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Rummy on the Draft
Excerpt from Secretary Rumsfeld Remarks to the Newspaper Association of America/American Society of Newspaper Editors
Q Secretary Rumsfeld, Iâm Narda Zakeeno (ph) from the San Francisco Chronicle. And Iâd like to ask you a question about the draft. Iâd like to know if there are currently any Selective Service Personnel anywhere in the country who are working to possibly reinstitute the draft, if thatâs going to happen. And if your answer to that question is going to be no, Iâd like to know what the plans are for replenishing our troops, especially if more members leave our coalition.
SEC. RUMSFELD: My answer is no; that I donât know anyone in the executive branch of the government who believes that it would be appropriate or necessary to reinstitute the draft. We have a very large population. We have a relatively small military. We have been very successful in recruiting and retaining the people we need. There were a lot of difficulties with the draft, as people may recall. A few of you are old enough to remember that. If you remember, there was a draft, but a relatively small number of people of that -- males, I should say; no females were drafted -- a relatively small number of the male population in that age group was ever drafted. A large number were exempted because they were married or they were teachers or they were students or they were some other thing that the society decided to set aside and not draft.
The result of it was that we conscripted people and trained them, and then they had relatively short periods of service. And they did a great job. But the task of training that large volume of people relative to the relatively small number who actually stayed in the service for a sustained period, from a cost-benefit standpoint, was useful to do during a certain part of our history, but we believe is not useful to do at the present time.
And then the second part of your question was well, what are we going to do, how do we sustain a force we need to engage in the kinds of activities that our countryâs engaged in? I mean, you think about it, weâve got close to 2,000 people in Haiti, and theyâll be there probably another month until the U.N. force replaces them. We had some folks in Liberia, and we have people in Korea. We have people in Bosnia and Kosovo -- Bosniaâs running down this year -- to say nothing of the ones that Iâve mentioned involved in the global war on terror and elsewhere in the world. So one can make the question, what do you do? How do you sustain what you need to sustain?
Let me put it this way. General Schoomaker, the chief of staff for the Army, says think of a water keg thatâs that high. And what weâve got is weâve got 1.4 million men and women in uniform on active duty, and if you add all the reserves -- the selective and the individual ready reserves -- it comes up over 2 million people. So in this universe of the water keg are 2 million-plus; 2.3 (million), 2.4 million people. All weâre trying to do is sustain 135,000 in Iraq plus the other commitments I mentioned.
Now, if thatâs a stress on the force, that probably means youâve got to do one of three things. You either have to increase the size of the water keg or you have to move the spigot down. At the present time weâre only accessing a very small portion of the two-plus million men and women in the active force and the reserves in our current deployments. So the question is, why is that? And the answer is because the spigotâs too high. We need to lower the spigot. We donât need to get a bigger barrel.
There isnât any reason in the world why we canât manage this force better with less stress on it, and it simply requires changing the rules, changing the requirements, changing the regulations in ways that we can manage that force considerably better. And that is the process that the Armyâs engaged in. Theyâre doing an excellent job at it. The chief of staff for the Army is hopeful that heâs going to be able to, for example, go from 33 brigades up to 43 or 48 brigades without a permanent increase in the size of the force, and thatâs by better utilizing the people we have. I donât know if heâll make it, but heâs a terrific leader and heâs working hard on it and he believes thatâs doable. Well, now, thatâs a significant increase in combat capability.
We have some 300,000, Iâm told, men and women in uniform doing things that are tasks that need not be done by military personnel. Now why is that? The reason we have military personnel doing tasks that are not military -- necessarily need to be military tasks is because we have, I donât know, dozens and dozens of different personnel systems and weâre not capable of managing our civil service in a way that is efficient.
So when a person in the Pentagon has a problem and they need someone to solve something, rather than reaching for a civil service person, they reach for a uniformed person because they can bring him on, they can send him away, they can deploy him, they can train him, and they can manage it in an efficient way. Or they reach for a contractor. They can sign a contract that fits the current needs, and they can stop the contract when they want it over. So we end up with three hundred -- weâre not using our civil service the way we ought to. Theyâre terrific people. There isnât any reason, with the right rules under this new national security personnel system we just got, there isnât any reason we canât manage them better and use them properly and end up with some fraction of that 300,000 people in uniform that are doing civilian jobs, some fraction of those moved out of civilian jobs back into military jobs so that weâll have them available to reduce stress on the force.
Posted by: Super Hose 2004-04-24 |
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