Bring back the draft?

From today’s New York Times, an editorial by William Broyles. His closing paragraph:

If this war is truly worth fighting, then the burdens of doing so should fall on all Americans. If you support this war, but assume that Pat Tillman and Other People’s Children should fight it, then you are worse than a hypocrite. If it’s not worth your family fighting it, then it’s not worth it, period. The draft is the truest test of public support for the administration’s handling of the war, which is perhaps why the administration is so dead set against bringing it back.

I’ve long supported the idea of bringing back some form of compulsory service. It’s proved to work well in a wide range of cultural and social environments, and it provides a powerful counterbalance to exactly the kind of problem we’re having now: the people calling the shots don’t have any personal stake in the way the military is used. However, I think Broyles is too quick to dismiss the difference in quality between an all-volunteer force (where presumably everyone there wants to be there) and a force of conscripts. There’s no question that a volunteer force tends to build up a more experienced core of non-commissioned officers, which (as any officer will tell you) is the real backbone of the armed forces. Without that core, it’s not clear that the US military would be able to maintain the same level of professionalism and discipline. It’s also an open question whether a mixed force of volunteers and conscripts would suffer from the same kinds of friction we’ve been seeing between regular and reserve/National Guard units. Interestingly, one benefit to come from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq is that regular units are getting to see that reserve and NG units are just as prepared and capable, in most cases, as their regular counterparts.