I turned to my platoon sergeant. “Why are the private companies driving around in these things and not the Marine Corps?” I asked. He looked at me and rubbed together his thumb and forefinger. An MRAP costs five times more than even the most up-armored Humvee. That’s when it became clear to me that America’s greatest strength—its economic might—was not fully engaged in Iraq.
Why not? People need a personal, vested, blood-or-money interest to maximize potential. That is why capitalism has trumped communism time and again, but it is also why private contractors in Iraq have MRAPs when Marines don’t. America isn’t practicing the basic tenet of capitalism on the battlefield, and won’t be until we reinstitute the draft. Until the wealthy have that vested interest, until the sons of senators and the upper classes are sitting in those trucks, the best gear won’t be paid for on an infantryman’s timetable. Eighteen months after the Marines first asked for MRAPs, the vehicles are finally being delivered, though still less than half the number the Pentagon had promised for this year.
It’s not hard to figure out who suffers. Like previous generations of soldiers, the 160,000 servicemen and -women in Iraq are abundantly unrepresented in the halls of power. As a result, they’ve adopted what I find to be a disturbing point of view: many don’t want the draft because they believe it will ruin the military, which they consider their own blue-collar fraternity. They have heard the horror stories from their dads and granddads about “spoiled” rich officers. When a politician would come on TV in the Camp Fallujah chow hall talking about Iraq, the rank-and-file reaction was always something like, “Well, I am cannon fodder to this wealthy bureaucrat who never got shot at and whose kids aren’t here. But I know I am making America safer, so I’ll do my job anyway.”
The real failure of this war, the mistake that has led to all the malaise of Operation Iraqi Freedom, was the failure to reinstitute the draft on Sept. 12, 2001—something I certainly believed would happen after I ran down 61 flights of the South Tower, dodging the carnage as I made my way to the Hudson River. (At the time I worked at the World Trade Center as an investment adviser for Morgan Stanley.) But President Bush was determined to keep the lives of nonuniformed America—the wealthiest Americans—uninterrupted by the war.
I assure you, no matter who wins the 2008 election, we are staying in Iraq. But with the Marine Corps and the Army severely stressed after four and a half years of combat in Iraq—equipment needs replacing, recruitment efforts are a struggle—you tell me how we’re going to sustain the current force structure without a draft. The president’s new war czar, Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute, essentially said as much last month, when he announced that considering the draft “makes sense.”
I don’t favor a Vietnam-style draft, where men like the current vice president could get five deferments. Such a system is ultimately counterproductive because of the acrimony it breeds. Since it allows the fortunate and, often, most talented to stay home, those who cannot get out of the draft feel marginalized, less important than the cause they are asked to die for. At the end of the day, it was this bitterness that helped fuel the massive antiwar movement that pushed Nixon to end the draft in 1973.
No, I am talking about a fair, universal, World War II-style draft, with the brothers and sons of future and former presidents answering the call (and, unfortunately, dying, as a Roosevelt and a Kennedy once did) on the front line. Only then will the war effort be maximized. This war needs to be more discomforting to the average American than just bad news on the tube. Democracies waging a protracted ground operation cannot win when the only people who are sacrificing are those who choose to go.
