If we don't get out of Iraq and Afghanistan very soon a new draft (here in the US) is simply inevitable. That's just a basic, unavoidable fact of life. You can't keep cycling the same people and the same military units in and out of these two countries forever, as we are doing right now. Many, many of our most experienced people are already leaving the US military in droves right now as it is, to avoid being subjected to that very situation (and also because the pay is a helluva lot better in the private sector). New [voluntary] replacements are just not coming in to the service anywhere near fast enough to keep the necessary force levels up. A new draft won't actually start until after the upcoming elections, because it's such a politically sensitive issue that nobody on either side wants to bring this up at the moment, but once the election is over the plans will be quietly presented, and it will begin.

staunchly ignoring the facts, Ranger? if there was concern about reenlistment, they would increase incentives, like reenlistment boni and not eliminate them.

82nd Airborne
http://rdu.news14.com/content/your_n...asp?ArID=45777
Despite long deployments in the war on terrorism, U.S. soldiers are continuing to re-enlist in the Army. 82nd Airborne officials at Fort Bragg said they have retained more than 90 percent of soldiers finishing their first enlistment period.

101st Airborne Division soldiers reenlist at Army's top rate
http://www.gulf1.com/military/all/mosul/1015a.htm
by Pfc. Thomas Day 40th PAD MOSUL, Iraq (Oct. 15, 2003) - The 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault) scored a three-peat this past fiscal year as the division landed the highest number of reenlistments of any division in the Army. The division also reenlisted the most soldiers in the Army in both the 2000-2001 and 2001-2002 fiscal years.

Incredibly, the division's success seems to have come because of the ongoing war on terrorism, not in spite of it. The 101st reenlistment strength stands at more than 140% for the 2002-2003 fiscal year - surprising numbers as the division has been deployed to Kuwait and Iraq for nearly eight months.

As for the Army regular forces.
They have not only met their retention and reenlistment goals, but they are having a problem. Congress won't allow them to have more than
482,000 troops and renlistment is high enough they might ahve to turn peopel away.

Army continues to meet retention target
http://www.estripes.com/article.asp?...9&archive=true
By Lisa Burgess, Stars and Stripes
European edition, Saturday, April 10, 2004

ARLINGTON, Va. — Despite concerns that the increased pace of deployments might prompt a retention crisis in the Army, the service is continuing to meet its active duty re-enlistment goals — even though those goals are higher than they were last year.

Accurate figures for National Guard and Reserve troops was unavailable at this time.

From Oct. 1, 2003, through March 31 of this year, the Army’s goal was to retain 28,377 soldiers, according Lt. Col. Franklin Childress, an Army personnel spokesman.

A total of 28,406 troops re-enlisted, putting Army retention at slightly more than 100 percent of goal, Childress said in a Thursday telephone interview.

“We’re right where we want to be,” Childress said. “The personnel tools and bonuses we’re using seem to be having the intended and desired effect.”

By comparison, in the first six months of fiscal 2003 the Army’s goal was 24,168 soldiers, and 25,328 troops re-enlisted, bringing retention to about 105 percent of goal. The Army actually dropped its retention goal in fiscal 2003, from 57,000 soldiers to 51,000 soldiers.

The reason for the reduction was that officials were concerned that stop-loss provisions would push the force over its Congressionally authorized limit of 482,000 troops, Childress said.

Air Force Cutting Back Re-Enlistment Bonuses
By Lisa Burgess
Stars and Stripes
European Edition
April 2, 2004,

WASHINGTON — With retention so high that the Air Force is now over-strength, service officials are eliminating Selective Reenlistment Bonuses for three-fourths of currently eligible jobs.

The 2004 SRB list released by the Air Force this week has 42 specialties eligible for extra cash. The 2003 list, by contrast, offered bonuses in 146 specialties.

http://www.military.com/NewsContent/...041404,00.html
Military Numbers Are Rising
Virginian-Pilot
April 14, 2004
Despite a rising tide of combat deaths and the prospect of deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan for years to come, Americans continue to volunteer for duty and are re-enlisting at record rates.

Sure, but what is "highly trained". I used to think that the Marines were some sort of super soliders for instance, them apparently having undegone the toughest training, being sifted through inhuman testing and then seasoned with sheer torture(I mean, so Hollywood says). And that would perhaps be true, for maybe one out of thirty of the ones serving. At least the ones participating in the joint winter excercise when I served were like that. Their teams were made up like this: They had one sergeant, he looked like he had surv.. served on every tour of duty since vietnam, but the rest of the soliders in the team were pitifully green as fresh grass. Judging from how they handled themselves, they were even greener than we were at that time after six months service. In fact they did so many strange things I thought at first that they were some kind of reserve force sent on vacation to "the land of the midnight sun" or something similar. But these were in fact Mercenaries, I was told quite forcefully actually by one of these sergeants, and the mainstay of the US forces. Apparently, they were on their way to Bosnia. They could shout real good, though.

I don't like to picture these guys under fire, to be honest. Perhaps they learned fast then. In any case, the point is that unless you're deciding to pick out all the ones with combat experience for a mission, which is difficult after a while, you'll end up having rookies with you. And they will, contrary to what some think, after one year of training at the most be fit for handling a billion dollar accident with sprinklers. That's just how it is. Or, they could be grown in vats and fitted with synthetic memory... nah.
Being homesick? If you asked me, I would say the reason why there has been so few "friendly fire incidents" is that most of the fresh forces are on guard duty. Only if you asked me, of course.

So few???
There have been 706 US fatal casualties. , since the begining of the conflict.
Of those 706, some 637 have occurred since May 1st, 2003. And of those 637, only 401 were hostile fire related. The other 236 were either friendly fire related or non-combat related incidents.
If you do the math on this, it shows that about 1/3 of the US casualties were caused by negligence, faulty machinery, and good old plain stupidity!!
It´s a really high number, by all accounts.
Now, either the Department of Defense lied about these numbers, maybe to hide the true mortality rate of the war and portraite it less deadly than what it really is;
or,
these numbers are actually correct, and thus show a very undertrained,unprepared, obtuse, and totally subpar military force! Take your pick!
I believe the answer is somewhere in between. There are a lot of people in Iraq that should have been retrained, especcially the National Guard people, and the reserves that Bush had to resort to. I call them the "weekend warriors". Then there´s those guys who get to drive a Hummvee without a license, and crash at the first corner! Not to mention the trigger happy fools, that shoot at anything that moves, and ask questions later...
Put that all together, and you get a grim picture.
If we could cross check the units from where the troops come from with the non-hostile casualties, i would bet most of them came from poorly trained and n00bie-green outfits. Rummsfeld needed every warm body he could find, and he took everything he could get, idiots and all.
I wonder what they tell the families...
"Sorry ma´am, your boy drowned when he tried using an M-1 tank as a river raft in the Euphrates. Here´s his Silver Star for his original thinking..."
Or
"Sorry ma´am, your husband died in "Airaq", while playing baseball with a live grenade".
No medal for him, he didn´t finish the home run."
:confused:

__________________
"Quincitilius Varus, give me back my legions!"
Emperor Augustus of Rome.

@ genius: I don't even know why I'm bothering to argue with somebody that's already been declared "unfit for service" (that's pretty damned disgraceful, if you ask me) yet who still thinks that he actually knows something about military matters, but here goes, anyway...

As your own post points out:

That's definitely not true, either; the current figures are well known and are readily available.

The entire US military (all the branches combined) breaks down as follows:

So...as you can plainly see a full 50% of the entire US military is either National Guard or Reserve personnel. And those units are now falling from -7% to -30% short of their required recruiting goals. This is considered to be a "critical" force shortage, since many vital military specialties are performed only by highly specialized Guard and Reserve units these days. Especially where "nation building" and "civil affairs" activities are concerned. Without these Guard and Reserve units the entire US military force simply can't function as expected.

Right now 20% of the US military forces in Iraq are either National Guard or Reserve soldiers. That figure was expected to double to about 40% by next year, but because of severe manpower shortages that goal will not be met, and will require the military to send active duty units back to Iraq -- units that were already in Iraq or Afghanistan once already (when the wars first started) and have since completed their tours (plus several "involuntary tour extensions") and have since been rotated back home again. These units were assured that they would be allowed to remain stateside for at least a full 12 months (minimum) before being re-deployed back to Iraq and Afghanistan again. Now that promise is already being broken in an effort to prevent these critical manpower shortages that the US military is facing.

Force planners all agree that these units cannot be redeployed to the same combat zones repeatedly before it becomes a major morale problem, so new bodies will have to be found somewhere, and conscription (the draft) is really the only viable option left for the future, if things continue as they are with the US forces in the Middle East. Everybody in the military already knows this. It's just the US civilian population that is totally clueless on this issue right now, apparently. That's because this is an election year and no politician wants to talk about something so unpopular right now -- it can wait until next year, and when it happens it will happen very quickly, as it did during the Vietnam war. The whole draft system was set up and working before anybody could organize to protest it, and that was that. The rest is history.

genius went out specifically looking for links that supported his own biased views and he did manage to find a few; but I'll show you some others that paint a slightly different picture. Who's opinions turn out to be right and who's turns out to be wrong should become clear within the next 24 months, or there-a-bouts, I should think.

Funny you should bring up figures and quotes on the 82nd. I've served with a couple different units of the 82nd Airborne Division over the years; in fact that Division was actually my very first "permanent" military posting, way back in the day. As a brand new young paratrooper (a cherry) I first served with the 2nd Battalion of the 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment. Fond memories there, despite the situation they were involved in at the time (they were trying very hard just to hold the South Vietnamese capitol of Saigon together when I first arrived).

And, yes, they are indeed some very highly motivated boys, to be sure, and that particular Division always makes it's recruiting goals; in fact, the 82nd has the unique honor of always being the very first unit in the Army to skim the cream-of-the-crop of the Jump School grads off for integration into their various units. The 82nd is the top division in the US Army, and the 101st is the second most important unit, and they always get the very best of everything. The 82nd's and the 101st's recruiting figures have always been exemplary, and they always will be, but the recruiting situation in the 82nd and the 101st is NOT indicative of the recruiting situation of the US military as a whole right now, I'm afraid.

The Army is full of guys that hope to go to jump school and possibly even Ranger school, and then earn a slot in a unit that wears the maroon beret of the paratroops, or the tan beret of the Rangers. The competition for those slots is intense, and few candidates actually succeed in getting in. Others are attracted to the other special units of other branches of the military. The SEALS slots are always full, too, as are slots in Marine Recon, Air Combat Control, etc. That's all a given. None of those particular units ever have recruiting or retention problems.

It's the other 50% of the military, the Guard and Reserve components, who will have to be replaced by full active-duty draftee's - and that will have to happen before too very much longer. That's what all your selective references totally failed to take account of.

http://www.globalsecurity.org/org/ne...-retention.htm

http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/...437475904.html

http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/Con...l=968350060724

http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0109/d...te.html?s=entt

Just a few relevant links. I could show you literally hundreds more that clearly indicate that a draft is coming, if something doesn't change, if you want to see them...

Well, Rumsfeld has recently categorically dismissed the possibility of resuming the military draft "at the present time"...




...which means one should expect exactly the opposite.

__________________

draft is definitly a possibility. in switzerland you can do practically everything, save
piloting military aircrafts as a draftee. we have close to no professional military here.
so even the "high-end" technical stuff is handled by drafted servicemen. the
consequence is that we have to serve three weeks every year to refresh our memories until we're old enough to leave for good.

__________________

I think that the argument that draftees are automatically somehow inferior to volunteers is simply absurd.

Most of the people I served with in Vietnam were drafted, and there was no difference in "performance" between the draftees and those few volunteers that served alongside of them. None. The military has, over the years, evolved a very highly polished, tried-and-true system that takes all sorts of different kinds of people and very efficiently welds them all together into one homogeneous "Big Green Machine". They are the ultimate masters at using this system to produce an incredibly uniform end-product, regardless of what sort of material they have to start with. Draftees and volunteers all get exactly the same training, because the military intentionally trains them all side-by-side, to form that lasting bond between them; the military makes no distinctions at all between the two groups. They are one, for all intents and purposes. There was simply no difference at all between them so far as their training went. The only way you might have been able to tell the two apart was by their political views, perhaps. Some of the volunteers were (almost insanely) gung-ho and highly supportive of the President and the war (no matter what) and some of the draftees were pretty outspoken in their views that the entire war itself was just plain wrong. That never seemed to effect their combat effectiveness, though. When somebody is trying to kill you the political rhetoric pretty much falls by the wayside very, very quickly, and the focus shifts entirely to supporting each other, as all soldiers that find themselves in tough situations always do, in the hopes of winning and thus surviving. The human bonds that are formed in the cauldrons of combat are always much more important and enduring than any individual's political opinions. Those issues simply seem to cease to matter after a while. War is a singularly transforming experience, and many "volunteers" left the military at the first opportunity, feeling angry, betrayed and bitter towards their politicians and their country. Likewise many "draftee's" went on to become career soldiers, and many that I knew reenlisted for multiple tours of duty in Vietnam, and served with great honor and distinction.

I'd also like to point out that the MAJORITY of Medal of Honor winners in the 20th Century were draftees. It was draftees that defeated the Kaiser in WWI, and Hitler and Tojo in WWII. Democracy and the Draft are not mutually exclusive; history proves that. Patton's Third Army, for instance, was a Draftee Army, and a helluva fine Army to boot.

I also think that the assertion that National Guard and Reserve troops are in any way inferior to regular active duty soldiers is also totally absurd. In fact, my own personal experience indicates that in many (if not most) cases the Guard and Reserve people are actually much better, not worse, than the "average" member of our "all volunteer" active duty military.

For one thing the majority of Guard and Reserve personnel are "prior service" which means that most have already completed at least one full tour (4 or 6 years) of regular active duty in some capacity, at some time, in some branch of the full-time military. They invariably bring a great deal of experience with them. Many are former career professional soldiers that have retired from full-time active duty after years of distinguished service, and then joined the Guard or Reserve "just to keep their hand in" so to speak. The military gets into your blood, and many former career soldiers enjoy the freedom to pursue civilian lives and careers after retirement from the military, and yet still keep their military skills honed sharp as members of the Guard or Reserve forces, and most also strongly desire to continue to make their hard-won experience and wisdom available to their country in it's times of need.

Guard and Reserve soldiers are also "all volunteer" and they tend to be very, very highly motivated, highly skilled, totally professional and are often very highly "seasoned" in the practical military sense, and that alone is worth it's weight in gold on the battlefield. They are a valuable asset to any military unit. Having already "been there, done that" many times before they tend to be much more cool, composed and focused in combat, and are far more apt to draw upon their previous military experience than the fresh, inexperienced active duty recruits who have no such prior experiences to draw upon, no matter how "patriotic" these unseasoned recruits may be.

The Guard and Reserve personnel receive exactly the same training, in exactly the same places and with exactly the same equipment, performance requirements and expectations as their active duty bretheren do. Their is no difference between the two. They all train side-by-side.

The only real difference is that many all-volunteer active duty soldiers have no experience at all, or very minimal experience, whereas most Guard and Reserve soldiers have anywhere from some to a whole lot of actual experience under their belts by the time they arrive on the battlefield.

I also believe that the Guard and Reserve soldiers tend to handle the pressure of life in a combat zone better than the green active duty soldiers do. Guard and Reserve members tend to be a little older, a lot wiser, and a whole lot more experienced when it comes to dealing with life in general, and they've already faced many more genuine challenges in their lives, and somehow learned to deal with them and overcome adversity. They just seem to be much more steady and reliable. They don't get rattled as easily, they don't bolt or do incredibly stupid things under pressure, and they don't become depressed so easily when things are not going well, and they're also far less apt to cave in to stress-induced defeatist attitudes when things begin to look downright dire. Patriotic 18-19-20 year-old active duty "volunteers" are fine for common cannon fodder, but I'd much prefer to have a crusty old Reservist who has seen combat before, and already proved his mettle under fire covering my own ass in a firefight, any day of the week.

So...I don't buy these arguments that Guard and Reserve forces, or even draftees, are somehow inferior. They're not. History (and my own personal experience as a career soldier) shows clearly that this is simply not so. The only really valid argument against a draft is the argument that it's always going to be politically unpopular in the extreme, and that unpopularity always tends to rub off onto the conflict itself, in the end, and onto those political leaders that initially conceived and promoted it.

And lastly there is always the question of the draft process itself, and how fair and equitable it is across the broad spectrum of our society. Who gets drafted and who doesn't? During the Vietnam war the lower- and middle-class guys all got drafted, but the rich kids avoided it with college deferrments, influence peddling and other underhanded tricks (like George Dubya Bush and his Texas Air National Guard thing). Many more poor rural blacks and middle-class kids who could not aford college were drafted and died in Vietnam than did those kids fortunate enough to have rich daddies did, that's for damned sure. Very, very few politicians kids ever died over there, or ever served in the military at all, and that's hardly fair or equitable by any means. So that debate has some real merit.

Also, since the last draft we also have a new issue to deal with, and that's women in the service. During the Vietman war a woman could only serve in a war zone as a nurse. These days they serve in combat roles just as men do -- so, will they be getting drafted now, too? You can bet their will have to be a very lively debate about all that before the first conscript is ever sworn in.

Don´t know if this was meant to me, but here goes.

Not as persons. I meant in training. A volunteer is a career man, He is there for the long haul, and he has plenty of time to get familiar with every kinds of ordenance. But the draftee is only there for a few months, and often enough he doesn´t want to be there. There are two completely mind sets here:
One is there because he wants to, he wants to be a soldier, and participate in battle.
While the other wishes he could be with his girlfriend, or playing NINTENDO,or whatever. He is in the military because he is forced to.

Of course if you in a war fighting for your life, you have all the motivation you need to be good at what soldiers do (killing), but often enough the training is not present, and many don´t get the chance to learn how to keep his head down in a firefight.

What i was trying to understand, is the unusuall high ammount of "accidents" and "friendly fire" incidents in Iraq. The Reserves and National Guard are not full-time soldiers. They either have been in the military, and did their program years ago, and thus are not in contact with the latest developments in military training, or have been on and off the military life.
Either way, they are not nearly as well trained as the career types. And that lack of training might get you killed in many stupid ways.

And assuming there will be a draft in the US in the near future, we can expect any cherry fresh out of boot camp to get sent to Iraq, in rotation for other troops. How will they perform?
I was obviously not in Vietnam, and everything i know about i got it from the media, and third hand information. But i believe i´m right when i say that the "cherries" had a bigger percentage of getting killed in the few days after arrival at the front. Why?
Well, they felt cocky, over confident, they didn´t know who they were fighting, and their training was highly inapropriate for that type of guerrilla combat. And they were kind of "ostracised" by their own mates. No one wanted to be next to a "cherry" in a firefight, because the "cherry" was a magnet to enemy fire. For a "cherry" to survive, he would have to get through the first weeks on his own.

The thing is, the draftees are often used to cope with man power shorteages, and they get sent to the field before they are ready, while the career types have spent years getting ready for the moment of truth. Both are "cherries", as they both haven´t seen combat before. But the volunteer has a few things in his favour:
More training, and he is mentally prepared.
Of course there are exceptions, but generally this is the way it goes.
It doesn´t mean the draftee is a lesser man than others.It only means that he had less preparation, either physical or mental.

__________________
"Quincitilius Varus, give me back my legions!"
Emperor Augustus of Rome.

It doesn't work that way. When you're operating with a 10 degree safety margin in troop advances, friendly fire incidents can happen to any unit, given the right(wrong) circumstances. The variable often is how well the unit can work together, how much they trust each other and how long they have trained as a unit. Not how long they have been dry- training on the shooting range or training as individuals, as long as they meet an acceptable minimum.

And I still think the number of friendly fire incidents is very low. 236 incidents on about 100 000 troops through a year is almost nothing. Come to think of it, the fatality rate is ridiculous as well, if there has been troop engagements against other "military" forces. I've heard some nasty rumours about injuries and invalides returning home, though, so I suppose that could explain it.
Just as good. Or bad, probably. The problem it seems the army is facing now is the little death that always have been the occupant's downfall. They're fighting against the civillians instead of another army. And you just can't handle civillians, semi- civillians and guerilla warfare with brute force. Specially not when your goal is the opposite of opression.
Good post.. again. I would think that the draft, or at least the suggestion, might be politically strategic, though, because the main reason for withdrawing the troops might just as well end up being that we don't want to see our people die, rather than that the goal they are fighting for - whatever that is - was wrong. It could certainly prove to be more acceptable as an excuse for a withdrawal, outside the whitehouse as well. I mean, they're fighting for the Iraqi's freedom. Can't really argue with the sound of that.