!#*% The Draft!

I'm showing my age but those of us who are old enough to remember what happed when this country had The Draft(conscription.) It seemed like a dead issue but the growing use of women in combat in the US armed forces has led to calls for women to register with the selective service. We've had the current system of registration without induction since 1980 when Jimmy Carter was trying to send a foreign policy signal. Some people think that if Carter had been re-elected in 1980 he would have proposed bringing back the Draft. It would have been a tough sell, less than a decade after the end of the old Draft, with its inequalities.

The Pentagon brass doesn't want the draft. It seems that they believe that most future wars will be of the "brushfire" variety, to which conscript armies aren't suited. During the past decade, there were people who had enlisted in the National Guard to finance their education, and then found themselves being "inducted" against their will. Multiply that by a million and that will give you an idea of what the Draft would be like.

The best thing would be to simply end registration and stop all this nonsense before any more people are killed or injured.