And don't imagine that every person you keep out will be replaced by someone else going in. And don't imagine the military does not need people now that it has robots. The military is having a heck of a time recruiting enough people to manage its robots. Even drone pilots have suffered PTSD and suicide. The military is struggling with recruitment, while counter-recruiters are piling up successes they can point to. Elder points to some of them in this book and advises on how to achieve more-- how to limit the use of military tests to collect data from students, how to counter recruitment pitches.
The military not only wants more recruits than it is getting right now, it wants the ability to use the draft again if desired. Bills have made significant progress in Congress this year to require that young women register for the draft just like young men, and to abolish the Selective Service entirely. The liberal progressive position has been in favor of keeping the Selective Service in place while adding women to it. That's how deeply war has been normalized. Some peace activists even want a draft because they think it would enlarge the peace movement. They claim the peace movement has never been as large as during the Vietnam War era when there was a draft. But there also has not been a U.S. war that killed anywhere close to as many people since that war. Imagining that we need a worse war in order to halt war requires that we fail to know our strength. We actually have the potential to end the draft forever and to deny the military the "volunteers" it wants as well.
People as smart as Tolstoy and Einstein thought we would end war only when individuals refused to take part. Ninety-nine percent of us are not asked to take part, but we have a role to play in protecting that other one percent. Of course the harm that U.S. wars inflict is overwhelmingly on the people who live where the wars are fought. The harm to U.S. troops is a drop in the bucket. But much of that harm is the moral injury that follows the infliction of harm on others. The experience of killing and injuring is traumatic for adults and even more so for kids. The United Nations, as Elder details, has sought to hold the United States accountable for its violation of a treaty in its recruitment of 17-year-olds. The United States is also now the only country on earth that has not ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child. It's hard to dismiss the suspicion that military recruitment plays a role in the decision to remain outside that otherwise universal treaty and basic standard of modern civilization.
This text is the foreword to a new book by Pat Elder called Military Recruiting in the United States.
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