Some commenters around here think it would be a good idea if the U.S. brought back the military draft. I think this is fundamentally a terrible idea, on a number of levels.

First, a switch from an all-volunteer ground force to a partially drafted one, in the midst of a shooting war, in the face of the enemy, would cause unnecessary confusion and casualties.

Second, no modern draft is a simple mass levee; rather it is a selective service. In mobilizing the national manpower for war, not every citizen is of greatest use to his country in uniform, hunting suicide bombers in Baquba. A highly skilled worker at a Stryker manufacturing plant, a farmer responsible for thousands of acres, a day-care operator probably do more good where they are.

Many classes of workers will have to be exempted from a draft. A system will have to be set up for processing draftees and sorting out the exemptions. The problems with such a system may be anticipated, and if not, history teaches them. Individual draft officers would operate with different levels of zeal; the exemptions, however well-meant in theory, would be widely abused; the richer class of men of military age inevitably would find it easier to avoid service. Every system can be “gamed,” and military bureaucracies are among the easiest to manipulate.

The result of this would be to increase social tension in America. It inevitably would revive the age-old cry of “rich man’s war, poor man’s fight.” It doesn’t surprise me that the most vocal supporters of a draft so far have been the politicians most opposed to the war itself, and to the Bush Administration. Reviving the draft would restore a crucial piece to the “Iraq=Vietnam” storyline, and the social turmoil and resentment that a draft would cause would spark the fire they long for, to embarrass the government and the war.

If there was a time to re-introduce a draft in America, it would have been right after 9/11, when the will to serve was high and the public would have welcomed the spirit of sacrifice. Albert B. Moore, the great historian of conscription in the Confederate States in the American Civil War, made a similar observation:

“[C]onscription would have been less odious if it had been made the exclusive policy of raising armies at the outset. It might then have been regarded as a scientific way of allocating the man power of the country and distributing fairly the burdens of war. But the volunteer system was tried the first year, and after conscription was adopted volunteering was still allowed. This made conscription appear to be a device for coercing derelicts, hence the taint that attached to the conscript.”

My second objection to a draft is more philosophical than practical. Modern America has strayed far from its roots, but I prefer to keep as close as possible to the vision of the Founders because it was so judiciously shaped, and framed with an eye to human weaknesses as well as virtues. The original Constitution, and its supporting documents, ought to be a touchstone for us, even if we no longer live under them.

In many ways the current system of the U.S. military — a volunteer professional force augmented by Reserve and National Guard units — resembles what the Founders created (though its use in Iraq and Afghanistan does not). They would have abhorred a draft of citizens directly into the ranks of the armed forces.

Their references to military powers in the United States plainly cover two separate forces: the militia, which was understood as the people under arms, and the army.

These distinctions of army and militia, and the notion of citizen duties to protect the homeland, are ancient in English history. Freemen were required to keep and bear arms by the Statute of Winchester (1285) so that they might be ready if called upon to put down insurrections, enforce the laws, or repel invasions.

In the early Middle Ages, the English kings began to conscript freemen into royal armies to fight foreign wars, but the people resisted this and the result was the statute of 1 Edward III, Chapter 5 (1327) which provided:

That no man shall henceforth be charged to arm himself otherwise than he was wont to do in the time of the King’s progenitors, and that no man be compelled to go out of his shire but where necessity requireth, and [there be] sudden coming of strange enemies into the realm, and then it shall be used as in times past for the defence of the realm.

This privilege, several times confirmed, abolished conscriptions of freemen and restricted the king to raising his armies by hiring soldiers. During the American Revolution, states called up their militias when invaded by the British or about to be. This was done in keeping with the ancient custom.

There’s a reciprocal notion here. The government has no right to force its citizens to serve as soldiers, but the people have an obligation to defend the government and the nation. George Washington summed it up in his 1783 “Sentiments on a Peace Establishment”:

It may be laid down as a primary position, and the basis of our system, that every Citizen who enjoys the protection of a free Government, owes not only a proportion of his property, but even of his personal services to the defence of it, and consequently that the Citizens of America (with a few legal and official exceptions) from 18 to 50 Years of Age should be borne on the Militia Rolls, provided with uniform Arms, and so far accustomed to the use of them, that the Total strength of the Country might be called forth at a Short Notice on any very interesting Emergency ….

Gen. Henry Knox had been Washington’s chief of artillery in the Revolution, and after independence he became Washington’s secretary of war. In 1790 he proposed a vigorous plan for compulsory militia service for all free American males, under the 15th and 16th clauses of Article I, Section 8.

Under the Knox plan, able-bodied males age 18 and 19 were to train 30 days per year, Those age 20 would train for 10 days, age 21 to 46 four days and even ages 47 to 60 would be in training two days a year.

Congress rejected it and passed a much less stringent regulation, leaving to much control to the states. The decay of the militias, their utter failure in the War of 1812, and the Lincoln Administration’s legal wriggling out from control of the Constitution to introduce a direct draft to America, are topics for another time and place, as is the story of the rise of the National Guard.

With one exception, because I can’t resist it. Madison’s administration, desperate for men to fight in the War of 1812, tried to push a direct conscription through the Congress, Daniel Webster stared it down. In his brilliant speech of Dec. 9, 1814, Webster laid bare the government’s plan beneath its ill-fitting legal garb and said:

Is this, sir, consistent with the character of a free government? Is this civil liberty? Is this the real character of our Constitution? No sir, indeed it is not. The Constitution is libeled. The people of this country have not established for themselves such a fabric of despotism. They have not purchased at a vast expense of their own treasure and their own blood a Magna Carta to be slaves. Where is it written in the Constitution, in what article or section is it contained, that you may take children from their parents from their children, and compel them to fight the battles of any war in which the folly or the wickedness of government may engage it? Under what concealment has this power lain hidden which now for the first time comes forth, with a tremendous and bailful aspect, to trample down and destroy the dearest rights of personal liberty? Who will show me any Constitutional injunction which makes it the duty of the American people to surrender everything valuable in life, and even life itself, not when the safety of their country and its liberties may demand the sacrifice, but whenever the purposes of an ambitious and mischievous government may require it? Sir, I almost disdain to go to quotations and references to prove that such an abominable doctrine has no foundation in the Constitution of the country.