Should the Army Return to Conscription?

General Stanley McChrystal, the former commander of the force in Afghanistan, received cheers and a standing ovation from a crowd at the annual Sun Valley conference in Aspen for saying it should. He said that if a government decides to go to war, a professional army is no good, and not at all representative of the actual citizenry. "Everybody [should have] skin in the game…every city, every town, needs to be at risk." Before pointing out the obvious — "Of course you can get killed in the army" — William Pfaff explains one of the draft's more benevolent contributions to history:

I can’t say that I enjoyed military service, but I learned a lot, about myself and about others—including the young black men who made up a good half of my all-southern, and mostly rural, basic training company (where I was not only the sole college graduate but probably the only high school graduate). This was just two and a half years after President Harry Truman had ordered the army desegregated. The regular army—which has always been essentially a southern institution—hated and feared the consequences of that order, but said “yes, sir” and did it, producing undoubtedly the biggest and most successful program of social engineering the United States had ever experienced. It also created what remains today the most successful route of social and professional ascension for talented young black males from poor communities that the country has ever known.

While I agree that a more democratic system would undoubtedly assist in breaking through social barriers, as it has done in the past, there's something innately repulsive about the whole business. Most people really won't want any part of it — that's for sure.