“If we can ask you one thing, speaking as a former army guy, it’s that we’d like to be welcomed in your hearts and on your campuses,” said Gen. Wesley Clark Saturday afternoon in a sunlit Johnson Chapel. “We’d like you to host ROTC, to encourage participation in it, to warmly welcome the U.S. Army recruiter, and view the Army as your army. It is; it’s just that you’re not serving it.”
For over a decade, the military was not welcomed on the Amherst campus. In protest of the military’s discrimination towards homosexuals, the College had required recruiters participate in public forums explaining the policy “Don’t ask, Don’t Tell” in order to recruit on campus, and none ever showed up. Following a Supreme Court ruling which permitted the government to withhold federal funds from schools impeding recruiter access, though, the College changed its policy earlier this year, allowing recruiters on campus without precondition.
Since the decision, one Navy recruiter spoke in the Career Center in February and he will return a week from Thursday.
Though military recruiters are no longer obligated to hold public forums in order to visit campus, President Tony Marx made it clear from the start that the College would make a concerted effort to facilitate discussion of the military on campus. To that end, Gen. Clark along with Boston University Professor Andrew Bacevich came to campus this weekend to participate in the two-day colloquium “Reinstating the National Draft.”
Clark, a 2004 presidential candidate and retired four-star U.S. Army General, and Bacevich, a professor of international relations and former U.S. Army Colonel, together led a two-day conversation with students and faculty tracing the evolution of the military from the citizen-military of WWII and Vietnam to the all-volunteer force of today.
“I was uncomfortable with [the all-volunteer force] from the beginning. I grew up reading Greek and Roman stories and philosophers and histories, and I always felt that a person had a duty to serve his country,” Clark said in the culminating Johnson Chapel open forum.
The draft was eliminated by President Richard Nixon in 1973, Bacevich explained, so that the President could buy time for his Vietnamization program. By eliminating the draft—against the military leader’s wishes—Nixon effectively took the momentum out of the anti-war movement.
In the intervening decades, there have been two important developments in the military-citizen relationship. For one, military leaders have embraced the all-volunteer force and now do not want it any other way. “We went from the conscript army of WWII where soldiers drew the peace symbols on their hats and really fought in spite of themselves to an army in which soldiers were motivated to excel and emulate those of higher rank and wanted to stay with us,” said Clark, adding later, “We’re an army of specialists. We don’t want people in that force who don’t want to be there; they create casualties, they cause problems for everyone else. We want an army of people who love to be with us.”
The other important development, which Bacevich harped on throughout the colloquium, was that the all-volunteer army has created a troubling divide between the American people and the military, a divide which has become all the more prominent since U.S. intervention in Iraq. “Having divorced ourselves from the Army, we are only now awakening to the fact that we, as citizens, have remarkably little control over our army, in what it gets sent to do and how it is treated or mistreated,” Bacevich said. He emphasized that Amherst students, and the citizenry, must make a concerted effort to be informed on military matters so that the government cannot abuse it.
Though he did not participate in the colloquium, Nobel Prize winning economist and Amherst College trustee Joseph Stiglitz ’64, spoke at the open forum. He echoed Bacevich’s worries regarding the silencing of the citizenry that occurred once the draft was eliminated. “The war illustrates the consequences of the lack of checks and balances,” said Stiglitz. Adding, “The politics of the [Iraq] War would be completely different if we had a conscription army” Not only did most Washington officials not have lives at stake when entering Iraq but they also did not have money on the line since, according to Stiglitz, the entire Iraq war has been deficit financed. “You can be very macho when your son or daughter is not going to the war or when you’re not paying for it,” Stiglitz noted.
Throughout the Colloquium, Clark firmly emphasized the duty of Americans to serve the country. During the open forum and the preceding conversations, Clark beseeched Amherst students to not dismiss the possibility of serving in the military. “Should we have a draft? I’d love to serve in a country and be part of a country where every American feels it’s his or her obligation to give time and take risks and serve [his or her] country—not with lip-service, but with really submitting themselves, their future, their fortune, their life and safety to a concern larger than themselves. What’s wrong with that? That’s what this country was built on,” boomed Clark.
Clark also remarked that Americans willing to serve the country are not all representative of the entire population. “The draft would be more equitable. How do you think it feels to look at these young men and women in uniform and then come to college campuses and look at you all? Most of them don’t have the opportunity to be at Amherst. They didn’t make the grades, didn’t go the right prep schools, don’t have the money,” said Clark.
Regardless of their thoughts on whether or not the U.S. should reinstate a draft, all three speakers agreed that its return is not in the cards. “Recognizing the real advantages that would come from increasing the size of the force, or certainly increasing the involvement of citizens in the force, [conscription] is not going to happen,” said Bacevich. He cited a three pronged “anti-draft consensus” that will preclude any possibility of re-implementing the draft: the military, parents and Congress.
Yet, draft or not, they agreed the U.S. must make some fundamental changes in its use of the military. “Right now we’re a one-tool country. We really have only one principle tool of foreign policy and that’s the hammer,” said Clark. Clark endorsed the creation of a “national databank of skills” such that the U.S. can defend its national security interests with non-military assistance. “I’m looking for mid-career professionals … people who are willing to work in a demanding foreign environment and take the skills that have made money for them and their communities in America, and share those skills with others around the world.” Clark envisioned millions of middle-aged Americans (much more qualified than 18-19-year-olds) volunteering around the world for six-nine months to lend their accounting, law or business expertise. “I think that we should call on every American to love this country and to give it time. And if you want to serve in the armed forces, we want you. We need you. But if you don’t, sign up for our national databank and we’ll take you when you’re a multimillionaire top accounting partner in Washington D.C.”
Ultimately, all three remarked that the only way the all-volunteer force can be sustained is to have fewer wars. The Iraq War has put so much stress on the force, with soldiers forced to redeploy over and over again. “I think the real essence of the problem here in 2008 is that we have too much war for too few warriors,” said Bacevich.