach its fair share through volunteerism, then that state will be subject to military conscription to bring it up to par with the other states.

That way we insure that in the future that Kerry’s Massachusetts and Boxer’s California share equally in the fight with Corker’s loyal Tennesseans and Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s (R) Texans.

Quigley is a prize-winning writer who has worked more than 35 years as a book and magazine editor, political commentator and reviewer. For 20 years he has been an amateur farmer, raising Tunis sheep and organic vegetables. He lives in New Hampshire with his wife and four children. Contact him at quigley1985@gmail.com.