[lbo-talk] The Return of the Draft

Doug Henwood dhenwood at panix.com
Wed Jun 2 12:06:32 PDT 2004


All these draft-is-coming-back arguments ignore at least two important points: 1) the conscript army of the Vietnam era was a disaster as a fighting force (see the piece quoted below), and 2) the risk of political backlash would be enormous, the best recruiting assistance the antiwar movement could ever ask for.

Doug

<http://chss.montclair.edu/english/furr/Vietnam/heinl.html>

THE COLLAPSE OF THE ARMED FORCES

By Col. Robert D. Heinl, Jr. North American Newspaper Alliance Armed Forces Journal, 7 June, 1971

[...]

THE MORALE, DISCIPLINE and battleworthiness of the U.S. Armed Forces are, with a few salient exceptions, lower and worse than at anytime in this century and possibly in the history of the United States.

By every conceivable indicator, our army that now remains in Vietnam is in a state approaching collapse, with individual units avoiding or having _refused_ combat, murdering their officers and non commissioned officers, drug-ridden, and dispirited where not near mutinous.

Elsewhere than Vietnam, the situation is nearly as serious.



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