Virtues Draft fosters virtues like discipline and confidence – basic military training is effective Aisen, 16 – US Navy officer (Joshua, Universal service in military would benefit the nation, 05 June 2016, Knoxville News Sentinel, Accessed 05 July 2016) [Premier] I read and hear constant complaints about soft, coddled American millennials with rooms full of participation trophies and helicopter parents smoothing their paths for them. Though I strongly disagree with this stereotype, even a brief stint of military service — just the completion of basic training, or "boot camp," for example — would help prepare young people to better face the challenges of adulthood. They would have to learn to stand up for themselves, to work with others and to persevere in the face of adversity. They would learn discipline, responsibility and teamwork that will serve them well throughout life and benefit our nation as a whole when these young adults enter the workforce.
AT Tech Renders Soldiers Obsolete The changing nature of combat won’t make a draft irrelevant – all draftees will have a role in modern warfare. Barno and Bensahel, 16 – retired US lieutenant general & Scholar @ American University (David and Nora, Nonresident Senior Fellows at the Atlantic Council, WHY WE STILL NEED THE DRAFT, 23 Feb 2016, War on the Rocks, Accessed 6 July 2016) [Premier] Wars are way too complicated today for anyone but long-serving professionals. Draftees will be useless or worse, disruptive. Conscription in the future could look very different than the draft calls of Vietnam or Korea, which were designed to provide more infantrymen for the fight. The changing shape of future wars may require conscripting the nation’s best experts at code writing, hacking, and cyber security to rapidly build a world-class cadre of cyber warriors. There might be an immediate need to put financial experts and market analysts into uniform to help protect the nation from potentially disruptive economic warfare. Or the military might need to mobilize social media gurus who can help understand and then undercut the insidious messaging of highly sophisticated adversaries aiming to inflame and radicalize populations at home and abroad. These targeted conscripts might also be drafted to be reservists, splitting time between uniformed and civilian jobs and leveraging skills from both. This 21st-century, human capital is unlikely to be found in today’s military — yet may prove crucial in a future major war.
AT DA – CMR The civil military gap outweighs the risk to civil military relations – if the gap is too wide, then crises in relations cannot be contained. Wetherbee ’07 –fellow at Center for the Study of the Presidency and Congress (Michael A., “Closing the Civil-Military Gap,” accessed 7/5/16, ) [Premier] The gap is perceived by Joseph Collins and Ole Holsti, as they note in their article, Civil-Military Relations: How Wide is the Gap?: “there [is] a growing and dangerous gap between civilian and military perspectives or preference on any number of issues.”vii Mackubin Owens also recognizes the gap in his piece, Rumsfeld, the Generals, and the State of U.S. Civil-Military Relations: relations are now unhealthy and out of balance.”viii Finally, Russell Weigley also identifies the Gap and says that there has always been a misunderstanding and distrust between the military and civilian elite, but it has been contained by “the outward faithfulness of both sides, nonetheless, to the constitutional principle of civilian control. During the 1990s that principle has been subjected to greater strain than at any time in the past. Therefore the future of civil-military relations in the United States is uncertain.”i
Another one is the idea that military service means everyone will have to fight in a war. This is just untrue. In most militaries, frontline infantry are only a small minority of total military personnel, and those are usually picked among volunteers. A modern military requires an enormous apparatus for logistics and support, done by soldiers who are never shot at. Nowadays it’s quite possible, and even easy, to spend an entire military career without ever seeing battle. At the height of the Vietnam War, there were eight support soldiers for each frontline soldier. Even in Israel, a country which is in a perpetual state of low-level warfare, only a minority of conscripts ever see battle. For most people, military service merely involves wearing ugly green and running around in the muck while a guy yells at you. Turn – Libertarianism is exploited to promote empire – the volunteer military has promoted intervention Mehr, 2008 – British journalist with multiple publications [Nathaniel, Nathaniel Mehr is a leftwing British journalist whose has written for several publications including The Morning Star newspaper and Tribune magazine and Red Pepper, Conscription Is The Antidote To Militarism And Imperialism, London Progressive Journal, March 28 2008, , Accessed July 6th 2016] [Premier] Those analysts who, prior to 2003, warned of a Vietnam-style catastrophe in Iraq, underestimated the scale of the disaster. For the conscripts who served in Vietnam were drawn from all sections of civil society. Integrated into the social life of the country, their disaffection eventually permeated US society and exerted a powerful motive force in the peace movement in that country. The demise of conscription, apparently motivated by decent liberal notions of voluntarism and respect for personal autonomy, has in actual fact been a very positive development from the point of view of imperialism.
CP – XO CP Text: Congress will modify the Authorization for Use of Military Force, cut funding for military operations, and increase its oversight powers on the President. Solves warfighting since the President can no longer initiate wars without mass support. Cohen 12 (Michael, fellow at the Century Foundation, “The Imperial Presidency: Drone Power and Congressional Oversight,” ) [Premier] In a sense we are witnessing a perfect storm of executive branch power-grabbing: a broad authorization of military force giving the president wide-ranging discretion to act, combined with a set of tools -- drones, special forces and cyber technology -- that allows him to do so in unprecedented ways. And since few troops are put in harm’s way, there is barely any public scrutiny. Congress has the ability to stop these excesses. On Libya, it possessed the power to turn off the financial spigot and cut off funding, and indeed, there was a tepid effort in the House of Representatives to do so. On the AUMF, Congress could simply repeal it or more realistically modify it to take into account the new battlefields in the war on terror. Finally, it could conduct greater oversight, in particular public hearings, of how the executive branch is utilizing military force. But not only has Congress not taken these steps, in deliberations over the National Defense Authorization Act earlier this year, it tried to expand the AUMF. On the use of drones and targeted killings, Congress has made little effort to demand greater information from the White House and has not held any public hearings on either of these issues. As Micah Zenko recently noted, claims “that congressional oversight of targeted killings exclusively by the intelligence committees in closed sessions is adequate” are “indefensible.”
Prefer my Lindo and Stoecker on crime because they were able to verify their results and their study was long term. Lindo and Stoecker 2010 — profs of Economics at Univ of Oregon and UC Davis [Drawn into Violence: Evidence on ‘What Makes a Criminal’ from the Vietnam Draft Lotteries, July 2010, July 5, 2016] [Premier] 4 Our study offers several advantages over this pioneering study. First, instead of using a cross-cohort differences and differences framework we focus solely on within cohort variation provided by the draft lotteries. Thus, we are able to use non-affected cohorts as a robustness check to verify that our results are not driven by the particular sets of birthdays selected in the drafts. Second, our outcome variable lends itself to a natural interpretation. Specifically, it provides a direct estimate of the effect of draft eligibility on the probability of incarceration in the survey years. Third, we explore longer-run effects and enhance the precision of our estimates by expanding the sample to include inmates incarcerated in 1986 and 1991 in addition to those incarcerated in 1979. Finally, we present a comprehensive exploration of the effects of draft eligibility on crime by separately considering its effects on violent crime, drug-related crime, and property-related crime, and public order crime.
return to conscription because today’s AVF supposedly has too few college graduates or too many African Americans. How to decide which of today’s volunteers to turn away is never addressed. The unwilling conscripts who replace the willing volunteers would bear a tax that no one bears in an AVF. And because these conscripts do not necessarily perform better than the volunteers they displace, this tax yields no “revenue.” Because the conscripts are part of society, the tax they pay is simply a waste to the country as a whole. And some who are qualified and would like to enlist are denied and forced into jobs for which they are less well suited or that offer less opportunity. A draft also encourages the government to misuse resources. Because draftees and other junior personnel seem cheaper than they actually are, the government may “buy” more national defense than it should, and will certainly use people, especially high-skilled individuals and junior personnel, in greater numbers than is efficient. This means that a given amount of national defense is more costly to the country than it need be. The Draft increases defense spending by billions - the total force must be larger and draftees have shorter enlistment periods Jehn, 2008 – VP for Government Programs at Cray Inc. [Christopher, Vice president for government programs at Cray Inc. He served as the assistant secretary of defense for force management and personnel from 1989 to 1993, and was assistant director for national security of the Congressional Budget Office from 1998 to 2001, The concise Encyclopedia of Economics: Conscription, Economics Library, July 5, 2016, ] [Premier] In 1988, for example, the U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO) studied the effects of reinstituting conscription and concluded that an equally effective force under a draft would be more costly, even in a narrow budget sense, than the existing force. With a draft, a larger total force would be needed because draftees serve a shorter initial enlistment period than today’s volunteers. Therefore, a larger fraction of the force would be involved in overhead activities such as training, supervising less-experienced personnel, and traveling to a first assignment. The GAO estimated that these activities would add more than four billion dollars per year (in 2003 dollars) to the defense budget.
Agriculture, in order to give their Children a right to study Painting, Poetry, Musick, Architecture, Statuary, Tapestry and Porcelaine. Our nation points away from politics and war—and toward science, industry, and art. National service should only be for times as dire as Adams’s own. Even then, there is an overwhelming case that it can and should still be voluntary. Adams’s old rival Thomas Jefferson was blunter: “The earth belongs in usufruct to the living… the dead have neither powers nor rights over it.” Raise Jefferson from the dead, ask him about national service, and he might say “Don’t ask me. I’m dead.” But if we really insisted, he might say that we should serve by minding our own business and by imposing on no one else. That’s a debt I’d be happy to pay.
was already growing moribund by the American Revolution; as an institution, it was arguably dead by the Militia Acts of 1792: Slapping the name “militia” on a centralized, federally conscripted force does not make it so. And what the U.S. government runs today is certainly not a militia. It’s a standing army. Worse, it’s imperial in scope. Conscripting everyone will not revive the militia of old. It will only grow the empire. The leadership will remain professional. The already colossal institution will grow even bigger. The central government will remain firmly in charge. The positive public choice effects on our foreign policy are speculative at best. And my younger brother, who lives in Ohio, will find it exceptionally implausible that he must go to South Korea, Afghanistan, Germany, Egypt, Japan, Honduras, Greenland, or Kyrgyzstan—to defend his neighborhood, his home, and his family. The militiamen of Lexington and Concord would never see themselves in this. In short: The militia wasn’t too bad. Then the state came along and killed it. Demanding that we serve the state in the militia’s place is perverse.