IN RETROSPECT

As you look back on our history you see a chain forged with links that are made from the bodies and bones of the people of this country and the one thing that makes you pause and wonder, is that again and again, we found it necessary to draft the youngest and most expendable and send them off to fight in our name. That right there is a sign of failure and it should have been addressed the first time it became 'necessary' to do something like that in a country that believed once so strongly in inalienable rights that it founded the greatest Republic the world has ever known and surely the first of those rights was the right to, Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. You can see it here if you like: 

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.--Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

If the powers of reason and persuasion are not sufficient to sway the young men to fight and die for your cause perhaps yours is not a just or worthy cause. If the old soft words don't work to get enough men then that leaves the mercenary form as the final offer from a government that truly believes in inalienable rights. You can pay them what the measured worth of their lives is to them and see if they'll fight for gold.

This is one of those days of the year where we make mention of the men that fought and died at Normandy and they are the standard bearers for all the tens of thousands of young men that fought and died in our name and, I suppose, in the name of liberty and justice for all. That said, there is nothing American about drafting young men. It did not happen in the Revolution and it should not have happened in the Civil War. The idea that we were going to do it in World War I and did it in World War II, Korea and Vietnam is a crime against this country's young men.

You see the brave battalions and divisions storm ashore at Normandy and also in Sicily, Italy and all the islands in the Pacific but you never ever hear about the collections of bodies that are simply moved en masse to the Replacement Depots you never heard of where they are parceled out to fill the gaps in the ranks left by days, weeks and months of fighting. They simply show up one day and fight and die right next to the guys that have been doing that since the first day. 

The idea that others may serve at the cost of their lives for no purposes of their own and however unwilling they may be is, on the face of it, unAmerican. It is hard to believe that we were drafting American teenagers to fight and die in Vietnam which as far as I could tell, never suffered from a shortage of Vietnamese soldiers.

I'm kind of displeased that the angry left has utterly failed to make the case that the draft is simply not an option in a free Republic like ours. It will either find the men to fight or it will have proven unworthy and it will fall away just as the Republics have since the beginning of time. That is the thing about a Republic. They ape the words and manners of a system of governance that makes men eager to keep it alive. When they don't come forward in sufficient numbers it is not a failure of the young men but of the Republic. 

I do not think we will ever be able to draft young men to fight again but it is still worth saying. This sort of thing flies in the face of every single thing this Republic was founded on.