Should the U.S. Reinstitute the Draft?
General Stanley McChrystal says yes:
"I think we ought to have a draft. I think if a nation goes to war, it shouldn't be solely be represented by a professional force, because it gets to be unrepresentative of the population," McChrystal said at a late-night event June 29 at the 2012 Aspen Ideas Festival. "I think if a nation goes to war, every town, every city needs to be at risk. You make that decision and everybody has skin in the game."
Most recent advocates of a return to conscription have usually pushed the idea because they believe a draft would act as a check on Washington's interventionist tendencies. If more people have "skin in the game," there would be a lot less patience for charging off into this or that country's civil war. That may be true for big ticket wars like the invasion of Iraq, but those are rare affairs. Most interventions rely heavily on air power and local proxies and wouldn't require mass mobilization in the U.S., thus negating much of the restraining power of that a draft would supposedly exercise.
For his part, McChrystal doesn't really advance this rationale (not all that surprising) but instead emphasizes the costs born by the military and their families due to repeated deployments.
