COUNTERING MILITARY RECRUITMENT
Articles: Draft: General
Draft Boards Stay Ready — Just in Case
Pauline Jelinek, Associated Press
April 20, 2006
Sitting
on a military draft board is not a taxing job right now. With no draft,
the boards have, well, no work to do — nearly 11,000 people
training for a crisis that may never come.
“It’s not hard at all. There’s nothing to it,”
deadpans Michael Cohen, a Selective Service System board member from
Highland Park, Ill.
That could change if there is a national crisis and if the government
decides the crisis requires a return to the draft that ended 33 years
ago. Officials say they don’t expect to restart conscription
— public sentiment is heavily against it — but should they,
draft boards could face their biggest work load in history as they help
decide who gets drafted and who doesn’t.
Until then, a draft board member’s main chore is training.
At half-day annual sessions, they keep up on rules for granting
postponements, deferments, exemptions and conscientious objector
status. They also learn how to hold meetings, judge evidence and elicit
testimony.
Then, as boards have done since the system was created in 1980, they wait.
“It’s a ghost of a job,” said board member James Stephen Brophy of Burke, Va.
And a ghost of its former self.
Before the draft ended in 1973, some people demonstrated outside of
draft board offices and burned their draft cards to protest U.S.
involvement in the Vietnam War. Many baby boomers still remember the
names of board members who judged their cases.
Today, most people don’t know the boards exist.
An agency independent of the Defense Department, the Selective Service
System trains board members and plans alternative national service for
objectors, but its main task is keeping an updated registry of males
aged 18-25 — now some 16 million individuals — from which
to supply untrained draftees that would supplement the professional
all-volunteer armed forces.
Conscientious objector groups, and occasionally some members of
Congress, oppose the idea of keeping the Selective Service at the ready.
But few opponents focus on the boards, which wouldn’t be activated unless there’s a draft.
“Nobody’s complaining about what we’re doing,”
said Brophy, an attorney who was appointed a board member five years
ago. “It might change if there was a crisis.”
Indeed, repeated polls have shown that about seven in 10 Americans
oppose reinstatement of the draft. Yet with President Bush saying U.S.
troops will remain in Iraq for years and with the Pentagon now calling
the war on terrorism the “Long War,” many Americans find it
hard to believe repeated government assurances that there are no plans
to revive conscription.
“Beware of attempts to revive military draft” has been a typical Internet headline in recent years.
If the government restarted the draft, here’s the plan:
—A lottery would choose the order of callups from those millions registered.
—Draftees would report for physical, mental and moral evaluations.
—When evaluation results are in, they’d have 10 days to appeal their status.
Training has taught board members to expect a range of claims —
“students who want to finish college ... ministers ... people
that don’t believe in fighting,” said board member Helen
Obernagel, 45, of New Athens, Ill.
“We’re here so that they don’t have to go scrambling
around looking for people qualified to determine who’s eligible
and who isn’t,” said Cohen, a 66-year-old retired
firefighter who is one of America’s 10,300 local board members.
There are also several hundred appeals boards above the local boards.
Board members are young, old, of different races, incomes — dentists, secretaries, maintenance men and real estate agents.
There are long lists of volunteers for the unpaid positions, which are filled through nomination by each state’s governor.
Officials say diversity on the boards would make any new draft the most
equitable ever. And draft boards could have more work than ever.
More people could apply for exemptions because more men have custody of
children now. And more might be supporting parents because of the
increasingly graying society and looming Social Security problems,
Brophy said.
What would happen if there were no draft boards ready?
“If everyone said ‘no, no, no,’ who would
decide?” said Obernagel, a board member since 1992 who works two
jobs: massage therapist and hospital secretary.
“When you see a war like we’re in now, you don’t know
what will happen,” she said. “We’re always ready to
be called up, in case they need us.”
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