Draft

To the Editors of The Crimson:

Reactivation of draft registration is obviously essential and it may well be necessary to call up registrants for fundamental training (as was done in 1940) if we are not to find our reserve components so short of qualified personnel that our military capacity will no longer effectively deter Russian aggression.

However, the youths who oppose the draft as increasing the risk of inadvertent transition from "cold war" to full scale war have valid historical argument on their side.

On each occasion when the politicians of the United States have raised a draft Army, they have tended to use it as the conscripted mass armies of the European monarchies were used by their rulers and have failed to respect the value of the individual lives of our citizen soldiers.

In World War I, Wilson planned to raise an army of two million Americans to be ground up by German machine guns on the Western Front when all the contribution necessary from the United States to prevent a German victory was sea and air power and economic support.

Similarly, in World War II, our leaders wastefully committed massive ground forces in Europe and planned an invasion of southern Japan with a contemplated death toll of over a million American lives after Japan had already been reduced to such military impotence that even without the atom bomb, air attack, naval bombardment and blockade during the fall and winter of 1945-6 would inevitably have brought about her surrender at minimal cost in American blood.

In both Korea and Viet Nam, many thousands of American lives were uselessly thrown away because the politicians, bemused by the apparently inexhaustible supply of draftable bodies, chose to abandon sound military principles and send them into battle with artificial restrictions imposed on the use of our air and sea power which were the same as sending them to be slaughtered with one hand tied behind their backs.

None of these slaughters, the first two narrowly averted by the fortunate swift collapse of the enemy, could have been contemplated if the politicians had been compelled to frame their strategic planning around the capabilities of forces raised from volunteers.

Routine defense needs including those of long term occupation forces and forces for fighting "brush fire" wars should be made up of volunteer, long term, career professionals, not from short term conscripts.

Any reactivation of the draft should be accompanied by a requirement (statutory in the first instance, and thereafter, as soon as possible, incorporated in a constitutional amendment) that drafted personnel shall not be committed to combat except in a time of declared war or in the event of armed attack upon or forcible occupation of United States territory.

In 1948, like most reserve officers, I favored revival of the draft. Looking back, I can see that our country and the world would be much better off today if our politicians had been compelled to limit our military commitments to those for which volunteers could be found. Franklin N. Cunningham '41   Cdr. USNR [Retired]