Reinstatement of the Military Draft
Manditory Draft Legislation pending
ACTION POINT: Suggested letter to elected officials
Various back-up articles
Uncle Sam Wants You - Dispite Bush's lies about no draft, further evidence of planning is revealed.
An Army of (No) One - The military's desperate attempt to enlist young people.

Links:
Army probes soldier suicides: - USA Today
Military Families Against the War: Military Families Speak Out

This is a critical piece of pending legislation, will effect our college students, our children and our grandchildren:
ALL MEN and WOMEN between the ages of 18 and 26.
Mandatory Draft Legislation
There is pending legislation in the house and senate (twinbills: S89 and HR 163) which will time the program's initiation so the draft can begin as early as spring, 2005, just after the 2004 presidential election. Details and links follow.

This House legislation is #HR 163, the Senate bill is #S89. Both bills can be found in detail at this website: http://thomas.loc.gov - enter in "HR 163" or "S89" in the Bill Number search box and will bring up the bills for you to read. Each is less than two pages long.

Men AND Women: If this bill passes, it will include all men and ALL WOMEN from ages 18 - 26 in a draft for military action.

No Deferments for College: This plan eliminates higher education as a shelter and includes women in the draft. Underclassmen would only be able to postpone service until the end of their current semester. Seniors would have until the end of the academic year.

No Escape to Canada: Also, crossing into Canada has already been made very difficult. In addition, college will no longer be an option for avoiding the draft and they will be signing an agreement with Canada which will no longer permit anyone attempting to dodge the draft to stay within it's borders. In December, 2001, Canada and the U.S. signed a "smart border declaration," which could be used to keep would-be draft dodgers in. Signed by Canada's minister of foreign affairs, John Manley, and U.S. Homeland Security director, Tom Ridge, the declaration involves a 30 point plan which implements, among other things, a "pre clearance agreement" of people entering and departing each country.

Extention of service: This bill also includes the extention of military service for all those that are currently active. If you go to the selective service web site and read their 2004 FYI Goals you will see that the reasoning for this is to increase the size of the military in case of terrorism.

Although nobody is talking about it, they ARE gearing up now: The pentagon has quietly begun a public campaign to fill all 10,350 draft board positions and 11,070 appeals board slots nationwide. Though this is an unpopular election year topic, military experts and influential members of congress are suggesting that if Rumsfeld's prediction of a "long, hard slog" in Iraq and Afghanistan (and permanent state of war on terrorism) proves accurate, the U.S. may have no choice but to draft. www.hslda.org/legislation/national/2003/s89/default.asp entitled the Universal National service Act of 2003, "to provide for the common defense by requiring that ALL young persons (age 18-26) in the United States, including women, perform a period of military service or a period of civilian service in furtherance of the national defense and homeland security, and for other purposes."

The draft $28 million has been added to the 2004 selective service system budget to prepare for a military draft that could start as early as June 15, 2005.

Selective Service must report to Bush on March 31, 2005 that the system (which has lain dormant for decades) is ready for activation. Please see www.sss.gov/perfplan_fy2004.html to view the Selective Service System annual performance plan, fiscal year 2004.

action points: Please copy and pass this along to your friends, family and coworkers.

Write to your elected officials and let them know how you feel about this legislation. (you may consider using the letter below)

Write to the media asking them why they are not covering this important issue.

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Suggested letter to elected officials and the media:

THE IMPENDING DRAFT MUST NOT HAPPEN UNDER BUSH'S WATCH!

The draft bills (HR 163 and S.89) written by Democrats (Congressman Charles Rangel, NY and Senator E. F. Hollins, SC) - were written for the right reason: to EQUALIZE THE DRAFT so rich kids like George W. Bush's girls don't find the same escape from service that their Granddad Bush did for Daddy Bush, while poor and minority kids get suckered (or forced) into serving. That equalization would be a good thing.

The bad thing is, there is NO escape mechanism for those who are conscientious objectors to the preemptive wars that George W. Bush is obviously prone to waging. If there was a DEPARTMENT OF PEACE development attached to these bills, and the conscientious objectors to military actions could serve their time working for peace efforts instead of holding desk jobs in support of war efforts - then they would have balanced bills worth supporting.
Also attached to the bill could be the manditory inclusion of a check box on Federal Income Tax forms that allows for the alternative funding of the Department of Peace/Peace Tax as an option to funding the War Department/Department of Defense for those morally opposed to war.

Read the bills (HR136 and S89) - there are way too many "at the discretion of the President" phrases. George W. Bush has demonstrated repeatedly that he is not able to exercise discretion.

Basically, it boils down to this:
We do not trust President George W. Bush to use these bills as they were intended. Instead, we fully expect him to implement the draft, as quickly as possible FOLLOWING the elections, and then use it to provide human beings with which to kill those he has conveniently labeled as "evil doers" (read: anyone who is not like us).

Elected Officials: PLEASE withdraw your support of the draft bills (HR163 and S.89) and rewrite these bills to allow for those who are morally opposed to ANY and ALL military action.
===
The letter above (or your own) may be sent to your Congressperson, Senators and to the media
Contact form links are available above.
You may also wish to send a copy to the Bill Co-Sponsors listed here.

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Articles about the recruitment drive for draft board workers may be found here:
A Copy of the DefendAmerica page
Draft Board Vacancies Prompt Questions of a Draft
Is the Draft on the Drawing Boards?
Talk of a Draft Grows
Will US Bring Back the Draft
Selective Service Notice Spurs Worries about Draft
US Raises Spectre of Conscription
Will Bush Reinstate The Draft?
Appeal for Draft Board Volunteers Revives Memories of Vietnam

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Uncle Sam Wants You
By Jim Hightower, AlterNet
Posted on March 2, 2005, Printed on March 3, 2005 http://www.alternet.org/story/21394/

Is it just me, or do you feel a draft?

In last year's presidential run, young voters were wary that Bush & Co. was quietly preparing for a military draft. The concern was spreading so quickly that George himself was rushed out to denounce what he called "rumors on the internets," and he flatly declared: "We're not going to have a draft – period." Donnie Rumsfeld went even farther, offering this absolute statement: "The idea of reinstating the draft has never been debated, endorsed, discussed, theorized, pondered, or even whispered by anyone in the Bush administration."

The problem for political liars is that they don't know when to stop. They keep piling it on until the lie becomes too extreme and too big to be true. Rumsfeld's denial, for example, was incredible when he issued it, and now we learn that it was patently untrue – i.e., a bold-faced lie issued for political purposes.

Rolling Stone magazine recently unearthed an internal Selective Service memo that reveals the lie. It details a meeting with two of Rummie's top aides early in 2003, specifically to debate, discuss, ponder, and otherwise consider reinstating the draft. Indeed, the head of the Selective Service later testified before Congress that, following "consultations with senior Defense manpower officials," the agency began preparing a plan to draft Americans who have special skills that the military needs, such as nurses and doctors.

But conscripting people with medical skills is just a start. A Selective Service official confides that "with some very slight tinkering, we could change that skill to plumbers or linguists or electrical engineers or whatever the military was short."

Military troop levels are already stretched to the breaking point, and now George W. is beating the war drums to move on to Iran, Syria and maybe North Korea. In other words, forget the official lies – Uncle Sam Wants You!

© 2005 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.

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An Army of (No) One
By Nicholas Turse, Tomdispatch.com
Posted on July 14, 2005, Printed on July 14, 2005
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/23498/

It's been a tough year for the U.S. military. But you wouldn't know it from the Internet, now increasingly packed with slick, non-military looking websites of every sort that are lying in wait for curious teens (or their exasperated parents) who might be surfing by. On the ground, the military may be bogged down in a seemingly interminable mission that was supposedly "accomplished" back on May 1, 2003, but on the Web it's still a be-all-that-you-can-be world of advanced career choices, peaceful pursuits, and risk-free excitement.

While there has been a wave of news reports recently on the Pentagon's problems putting together an all-volunteer military, or even a functioning officer corps, from an increasingly reluctant public, military officials are ahead of the media in one regard. They know where the future troops they need are. Hint: They're not reading newspapers or watching the nightly prime-time news, but they are surfing the web, looking for entertainment, information, fun, and perhaps even a future.

In addition to raising the maximum enlistment age, no longer dismissing new recruits out of hand for "drug abuse, alcohol, poor fitness and pregnancy," allowing those with criminal records in, and employing such measures as hefty $20,000 sign-up bonuses (with talk of proposed future bonuses of up to $40,000, along with $50,000 worth of "mortgage assistance") to coerce the cash-strapped to enlist in the all-volunteer military, one of the military's favorite methods of bolstering the rolls is targeting the young -- specifically teens -- to fill the ranks.

What the military truly values is green teens. Not surprisingly, the Pentagon pays companies like Teenage Research Unlimited (TRU), which claims it offers its "clients virtually unlimited methods for researching teens," to get inside kids' heads. It was also recently revealed that the Department of Defense (DoD), with the aid of a private marketing firm, BeNow, has created a database of twelve million youngsters, some only 16 years of age, as part of a program to identify potential recruits. Armed with "names, birth dates, addresses, Social Security numbers, individuals' e-mail addresses, ethnicity, telephone numbers, students' grade-point averages, field of academic study and other data," the Pentagon now has far better ways and means of accurately targeting teens.

(Military) Culture JAMRS

BeNow and TRU, however, are just two of a number of private contractors working through JAMRS -- the Pentagon's "program for joint marketing communications and market research and studies" -- to fill the ranks of our increasingly-less-eager-to-volunteer military. JAMRS claims that it's only developing "public programs [to] help broaden people's understanding of Military Service as a career option." However, it also hires firms to engage in all sorts of not-for-public-consumption studies that are meant to "help bolster the effectiveness of all the Services' recruiting and retention efforts." Put another way, behind the scenes the military is in a frantic search for weak points in the public's growing resistance to joining the armed services. Some of this is impossible to learn about because access to the studies via the JAMRS web portal is restricted. Should you visit and inquire about examining their research, you are told in no uncertain terms that "access is currently limited to certain types of users" -- none of which are you.

What we do know, however, is that JAMRS is currently focusing on the following areas of interest in an attempt to bolster the all-volunteer military:
• Hispanic Barriers to Enlistment: a project to "identify the factors contributing to under-representation of Hispanic youth among military accessions" and "inform future strategies for increasing Hispanic representation among the branches of the Military."
• College Drop Outs/Stop Outs Study: a project "aimed to gain a better understanding of what drives college students to... 'drop out' and determine how the Services can capitalize on this group of individuals (ages 18-24)."
• Mothers' Attitude Study: "This study gauges the target audience's (270 mothers of 10th- and 11th-grade youth) attitudes toward the Military and enlistment."

During the Vietnam War, Hispanics took disproportionate numbers of casualties and similar disparities have been reported in Iraq. JAMRS, apparently, is looking to make certain that this military tradition is maintained. Additionally, eyebrows ought to be raised over a Pentagon that is looking at ways to influence the mothers of teens to send their sons and daughters off to war and at a military eager to study what it takes to get kids to "drop out" of school and how the military might then scoop them up. Perhaps the most intriguing line of research, however, is the "Moral Waiver Study" whose seemingly benign goal is "to better define relationships between pre-Service behaviors and subsequent Service success." What the JAMRS informational page doesn't make clear, but what might be better explained in the password-protected section of the site, is that a "moral character waiver" is the means by which potential recruits with criminal records are allowed to enlist in the U.S. military.

Future Shock

Another of JAMRS' partners is Mullen Advertising which "works with JAMRS on an array of marketing communications, planning, and strategic initiatives. This work includes public-facing, influencer-focused joint offline and online advertising campaigns." One Mullen effort is the very unmilitary-sounding MyFuture.com. It's a slick website with information on such topics as living on your own, writing a cover letter, or finding a job and includes tips on dressing for success. ("Take extra time to look great.") Without the usual tell-tale ".mil" domain name, MyFuture offers what seems like civilian career advice (albeit with some military images sprinkled throughout). You can, for instance, take its Work Interest Quiz in order to discover if you should "go to college or look for a job." However, the more you explore, the more you see that the site is really about steering youngsters towards the armed forces. For example, when you take that quiz, you are prompted to ask your school guidance counselor "about taking the ASVAB Career Exploration Program if you'd like to know more about your aptitudes, values, and interests..." Not mentioned is that the ASVAB is actually the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery -- a test developed during the Vietnam War as "the admissions and placement test for the US military."

When I took the quiz I was told: "Based on your responses to the activities listed, here are the work styles that may be appropriate for you: Investigative [and] Artistic." To follow up on my investigative aptitude, MyFuture.com offered eight civilian career suggestions, ranging from veterinarian to meteorologist. It also recommended eight military counterparts including Law Enforcement and Security Specialist. For my artistic aptitude, MyFuture suggested that I "may like activities that: 'Allow [me] to be creative [and] Let [me] work according to [my] own rules.'" Apparently, there are eight military jobs that will allow me to stretch my imagination and do just what I want, artistically speaking. Who knew, for example, that the perfect move for an artistic, freethinker would be joining an organization based on authority and conformity -- and then becoming a "Food Service Specialist"?

MyFuture.com claims that its "website is provided as a public service," while the JAMRS site refers to it as a "public site for potential military candidates to discover more about career opportunities appropriate for their interests." Of course, it's really an effort to recruit kids.

Tomorrow's Military, Today?

Another Mullen Advertising-created site is aimed at a different population. Like MyFuture, Today'sMilitary.com is a polished-looking site that lacks a ".mil" in its web address, but instead of targeting teens, the website announces that it "seeks to educate parents and other adults about the opportunities and benefits available to young people in the Military today." In JAMRS-speak that means it's a "public site targeted at influencers."

Today'sMilitary.com is filled with information on financial incentives available to those who join the military and webpages devoted to "what it's like" to be in the armed forces and how the military can "turn young diamonds in the rough into the finest force on the face of the earth." We learn that Army basic training is "[m]ore than just pushups and mess halls." In fact, quite the opposite of a torture test, it's actually a "nine-week-long journey of self-discovery." The Marines' boot camp comes across as an even more routine, though less introspective, affair with nary a mention of its rigors aside from "a final endurance test of teamwork." Scanning through the pages, we even learn that life in the military is not just "exciting, challenging and hugely rewarding," but that in their off-time, military folk "go for walks... and they even shop for antiques" (which may account for some of the antiquities that seem to go missing from Iraq).

Today's Military even takes the time to dispel "myths" like: "People in the Military are not compensated as well as private sector workers." According to Today's Military they are -- just don't tell it to the Marines who recently roughed up their highly-paid mercenary counterparts in Iraq. "One Marine gets me on the ground and puts his knee in my back. Then I hear another Marine say, 'How does it feel to make that contractor money now?'" So reported a former Marine now working in the war zone as a "private security contractor." Mercenaries in Iraq generally rake in $100,000 to $200,000 per year. Earlier this year, under pressure from Congress, the Pentagon announced that it, too, would start paying out this type of cash. One caveat -- you've got to be dead.

Such unpleasantries as death and combat go largely unmentioned on Today'sMilitary.com (or on any of the other sites mentioned in this article). In fact, the only such allusion is on a webpage that coaches parents on ways to push their children to consider the military. It instructs parents to "[e]ncourage them with subtle hints" to foster conversation on the subject and offers talking points to refute the possible trepidations of your own little potential enlistee about the armed forces. Among the "tough questions" a child might raise is a simple fact, driven home nightly on the news: "It's dangerous." Today's Military offers the following answer:

"There's no doubt that a military career isn't for everyone. But you and your young person may be surprised to learn that over 80 percent of military jobs are in non-combat operations... A military career is often what you make of it."

Tell that to non-combat troops like Jessica Lynch, the late Corporal Holly Charette (seen here delivering mail for the Marines) and her fellow fourteen casualties from a recent suicide car-bomb attack on a Marine Corps Civil Affairs team in Fallujah, or the large number of other troops in support roles who have found themselves directly in harm's way. As a Voice of America article recently put it, "Increasingly, there is a fine line between combat and non-combat jobs, especially in a place like Iraq, where there is no front line, and any unit can find itself in a firefight at any moment."

Assault and (Aptitude) Battery

Maj. Gen. Michael Rochelle, head of the Army Recruiting Command, recently stated, "Having access to 17- to 24-year-olds is very key to us. We would hope that every high school administrator would provide those lists [of student phone numbers and addresses] to us. They're terribly important for what we're trying to do." In the wake of the revelation of the Pentagon's massive new database of America's youth, Chief Pentagon spokesman Lawrence Di Rita claimed, "We are trying to use appropriate methods to make ourselves competitive in the marketplace for these kids who have a lot of choices." But as Nation magazine editor Katrina vanden Heuvel recently wrote in her Editor's Cut blog, it isn't just choices keeping the kids away:
"The debacle in Iraq has made recruiting an impossibly difficult job and recruiters are sinking to new lows in the face of growing pressure to fulfill monthly quotas as well as fierce opposition from parents who don't support the President's botched Iraq war mission."

One of the military's new lows brings us back to the subject of ASVAB and the methods of the Vietnam-era. Faced then with the need for expendable troops, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara instituted an unholy coupling of the War on Poverty and the War in Vietnam -- Project 100,000. Project 100,000 called for the military, each year, to admit into service 100,000 men who had failed its qualifying exam. The program claimed that it would outfit those who failed to meet mental standards, men McNamara called the "subterranean poor," with an education and training that would be useful upon their return to civilian life. Instead of acquiring skills useful for the civilian job market, however, "McNamara's moron corps," as they came to be known within the military, were trained for combat at markedly elevated levels, were disproportionately sent to Vietnam, and had double the death rate of American forces as a whole.

Today, a desperate Pentagon seems to be following a strikingly similar path. As Eric Schmitt of the New York Times has written, the Army is increasingly turning to high-school dropouts, has already almost doubled last year's number of recruits scoring in the lowest level on the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery and is "accepting hundreds of recruits in recent months who would have been rejected a year ago." Meanwhile, those who happen upon the Pentagon's ASVAB website will find another slick design, with few military trappings, no ".mil" web-address, and lots of objective career counseling. You have to troll around the site to discover in the fine print that it's offered as a "public service by the U.S. Department of Defense, Defense Manpower Data Center."

Like Today'sMilitary.com, the ASVAB site makes a pitch to parents, exhorting them to "[e]ncourage your teen to take the ASVAB." It also tries to influence teachers to "[i]ntegrat[e] the ASVAB Program Into the Classroom," even recommending that portions be "assigned as homework" to students.

Strapped for bodies, the Pentagon is putting on a full court press to fill the ranks. Its new package of promotion includes: big signing bonuses and drastically lowered standards; NASCAR, professional bull-riding, and Arena Football sponsorships; video games that double as recruiting tools; TV commercials that drip with seductive scenes of military glory or feature The Apprentice host Donald Trump; disingenuous career counseling websites; and an integrated "joint marketing communications and market research and studies" program actively engaged in measures to target Hispanics, "drop outs," and those with criminal records for military service. The Department of Defense, in short, is pulling out all the stops, sparing no expense, and spending at least $16,000 in promotional costs alone for each single soldier signed up.

Obviously the Pentagon wants recruits badly and cash-strapped teens represent one of the best chances to fill uniforms. The military clearly thinks that America's youth couldn't really pass your basic intelligence test. Its websites downplay danger and its slick TV commercials show bloodless scenes of adventure and heroism that don't square with images (and news) now coming home from Iraq to anybody's neighborhood. From hiccupping recruitment rates, it's clear, however, that America's teens already know these ads and websites are missing a few critical elements -- scenes of American troops acting as foreign occupiers, killing civilians, torturing detainees, fanning the flames of discontent, and failing to deliver basic safety or security not just for Iraqis but for their own troops.

Nick Turse works in the Department of Epidemiology at Columbia University. He writes for the Los Angeles Times, the Village Voice and regularly for Tomdispatch on the military-corporate complex and the homeland security state.

© 2005 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.

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