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| Rummy on the Draft |
| 2004-04-24 |
| Excerpt from Secretary Rumsfeld Remarks to the Newspaper Association of America/American Society of Newspaper Editors Q Secretary Rumsfeld, I’m Narda Zakeeno (ph) from the San Francisco Chronicle. And I’d like to ask you a question about the draft. I’d like to know if there are currently any Selective Service Personnel anywhere in the country who are working to possibly reinstitute the draft, if that’s going to happen. And if your answer to that question is going to be no, I’d like to know what the plans are for replenishing our troops, especially if more members leave our coalition. SEC. RUMSFELD: My answer is no; that I don’t know anyone in the executive branch of the government who believes that it would be appropriate or necessary to reinstitute the draft. We have a very large population. We have a relatively small military. We have been very successful in recruiting and retaining the people we need. There were a lot of difficulties with the draft, as people may recall. A few of you are old enough to remember that. If you remember, there was a draft, but a relatively small number of people of that -- males, I should say; no females were drafted -- a relatively small number of the male population in that age group was ever drafted. A large number were exempted because they were married or they were teachers or they were students or they were some other thing that the society decided to set aside and not draft. The result of it was that we conscripted people and trained them, and then they had relatively short periods of service. And they did a great job. But the task of training that large volume of people relative to the relatively small number who actually stayed in the service for a sustained period, from a cost-benefit standpoint, was useful to do during a certain part of our history, but we believe is not useful to do at the present time. And then the second part of your question was well, what are we going to do, how do we sustain a force we need to engage in the kinds of activities that our country’s engaged in? I mean, you think about it, we’ve got close to 2,000 people in Haiti, and they’ll be there probably another month until the U.N. force replaces them. We had some folks in Liberia, and we have people in Korea. We have people in Bosnia and Kosovo -- Bosnia’s running down this year -- to say nothing of the ones that I’ve mentioned involved in the global war on terror and elsewhere in the world. So one can make the question, what do you do? How do you sustain what you need to sustain? Let me put it this way. General Schoomaker, the chief of staff for the Army, says think of a water keg that’s that high. And what we’ve got is we’ve got 1.4 million men and women in uniform on active duty, and if you add all the reserves -- the selective and the individual ready reserves -- it comes up over 2 million people. So in this universe of the water keg are 2 million-plus; 2.3 (million), 2.4 million people. All we’re trying to do is sustain 135,000 in Iraq plus the other commitments I mentioned. Now, if that’s a stress on the force, that probably means you’ve got to do one of three things. You either have to increase the size of the water keg or you have to move the spigot down. At the present time we’re only accessing a very small portion of the two-plus million men and women in the active force and the reserves in our current deployments. So the question is, why is that? And the answer is because the spigot’s too high. We need to lower the spigot. We don’t need to get a bigger barrel. There isn’t any reason in the world why we can’t manage this force better with less stress on it, and it simply requires changing the rules, changing the requirements, changing the regulations in ways that we can manage that force considerably better. And that is the process that the Army’s engaged in. They’re doing an excellent job at it. The chief of staff for the Army is hopeful that he’s going to be able to, for example, go from 33 brigades up to 43 or 48 brigades without a permanent increase in the size of the force, and that’s by better utilizing the people we have. I don’t know if he’ll make it, but he’s a terrific leader and he’s working hard on it and he believes that’s doable. Well, now, that’s a significant increase in combat capability. We have some 300,000, I’m told, men and women in uniform doing things that are tasks that need not be done by military personnel. Now why is that? The reason we have military personnel doing tasks that are not military -- necessarily need to be military tasks is because we have, I don’t know, dozens and dozens of different personnel systems and we’re not capable of managing our civil service in a way that is efficient. So when a person in the Pentagon has a problem and they need someone to solve something, rather than reaching for a civil service person, they reach for a uniformed person because they can bring him on, they can send him away, they can deploy him, they can train him, and they can manage it in an efficient way. Or they reach for a contractor. They can sign a contract that fits the current needs, and they can stop the contract when they want it over. So we end up with three hundred -- we’re not using our civil service the way we ought to. They’re terrific people. There isn’t any reason, with the right rules under this new national security personnel system we just got, there isn’t any reason we can’t manage them better and use them properly and end up with some fraction of that 300,000 people in uniform that are doing civilian jobs, some fraction of those moved out of civilian jobs back into military jobs so that we’ll have them available to reduce stress on the force. |
| Posted by:Super Hose |
#6 They were young morons then and they're old morons nowThat sums it up perfectly, RWV. |
| Posted by: Barbara Skolaut 2004-04-24 6:38:36 PM |
| #5 "This talk about the draft is self-indulgence by aging baby boomers trying to recall the battles of their youth." Indeed. When you look back at force levels since the draft ended in 1972, it's clear that the size of the U.S. Army could easily be doubled without any draft: from 1973 until the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, the number of Army active duty personnel was constant at just under 800,000. "They were young morons then and they're old morons now." Yeah. And in the process of moving from young moronhood to old moronhood, they fathered a whole new generation of morons, who now populate Indymedia and DU. Sterilize 'em all. |
| Posted by: Dave D. 2004-04-24 12:53:15 PM |
| #4 The DRAFT is a phony issue. Implementation of the draft will not add one single soldier to the force. The size of our military is authorized by Congress. IF we need more troops, all Congress has to do is authorize and fund more troops. There are more than enough qualified volunteers to fill any force structure that Congress might authorize short of a WWII size mobilization. This talk about the draft is self-indulgence by aging baby boomers trying to recall the battles of their youth. They were young morons then and they're old morons now. |
| Posted by: RWV 2004-04-24 11:34:21 AM |
| #3 the draft idea belongs to longtime Dem idiot, Charlie Rangel, and is strictly a vehicle to damage, not help, our ability to project military power |
| Posted by: Frank G 2004-04-24 11:29:15 AM |
| #2 Well, one thing occurs to me... the same person doing the same job, once he takes off his military uniform and puts on a civilian one, is a) no longer under militiary discipline, and b) may be liable, as many of the current civilians are, to have to go to work without any means of self-defense. (Most civilian contractors in Iraq can't carry weapons of their own). OTOH, I think the whole "we need a draft" situation is bogus: you can read my thoughts here. |
| Posted by: Phil Fraering 2004-04-24 11:13:16 AM |
| #1 im hear they only going to draft needie homeless democrats sounds just like a repuglicans |
| Posted by: HalfEmpty 2004-04-24 10:07:28 AM |