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TI: There's something, I heard you speak a couple weeks ago at the University of Washington, and there was something you said that was very powerful about, it actually had to do with this concept of a volunteer army versus a draft. Where I think the comment you said was, in some cases, if there was a draft, and so more people were impacted in terms of having a relative being drafted, that there would be much more protest on the streets of America than there is now. Because now, we have a volunteer, so it's actually much more segmented in terms of who is in the military, and doesn't impact the vast majority of Americans. Because whether it's socioeconomically or whatever, they're not, they don't know people in the military because we don't have the draft. Can you talk a little bit about that? I thought that was a powerful concept.

EW: Sure, and I'll just start off by saying the concept of an all-volunteer army is very intricate and complicated as opposed to a draft army. These days, the army human resources, they know that married soldiers, soldiers with kids, are more responsible, more stable than your eighteen-, nineteen-, twenty-year-old draftees. So they encourage soldiers to join the military, they encourage them to get married and have kids and be more stable because they give more money to them. So that's, that's an enticement. But in doing so, you have soldiers who have a lot more to lose by doing things that are outside of the, going against the system. Whereas opposed to a draft military, like they had in Vietnam, you had a lot of single soldiers, you had a lot of soldiers from all walks of life who had different ways of thinking or histories and things like that, education. You had a more diverse segment of society. Whereas in today's all-volunteer army, which they, they call it the "economic draft" in which they go into low-income neighborhoods, and they, they recruit these kids and these kids with families who have little choice but to join the army, because the army offers so much in terms of a stable job, a stable salary, health care and benefits, housing, food, what have you. And so a soldier has a lot more to lose in today's all-volunteer army.

Now, what I was saying to the University of Washington is that when you have a draft, everybody instantly in America becomes involved in what's going on. Everybody has something to lose or gain, as opposed to nowadays, where you have less than one percent of the American population who is enlisted or is in the military. With a draft, if you have a war, automatically you have about eighty to ninety percent of the people in this country -- or, I mean, eighty to ninety percent of the people who have some involvement in the war. Because at any point, they or their loved one could be drafted into the military, and that is a lot more, I believe, democratic than having an all-volunteer army. Because when people have something to lose, they're gonna find out what it is, why they're gonna lose that. If they don't, they're not gonna be involved.

TI: Yeah, I thought that was interesting, because you're, what struck me was you thought that people would be questioning the war more if there actually was a draft, versus the volunteer army.

EW: Right. I mean, I equate an all-volunteer, what they call a professional army, with a mercenary army. And in some sense, an indentured servant army, because they have no other choice but to do what they're told. I equate a draft army with being really what it means to be a democracy.

<End Segment 25> - Copyright © 2006 Densho. All Rights Reserved.