An Army of Indentured Servants

By Susan E. McGregor

As the current of campaign politics whirls and eddies around the military service of the candidates, the ongoing conflict in Iraq—already raising specters of Vietnam—has resurrected yet another ghost of that era: the military draft. Specifically, focus has suddenly been thrown to the Universal National Service Act of 2003 (HR163), which, among other things, could be used to reinstate a military draft. Despite gaining its notoriety for that possibility, HR163 isn’t merely a “draft” at all. It’s a plan for indentured servitude to the President of the United States.

HR163 has some people ready to run for the borders mostly because the legislation would require two years of mandatory “national service,” which could be required as active duty in the uniformed services. In other words “the draft.”

Unfortunately, we would be lucky if that’s all it was. This bill is anything but a simple reinstatement of the draft that was used in previous decades. The most notable difference is that the “national service” requirement must be fulfilled by all men and women between the ages of 18 and 26, and while there are non-military positions, all service must be deemed to “promote the national defense.” Moreover, the only deferments or postponements allowed will be for full-time high school students, or those suffering from extreme “hardship” (which goes charmingly undefined) or from mental or physical disability.

Strangely, these few vague specifications comprise almost the entire bill. For a piece of legislation that aims to instate a program that would impact more than 20 million people, the document is disconcertingly short—barely 2,000 words. One would imagine that there would be more involved in such a proposal—all kinds of stipulations and qualifications—and yet there are none. Which begs the questions—is the vagueness of the bill innocuous or intentional? Follow the trail of breadcrumbs, everyone, and you’ll find the answer in the fine print.

As is often the case, it’s hardly possible to create one piece of legislation without modifying another. In the case of HR163, the changes being made are to certain portions of the Military Selective Service Act, which is part of the collection of general and permanent laws of the U.S. known as the United States Code. It is the Military Selective Service Act that lays out the terms and procedures for compulsory military service that were used from World War II to Vietnam. HR163, if passed, would reopen the possibility of a draft by removing the end date on mandatory induction into the armed forces that was originally set at July 1, 1973. Other portions of the Act would be modified to remove the gender specificity of certain nouns, so that women could be included in the service program.

The final change would be to include the following subsection in the U.S.C. 50, App. 454:

‘(h) This section does not apply with respect to the induction of persons into the Armed Forces pursuant to the Universal National Service Act of 2003.’

If you look up U.S.C. 50, App. 454, you will find all of the stipulations and requirements that are so conspicuously missing from HR163. Namely, it is this section that requires that anyone drafted into military service receive compensation equivalent to that awarded any regular voluntary member of the same rank and division of the armed forces. It is this section that dictates that qualifications for deferment be determined by the Director of the Department of Defense-independent Selective Service System. It is the section that gives Congress the explicit power to repeal or eliminate active service for those inducted into the armed forces. In other words, it contains every protection and compensation related to mandatory national service.

In place of all of those things, HR163 give us only “the President.” If this legislation were to pass, its entire structure and implementation would be under jurisdiction of the President. It would be at the sole discretion of the President to determine what constitutes “satisfactory” performance of civilian service; it would be the choice of the President what groups would serve in active military service. The President alone would be arbiter of how much (and even if) those performing their “national service” would be paid (which casts the “hardship” reference in a whole new light). Effectively, it would give the President of the United States the power to demand two years of potentially unpaid labor in any capacity—including military service—from nearly every man and woman in the country between the ages of 18 and 26. At that point, a draft would hardly be necessary. The President could have a cost-free standing army at his disposal.

One hopes, of course, that such legislation would never pass—that a desire to preserve the fundamental balance of power intended in our government would prevent it from happening. One hopes that some sense of loyalty to the founding principles of our government, where power is supposed to lie with the legislature, would make it impossible. Then again if the USA PATRIOT Act (full title: "Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism”) is any example, maybe we just better hope that HR163 doesn’t get a better acronym.

Susan E. McGregor ’05 is a special concentrator in Interactive Information Design living in Quincy House.