There were definitely downsides to ending the draft. That’s not to endorse it’s return, but Patrick Lawrence argues it was never an unmitigated blessing. From Lawrence at consortiumnews.com:
Americans will understand themselves less fantastically if they consider the extent to which the end of the Selective Service System a half century ago gave them permission to put their public selves to sleep.
Curtis Tarr, director of the Selective Service System, turning the drum containing capsules of draft numbers at the annual lottery in the Commerce Department auditorium, Washington, D.C., Feb. 2, 1972. (Thomas J., O’Halloran, U.S. News & World Report Magazine Photograph Collection, Library of Congress )
It is 50 years ago now that old Melvin Laird, President Richard Nixon’s defense secretary and the architect of “Vietnamization” in the Indochina war, ended America’s military draft.
Henry Kissinger — with whom Laird was famously at odds, but that is another story — had just finished negotiating the Paris Peace Accords with LêDúc Tho, veteran of French “tiger cages” and Hanoi’s chief diplomat at the talks.
Tho, a tough-minded revolutionary the whole of his life, refused the Nobel Peace Prize when the committee in Oslo proposed later in 1973 that he share it with Nixon’s secretary of state — a principled move, given there was no peace for two more years.
But Laird, eager to assuage the explosive antiwar movement at home, pounced. When he suspended the Selective Service System’s conscription program on Jan. 27, 1973 — the same day Kissinger signed the accords in Paris — it was nearly half a year ahead of his announced schedule for Vietnamization, which he had initially named “de–Americanization.”
When a nation demands the right to risk someone’s life and demand that they behave in whatever way the state desires, it is apparent that the individual is not free and the state is supreme. In other words, the state is sovereign, not the individual. Since immoral, narcissistic sociopaths are the ones to seek positions of authority; it is foolhardy to assume they will only lead those who are enslaved to moral conquests. The world is endangered by those who claim they are about to save it. ~ Chad