Bringing back the draft

I'm STILL hearing a bunch of crap about this- How many times must this be discredited before the tin-hat crowd lets go?

The Pentagon has spoken out against it. The Prez and SecDef say it's not true. The only people proposing it are Democrats, so why are the leftist conspiracy whackos up in arms thinking Bush will re-instate the draft if elected? And why are college students freaking out about this? Isn't college supposed to promote critical thinking?

Recruitment is easy, and has been for many years. When I joined the AF 13 years ago, my recruiter was responsible for the entire eastern Washington region- by himself. His 'quota' was 2 persons per month. This was before the 'RIF' (reduction in force) of the mid-90's.

The military turns away far more kids than it accepts, and has been steadily raising the bar on military entrance in terms of test scores on scholastic and aptitude tests, as well as requiring a clean background (too many traffic tickets can get you rejected- any serious brush with the law is a deal-breaker).

While those high standards contribute in large part to the professional, kick-ass military we have today, some of those standards were introduced merely because we have long had too many applicants for the force levels that are authorized and funded by congress, and we needed some sort of discriminator when sorting potential recruits.

No, the problem with adding 30 or 40 thousand folks to the current military numbers is not recruitment, it's training. That's a couple divisions. You can't stand up a unit as big as a division in a short period of time without serious cadre. Building a cadre to deal with large percentages of raw recruits means you have to have the best for your core. Which means you have to strip the top performers from MANY other units to do it. Leaving them all suddenly floundering because they have (not necessarily half trained but) less experienced people running everything from platoons to laundry detail (I said, NO STARCH!) lol.

Highly skilled, valuable soldiers aren't found; they're created. A raw recruit is just building material. Some are better material than others, but no matter how smart and educated they are, they're still worse than useless until *trained*.

Update:

the measure was finally defeated once and for all, and even Charles Rangel (Democratic sponsor of the bill) voted against it. House kills Draft bill 402-2

Another Update:

Rangel Retreats: Some good commentary on the issue.

Yet Another Update:

Now John Kerry gets into the fear-mongering, spreading-irresponsible-rumours act. Un-frickin'-believable!