"If you think back to when we had the draft, people were brought in; they were paid some fraction of what they could make in the civilian manpower
market
because they were without choices. Big categories were exempted - people that were in college, people that were teaching, people that
were married. It varied from time to time, but there were all kinds of exemptions.
And what was left was sucked into the intake, trained for a
period of months, and then went out, adding no value, no advantage, really, to the United States armed services over any sustained period of
time, because the churning that took place, it took enormous amount of effort in terms of training, and then they were gone."
Dismissing the memory of the last draft and the fifty-eight thousand men, most of whom were forced to fight that stupid, ugly war, not because they
couldn't get a job in the "civilian manpower market," but because to refuse would have landed them in jail, is a bit foul, no?
www.defenselink.mil...