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No "Volunteers" For VOLAR

By VVAW

NEW DRAFT ON RULING CLASS DRAWING BOARDS

The Defense Department has made its recommendations to Carter and discussions by ruling circles in Washington have started on the need for the US to return to a new "standby" draft lottery and eventually to a complete compulsory draft system.

With the imperialist rivalry between the US and the Soviet Union heating up in Europe and in Africa, the US rulers have to make further preparations for war. The Pentagon estimates that more than 450,000 casualties will need to be replaced in the first six months after a major war begins in Europe. They want a new standby "wartime draft system" (including the annual draft lottery of 20 years olds) so that the Us can produce 650,000 warm-blooded bodies (not those of the rulers, of course) as replacements within those six months.

Even this idea is considered only a stopgap measure to the "nation's military problems." The four-year experiment with the all-volunteer military is being termed, by a Senate study, a failure, "a sinking ship that is becoming increasingly costly to keep afloat." The all-volunteer force (VOLAR) is looked upon as overly costly, increasingly undermanned, and potentially unreliable.

• Due to pay increases and bonuses to entice recruits into the combat arms, personnel costs have increased from 42% (pre Vietnam War) to 56% of the yearly Defense Budget. And this is despite the reduction of overall personnel by 40%. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the annual manpower bill will shoot up by as much as 8 billion dollars by 1985. And another study estimates that recruiting would cost $29 billion more than the draft to increase the military to the Vietnam War level of 3.1 million enlisted men through the volunteer system.
• The high proportion of personnel costs in the Defense Budge worries Congress because it sharply curtails funds available for new weapons systems, military ship construction and training costs. They need to keep government borrowing ( and military spending as a part of that) within some limits in order not to deny capital to private corporations.
• When the official unemployment rate reached its peak of 10% in 1975, the military had no problem filling its recruitment quotas. Today, even with the official unemployment rate for 18-19 year olds at a record 19% for white youth and 36.9% for Blacks, and with higher pay, bonuses, and no war, the military is having a difficult time filling its quotas. In the last three months of 1976 the Army was 6% below its quota and the Marines 15% low. And all this was despite the flood of recruits trying to get into the military before the new GI Bill came into effect on the 1st of January, 1977.

Once in, recruits, seeing the petty harassment of the military and lies about job placement and training are quitting or deserting at a high rate. For fiscal 1976 at least one third of all Army and Marine Corps recruits, and a quarter of Navy and Air Force recruits will leave the military before completing their initial enlistments. In the Army, over half of these will leave more than six months after enlisting. Desertion rates in the present peacetime Army, Marine Corps and Navy are substantially higher than in the pre-Vietnam period.

Besides the money lost by having to train someone who then leaves the military early, another factor worries the country's bosses. In the words of a former Pentagon Security Chief, these people "have a number of lethal skills--they have been trained in small arms, rifles, grenades, explosives, and hand-to-hand combat."

The third major problem with the VOLAR which has Congress scared is the high percentage of minority and poor working people (or their sons) in the military's enlisted ranks. Nearly 80% of the military is now from the working class. And Blacks, who represent only 12% of the American population now comprise 24% of the Army; recruiters predict that the figure will soon rise to 30%. Because discrimination in the military has not diminished--witness the KKK at Camp Pendleton--Blacks are concentrated in the combat arms. This situation plus the expectation of half a million casualties early in the next war point toward a military which may be highly unreliable.

It was the antiwar movement and the tremendous sentiment of the American people against conscription that forced an end to the draft. That opposition hasn't subsided; 54% of American surveyed opposes restoring the draft. Among males 18 to 24, the group most directly affected, the sentiment was an overwhelming 82% against the draft. Realizing this, some politicians are fishing around for some sort of universal national service program in which all young men and possibly women would be given the choice between military duty and some form of civilian social service such as the Peach Corps or VISTA. Part of this plan includes lowering military pay scales too the pre-volunteer army level.

Even with this plan the bosses realize that special incentives will be necessary to induce enough young people to opt for military duty; only half of the 18-24 year old men surveyed support this plan, and more than half say that is such a plan were imposed, they would go for the social work rather than military service.

Many of the young men that VVAW has talked with, whether on the job or at recruiting offices or in schools, have remembered the Vietnam war and said that they would leave the country before fighting a war for the rich. It is right to resist an unjust war, or to resist a draft which, like the last one, grabs up the sons of the working class to fight a war not in their interest. For VVAW the battleground has shifted; once we came to see in whose interests we had been forced to fight, whether in Vietnam or other places around the world, we also came to see who was our real enemy. And that is why we say today, "FIGHT THE RICH, NOT THEIR WARS."