Military Draft Alert

In the second debate, President Bush asked us to “forget all this talk about a draft” and refused to answer the question of how he would prevent it—then he rudely cut off Charles Gibson’s next question as to why the overuse of Reservists on long deployments was not a back-door draft.

Yet the issue of the draft deserves a fair debate based on the facts before the election.

President Bush also said in the second debate that he “hears there’s rumors on the Internets” about the draft. What you are about to read is not a rumor and the Freedom of Information Act document now posted on the Web has been acknowledged as authentic by Selective Service Spokesman Dan Amon, speaking to the Rocky Mountain News. The timeline below shows that the Selective Service System is not telling the truth when they say this is only “food for thought”—the SSS is in fact preparing for the real possibility of a Skills, Medical and Combat Draft for 2005. Congress of course must still pass a 1-page trigger resolution reauthorizing current conscription law, but the Selective Service will by early 2005 have geared up the entire draft system and be prepared to register more than 40 million Americans for a new Skills Draft and the Medical Draft; they will be using complex forms that will track a person’s skills—man or woman.

The most important thing to keep in mind about the draft before the election is that, if it wanted to avoid a draft, the Bush Administration could add several billion dollars to the Defense budget and add 2 active-duty divisions to the military to save the Volunteer Army. John Kerry is actually proposing doing just that in his $7 billion plan to add the 2 divisions, and to preserve a purely Volunteer Army with increased benefits, a doubling of Special Ops, and several other programs like his volunteer Civilian Stability Corps (kind of a Peace Corps on steroids).

Yet instead Bush is stretching the Army so thin, they are now calling up the retired Individual Ready Reserve—and they have even sent Company B of the Arlington Color Guard to the Mideast, giving them real bullets instead of the blanks they were firing at military funerals.

If the Republicans want to preserve the Volunteer Army, as Bush said in the debates, and not have to reinstate the combat draft, why has the Bush Administration not added the several billion needed to avoid having to call a draft? Out of the $200 billion allocated for Iraq, not one penny was ever allocated to do this. It’s as if Bush deliberately wants to wreck the Volunteer Army so the country has to call a draft.

On October 4, Republican Rep. Tom Delay attempted to defuse fears about a Bush Draft by calling for a vote on Democrat Charlie Rangel’s protest legislation HR163, which would have (1) expanded the draft from only men 18–25, to women and men aged 18–34, and (2) reinstated the compulsory draft immediately. Not only was the legislation defeated by a vote of 402–2, Rangel voted against his own bill—a House first. The Republicans are saying that since the Rangel legislation has been defeated, no one need worry about a re-instatement of the draft if President Bush is re-elected.

The truth is that any President can go to Congress under the Military Selective Service Act, the current registration law, and ask for re-authorization of the Combat Draft. All Congress need do is pass a 1-page “trigger resolution” and the Combat Draft for men 18–25 is back. At the same time, the Medical Draft is automatically activated for men and women, 18–44, with no deferments for health reasons. The NY Times on Oct. 19 published a long article on a subcontractor, Widemeyer Communications, that over the summer consulted the SSS on how a Medical Draft could be started up with minimal attention. The SSS said 36,000 doctors and nurses would be taken in the first batch of draftees. Why would Bush need so many? 36,000 is a huge number.

The main worry for young people is that beyond Iraq, Bush and Cheney are following the neocon plan that would involve the invasion of still more countries, such as Syria and Iran. In fact, Wesley Clark charges in his book Winning Modern Wars, that a senior Pentagon official told him in 2001 that there was a 5-year plan to topple 7 countries: Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Iran, Libya, Sudan and Somalia. Assuming Libya is now off the list, that still leaves five countries.

Very worrisome to those in the anti-draft movement was the Family Circle July 13 “Could Your Child Be Drafted?”, in which Rick Jahnkow, program coordinator of the nonprofit Project on Youth and Non-Military Opportunities, had found out that “Karl Rove polled Republican members of Congress on how they felt about the draft. They said they'd support the President.” Despite Family Circle’s circulation of 23 million, this charge was never refuted by the White House, no doubt because the moderate Republican Congressmen who had told Jahnkow about Rove’s polling would then come forward with the truth.

But there are also concerns about actions the Bush Administration and the Selective Service are quietly taking behind the scenes, not only to make the Combat and Medical Drafts ready but also to gear up a new kind of draft: the Skills Draft.

The facts on the Skills Draft

This account is confirmed by (1) the internal Agenda document recovered through the Freedom of Information Act, now posted on the Web and acknowledged as real by the SSS, and (2) the statements of the Pentagon, Selective Service Congressional liason Richard Flavahan, and Acting Director Lewis Brodsky.

We now know that on February 11, 2003, Charles Abell, the Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness, and William Carr, Deputy Undersecretary for Military Personnel Policy, met with Lewis Brodsky, the Acting Director of the Selective Service, Flavahan, and some other officials. This is the highest-level meeting you could have about the draft, outside of Rumsfeld and his inner circle. The proposed changes discussed in this meeting include:

• Allow a non-combat draft for shortages in critical skills, without calling a combat draft.  This non-combat Skills Draft would induct men and women ages 18 to 34.
• Fill labor shortages of all kinds throughout not only DoD but the Dept. of Homeland Security and other agencies as well, especially high-paying professional positions like computer networking specialist or linguist. However, truck drivers, cooks, and several hundred other skills are also considered “critical.”
• Create a single-point, all-inclusive database, in which every young person would be forced to send in a “self-declaration”—like an IRS form—of all of their critical skills, chosen from a long list of several hundred occupations, similar to the Air Force Specialty Code with Skills Identifier. The usual penalties of imprisonment and/or a $250,000 fine would apply to all non-registrants.
• Upgrade the Medical Draft so that it collects data on skill sets and other information in the same way the Skills Draft would.
• Reduce induction time from being able to deliver all inductees in 193 days down to just 90 days for skills and medical inductees.

The Agenda document begins by declaring:

With known shortages of military personnel with certain critical skills, and with the need for the nation to be capable of responding to domestic emergencies as part of Homeland Security planning, changes should be made in the Selective Service System’s registration program and primary mission.

And goes on:

Defense manpower officials concede there are critical shortages of military personnel with certain special skills, such as medical personnel, linguists, computer network engineers, etc. The costs of attracting and retaining such personnel for military-service could be prohibitive, leading some officials to conclude that while a conventional draft may never be needed, a draft of men and women possessing these critical skills may be warranted in a future crisis, if too few volunteer.

So the Agenda document proposes:

In line with today’s needs, the SSS structure, programs and activities should be re-engineered towards maintaining a national inventory of American men and (for the first time) women, ages 18 through 34, with an added focus on identifying individuals with critical skills.

The head of the Selective Service then explains to the Deputy Undersecretaries how the Skills Draft would work:

. . . In addition to the basic identifying information collected in the current program, the expanded and revised program would require all registrants to indicate whether they have been trained in, possess, and professionally practice, one or more skills critical to national security or community health and safety. This could take the form of an initial “self-declaration” as a part of the registration process. Men and women would enter on the SSS registration form a multi-digit number representing their specific critical skill (e.g., similar to military occupational specialty or Armed Forces Specialty Code with Skill Identifier), taken from a lengthy list of skills to be compiled and published by the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security. Individuals proficient in more than one critical skill would list the practiced skill in which they have the greatest degree of experience and competency. They would also be required to update reported information as necessary until they reach the age 35. This unique data base would provide the military (and national, state, and municipal government agencies) with immediately available links to vital human resources . . . in effect, a single, most accurate and complete, national inventory of young Americans with special skills.

In short, if a Skills Draft and Medical Draft are authorized by Bush and the Republican Congress in 2005, nearly 40 million young people and a somewhat overlapping 13.5 million doctors, nurses and specialists ages 20–44 will have to go to their local Post Office and register with the IRS. The form will have on it a list of several hundred skills for the Skills Draft, and at least 61 medical specialties for the Medical Draft form, probably along with a host of other medical occupations, from dental lab technician to health forms processor. Under penalty of a $250,000 fine, these tens of millions of Americans will “self-declare” their name, address, and all of their skills—and they could be drafted for any one of them—by writing down the coded number for that occupation. Recently, the DoD asked the IRS to help them track down the whereabouts of 50,000 Ready Reserve soldiers they had lost track of, so not registering could be very problematic in 2005.

This newly recovered document and the actions that the SSS admits they are taking in 2004 proves that at the very least, a Skills Draft and Medical Draft are being quietly readied for 2005—“just in case.”

From the FOI Agenda document, we now know that at the end of the Feb. 11 meeting the Head of the Selective Service presented the Pentagon with three 3 options:  Option 1 was to maintain the status quo of male-only registration and the not-quite ready Medical Draft.  Option 2 was to put the whole Selective Service into “Deep Standby” with reduced funding.  From all indications, and from the statements of the SSS itself (see timeline below), the Pentagon has obviously decided to go ahead with Option 3a and Option 3b, which read:

Next Step A.  #3. Restructure the SSS and shift its peacetime focus to accommodate DoD’s most likely requirements in a crisis. Plan for conducting a more likely draft of individual with special and critical skills.

a. Minimum requirement: SSS mission guidance and time lines must be redefined promptly by DoD to allow more relevant pre-mobilization planning and funding for the possibility of a critical skills draft at M+90 or sooner [M+ is the number of days from authorization of a draft to delivery of the manpower to the DoD —ed.]. Peacetime registration of men 18 through 25 would continue, but consideration would also be given to identifying men with certain critical skills among these year-of-birth groupings. A post-mobilization plan would also be devised and computer programming accomplished for a full-blown critical skills draft. The HCPDS program is completed, brought to the forefront of SSS readiness planning, and tested through exercises . . .

b. Expanded pre-mobilization requirement. SSS peacetime registration expanded to include women and men, 18 through 34 years old, and collects information on critical skills within these year-of-birth groupings . . .

Note that the memo is recommending that a minimum requirement for going forward would be a “post-mobilization plan . . . devised and computer programming accomplished for a full-blown critical skills draft. The HCPDS program is completed, brought to the forefront of SSS readiness planning, and tested through exercises.”

From all signs, the Selective Service was quietly asked by the Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security to undertake Options 3a and 3b of the Agenda memo more than a year ago.   The possibility of a Skills Draft or Combat Draft, and the apparent attempts of Donald Rumsfeld, Selective Service spokesman Amon, and Acting Director Brodsky to mislead reporters and the public on this issue deserve full debate before the election.

Instead of after it.

Again, as mentioned at the beginning, the most important thing to keep in mind is that the Bush Administration could add several billion dollars to the Defense budget and add 2 active-duty divisions to the military to save the Volunteer Army. Yet instead Bush is stretching the Army so thin, they are now calling up the retired Individual Ready Reserve—and they have even sent Company B of the Arlington Color Guard to the Mideast, giving them real bullets instead of the blanks they were firing at military funerals.  If they want to preserve the Volunteer Army, as Bush said in the first debate, and not have to reinstate the combat draft, why has the Bush Administration not added the several billion needed to avoid having to call a draft?  Out of the $200 billion allocated for Iraq, not one penny was ever allocated to do this.