Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, February 1, 1991 TAG: 9102010750
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-7 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: PERRY MORGAN
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
In those terms, the president's judgment was sound. But is it right, as former Secretary of the Navy James Webb has asked, to have such a "complete separation of people in power in Washington from the people at peril in the Persian Gulf"? Webb was referring to the fact that the military is not representative of the country. It is blacker and poorer than the population as a whole.
Columnist Mark Shields has put it this way: "From the enlisted ranks of today's military, the sons of the powerful and the privileged, of the policy-makers and the politicians, are overwhelmingly missing from action."
These comments have moral authority but no more now than at any time since the draft was officially ended in 1973. If the military forces must reflect the population in terms of race and income, then there must be a draft.
And if there is to be a draft, it should be devised and debated on its own merits - not as a device to tip the scales against use of the military force in a particular crisis.
Even if activated today, a draft cannot deliver trained forces to the Gulf before American support for the war runs out. That support is bottomed on presidential promises of a swift and decisive victory.
Besides, it's a bit late in the day for Shields to be discovering that Washington is "an elitist place" and that the "political and journalistic establishments of this city do live in a different country from those Americans whose lives are now at risk in the Persian Gulf."
More to the point, there's nothing new in Main Street aversion to conscription in peacetime, or to the avoidance of it by some in wartime through exemptions or deferments of dubious moral merits.
The volunteer services do not reflect the bias of various Washington elites as much as they do a consensus of the American people. Americans obviously want and are willing to pay for a professional military to fight wars, as a police force is paid to fight crime.
That's a neat concept. It works to the economic and educational interests not only of blacks, whose presence in the military is about twice that in the total population, but of lower-income whites as well. And quite possibly the volunteers worry less about the unfairness of their having to fight everybody's war than those, Jesse Jackson included, who demagogically cast the war in racial terms.
Visiting troops just before the war began, Georgia Congressman John Lewis found "very high morale among black soldiers" and "a great degree of interracial cooperation, a much greater sense of family, a greater sense of togetherness among the military people than I see in civilian life." Lewis, a tough-minded advocate of civil rights, is not given to sentimental judgments.
The social-equity question lingers: War blood should not be shed along lines of race or class. The concept is morally unsound, divisive and, thus, ultimately even impractical. The question cannot be settled, though, by saying any major military engagement must reinstate the draft and strike a balance of sacrifice.
If the United States is going to be both "shield" and "storm" in an unstable world, it should have draftees in service before the question of war arises. The duty of the elites is to confront the issue of a draft in terms of a coming debate over the proper role of U.S. forces. If military burden-sharing is unbalanced among Americans, it is balanced, on the world stage, upon Americans. Neither arrangement is workable for the long haul.
by CNB