Nick Confessore on the military draft
From TAPPED:

IT'S DRAFTY IN HERE. A friend of mine who is currently an inactive Army reservist forwarded me some memos he received regarding future mobilizations -- memos that indicate that we are not far from some kind of conscription in the next few years. According to my friend, recruiters are telling inactive reservists that they're going to be called up one way or another eventually, so they might as well sign up now and get into non-Iraq-deploying units while they still can. There's also a "warning order" -- i.e., a heads-up -- from the Army's personnel command that talks about the involuntary transfer of inactive reservists to the active reserves, and thus into units that are on deck for the next few Iraq rotations.

My understanding of how reserve call-ups work is imperfect, but if memory serves, the inactive reservists -- known as the Individual Ready Reserve -- are people who have already fulfilled their term of enlistment but can be called up as individuals if the military needs their particular skills or specialty badly enough. In other words, after a couple of years of dipping into the main reserves -- essentially chewing through them to sustain post-9/11 deployments, the Afghanistan occupation, and then the Iraq invasion -- we're now dipping into the inactive reserves. And if we still need more manpower after that -- well, then we start drafting.

There is no question we do not have enough manpower (among other things) in the active-duty military to sustain our current "operations tempo," as the military wonks call it. And there are many good arguments to be made for reinstating the draft, albeit one that would look very different from the corrupt and unfair Vietnam-era draft. It's worth thinking now about what kind of draft we'd like to see if the need for one becomes inavoidable.

--Nick Confessore
Posted at 11:35 AM