@collapsedsquid On the other hand, given proportional manpower required relative to population size (small, due to force multipliers), and the wave of response to 9/11, would a draft have prevented the Iraq War from getting launched?
I’m not so sure. And that’s an enormous political cost to pay if it may not even work for that goal.
While the article called it a draft and I sort of continued that, in truth what I think it’s suggesting is some sort of mandatory national service program. “Requiring everyone to serve“ is the phrase used in the article.
And I wasn’t suggesting it as policy, I was discussing it as something to react to.
Right, I just mean the general case of “well America would be less likely to randomly go to war if it had a draft,” since that did come up. I do think we should be looking for ways to prevent the next Iraq War, I just don’t think that would work for that. (Though I’m not quite opposed national service in principle.)
As for left-leaning youngsters learning to fight, while the older Millennials are more strongly Democrat, apparently the younger ones are only weakly so, and the dividing line happens to correspond to how old people were during the Bush Administration.
(I don’t think the Bush Administration realized just how much damage they were doing to the cause of Conservatism itself in America.)