Let the other people's children fight for us?

Here’s something to be concerned about: No less an authority than Secretary of Defense Robert Gates fears we’re in danger of nurturing a military that is politically, culturally and even geographically cut off from the rest of us principally because “service in the military has become something for other people to do.â€

Gates’ worry about the growing division between the nation and the volunteers who fight its wars was voiced during an election campaign that failed to address, never mind debate, the two costly wars we have been fighting for a decade.

Speaking in late September at Duke, one of the few major private universities with reserve officer training programs, Gates said that for most citizens, wars have become “an abstraction, a distant and unpleasant series of news items that do not affect them personally.â€

He reminded his student audience that our military recruits come increasingly from the South, the mountain West and small towns. Fewer come from here in the Northeast, the West Coast and the larger cities. Even their training is mostly limited to five states, Georgia, Kentucky, North Carolina, Texas and Washington, before they are shipped to Iraq and Afghanistan for the first of many tours.

That’s another way of saying these professional soldiers are mainly from the Red states, one more contribution to the polarization of America.

All of this would cause one to ask the obvious question. If we are destined to be in a never-ending, worldwide struggle with terrorism, why not have all of our young men and now, our young women, too, share in the necessary sacrifice by reviving the draft?

We forget that the volunteer military was only intended as a peacetime force when it was instituted in the 1970s. Draft registration was reinstated a few years later when it finally occurred to those in charge that there would be a need for more than active duty volunteers and National Guard and Reserve units during a war or two.

Yet, we are now fighting wars with mostly volunteers for the first time since the American Revolution. And because this peacetime force is not large enough, enlistment standards have had to be lowered and troops are unfairly being returned again and again to tours in Afghanistan and Iraq.

 But a draft is not something we can expect from a Congress facing a presidential election in 2012 or a congressional election in 2014 or, a presidential … but you get the idea. As long as we can sustain decades-long holding operations in places like Afghanistan with other people’s sons and daughters doing the fighting, Congress will never even contemplate the revival of a draft.

Gates calls the all-volunteer force, organized when President Nixon ended the draft in 1973, a remarkable success, which, in many ways, it is. But it has left us with a professional army that is easier for presidents to send into combat without the almost obsolete, but still constitutionally correct, congressional declaration of war.

The defense secretary used the speech at Duke to ask our great universities to revive the ROTC, expelled from many campuses since the Vietnam War, and a number have agreed to do so — once the reprehensible don’t ask, don’t tell policy is abandoned. But that would only put a small dent in the problem of having other people fight our wars and have no impact on the enlisted ranks.

And, only a draft would have the additional benefit of making a war fought without finding Iraqi weapons of mass destruction — or finding Osama bin Laden — more difficult to justify or sustain.

Draft everybody’s children and these wars would end in no time.

Dick Ahles is a retired journalist from Simsbury. E-mail him at dahles@hotmail.com.