52 Time October 21–28, 2019
and wage war they have. Without congres-
sional approval. Without updating the current
Authorization for Use of Military Force, which
was passed by Congress one week after 9/11. Cur-
rently we live in a highly militarized society but
one which most of us largely perceive to be “at
peace.” This is one of the great counterintuitive
realities of the draft. A draft doesn’t increase our
militarization. It decreases it.
A draft places militarism on a leash.
In the run-up to the 2018 midterm elections,
42% of Americans didn’t know whether we were
still at war in Afghanistan. There are few debates
in public life that should merit greater attention
from its citizens than whether or not to commit
their sons and daughters to fight and possibly to
die. Imagine the debate surrounding troop levels
in Afghanistan, or Iraq, or Syria, if some of those
troops were draftees, or if your own child were el-
igible for the draft. Imagine if we lived in a society
where the commitment of 18- and 19-year-olds to
a combat zone generated the same breathless at-
tention as a college- admissions scandal. Imagine
Twitter with a draft going on; snowplow parents
along with millennial cancel culture could save us
by canceling the next unnecessary war.
By the end of Vietnam, after President Nixon
eliminated the draft, the U.S. military was in
shambles. It had morale problems. Drug prob-
lems. Racial problems. It had lost America’s first
war, and with the Soviet invasion of Afghani-
stan and our failed bid to rescue our hostages
from Tehran on the horizon, it seemed poised to
lose the next one. From the detritus of the post-
Vietnam military, a generation of officers—Colin
Powell, Norman Schwarzkopf, Anthony Zinni,
to name a few—began the decades- long work of
thoroughly rebuilding and professionalizing its
ranks. The most visible result of their toil played
out in 1991, with scenes of ultra-sleek U.S. bat-
tle tanks trouncing the Iraqi military (the world’s
fifth largest at the time) in a whopping hundred-
hour-long ground war. More recently, we’ve seen
the high-tech efficiency and lethality of our mil-
itary in its rapid ouster of the Taliban from Af-
ghanistan and in the rush to Baghdad in 2003.
Today, among many officers, particularly
those senior officers who shepherded in that
change, the idea of returning draftees to the mil-
itary seems entirely regressive. Why would you
degrade the finest fighting machine the world
has ever known? It’s not a logic without merit,
but professionalization has had its own draw-
backs, ones that are perhaps more insidious to
the fabric of a democracy than a draft would be.
Not long ago, I was speaking on a panel about
the integration of women into frontline combat
units. The Department of Defense had recently
Nation