This Seattle PI Story has the headline: Agency initiates steps for selective draft. That’ll scare the pants off any male under 26 right quick. Fortunately, this turns out to be a non-story. The Pentagon has no plans to ask for a draft, Congress would most likely not authorize one, and DoD made sure to say that there’s no “draft movement” as it were. Turns out they’re only adding linguists and computer specialists to an existing list of professions to rapidly mobilize, here’s the quote:

The agency already has a special system to register and draft health care personnel ages 20 to 44 in more than 60 specialties if necessary in a crisis. According to Flahavan, the agency will expand this system to be able to rapidly register and draft computer specialists and linguists, should the need ever arise. But he stressed that the agency has received no request from the Pentagon to do so.

Sounds like somebody is trying to get the word “draft” out there to scare a few folks…why can the boomer generation only see things through the Vietnam lens?

[Note: I do not like conscription. I believe that it is against the principles of representative government to be compulsed into military service. If the government is the citizenry, then the government really has no authority to make members of the citizenry go out and get shot at against their will. I’m against the death penalty for similar reasons, among others.]

This entry was posted on Monday, March 15th, 2004 at 12:13 by Timothy and is filed under Miscellaneous. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.