For over a year, many of America's young people have heard the same thing through conversations in high school corridors or college quadrangles. Students have read the same scare-mongering chain e-mails, or heard it blaring through the megaphones of activists. To attract viewers and readers, media outlets always pose the same question: Is the United States going to reinstate the military draft? It is said that the draft possibility is the central issue concerning the 18-26 demographic. But what if the biggest issue among this electorate is not an issue at all?
When the war in Iraq began, 72 percent of Americans approved of it. That number has since decreased to around 50 percent. Why would President Bush or John Kerry commit political suicide by forcibly recruiting those opponents of the war and cost themselves re-election? Even if Bush were re-elected, he would still have to worry about the 2006 congressional elections and his party's re-election in 2008. But if it is so obvious that draft restoration would ensure political defeat, as some might ask, then why did the Senate and House raise a bill last year reintroducing the draft? The bill that many young people learned about via chain e-mails were proposed by "lame-duck" legislators Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.) and now-retired Ernest Hollings (D-S.C.) and virtually no one else. Another detail excluded from the rumor is that both bills died shortly after being written.
Were a draft somehow to happen, how would this impact the American economy? One e-mail I received read that draft exemption via college enrollment would not be an option, and thus it will be harder to evade the draft for college-age students. This would mean that over 4,000 college campuses nationwide would somehow empty out as all of its students were dragged into the military.
And unlike wars past, women have gained full status in the U.S. Services. With the potential for most of the American youth to be conscripted, American corporations will have no interns to hire from America's best schools, and factories could not hire women, since they too would fight. Who then would man the factories and software companies? Senior citizens? With a draft, the government would suck all of the young talent out of the hands of Fortune 500 companies and unwillingly into the military, so businesses would either have to resort to total outsourcing of jobs, or they would just collapse in the face of competition from European and Asian companies.
For example, Boeing is the largest aircraft corporation in America and the world. However, they are quickly losing ground to French rival Airbus. Furthermore, Boeing is one of the largest suppliers of technology to the U.S. Military. Like other businesses, Boeing hires college graduates and depends on them for their company's future.
With all of said "graduates" drafted, Boeing would lose so much ground to its foreign competitors that it could bring the company (one of the world's most successful), into bankruptcy. Thus, the U.S. Military would have to buy its equipment from foreign companies, something the Pentagon has never done. Why would a pro-growth government like the United States want to do this to its economy, which would never recover from a military draft? No politician, Democratic or Republican, would ever do this to his nation's businesses.
The effects that a military draft would have on Wall Street and in Washington aside, would it help us win the War on Terror? Of course it wouldn't. Drafting 5 million young Americans requires the money to feed, clothe, house, train, and arm those who have practically no will to fight. With more recruits, there is less equipment to go around for each soldier, but the amount of money that preparing these adolescents for war far exceeds the $87 billion provided by Congress for the war.
Additionally, this leaves the Pentagon so strapped for cash that it could not afford to employ members of the U.S. Military with the most advanced technology. The U.S. military is fighting a "hot" war against terrorism with equipment designed during the Cold War. By spending our military budget on priming draftees for war, the government could no longer afford any of the tools necessary to defeat terrorists. And with the economic effects of conscription, Boeing could not provide these tools anyhow.
Do Iraq and Afghanistan require a vast increase in troop numbers? Recently, on NBC News' "Meet the Press," General John Abizaid explained, "It's not a war that ultimately needs to entail large number of American forces, but it's a war where intelligence, where economics, where political and diplomatic power need to come together with military power to defeat this ideology."
In the event that more U.S. troops would needed, the Pentagon would look no further than the resources it already has. There are over 60,000 troops sitting in Germany, as well as those still deployed in Korea's Demilitarized Zone (DMZ). The South Korean military has more soldiers than we do if Kim Jong Il wages war. This bold plan for realignment is unconcealed, and both candidates support it.
Most people at the antiwar protests staged this past year were in the demographic of 18-26, that which is supposedly prone to the "threat" of conscription. A protester recently told me, "If the government drafted me, their second mistake would be handing me a rifle." This sentiment, coupled with images of activists burning draft cards during Vietnam, has haunted every President since Nixon, who ended the draft in the 1970s due to protesters.
This election, voter turnout is expected to reach a record high. The implications of this election are too enormous for the results to be swayed by gossip-filled e-mails circulated by those who would gladly scare America into voting to the tune of their agenda. These rumors are false and illogical at best, and a malicious attempt at libel at worst. The American people have always been smart enough to see past such deception. The same should hold true this November.
Adam Tannenbaum attends Goldstein High School in Brooklyn, N.Y.
