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How much time and effort did you put into choosing a house the last time you moved? 100 hours? 200 hours? More?
If you’re like me, you probably put in a good deal more time than that. Choosing a new house is a big decision, and since we know we’ll be stuck with the results of that choice for a long while, it’s a choice we take seriously and correspondingly prioritize.
What if I instead asked you to choose a home for a family in New England that you don’t know and would never meet? How much time would you put into that decision? No doubt, we’d all do our best to take care of the unfortunate strangers whose fate was tossed so casually into our hands. Still, I suspect that much of the time we knew we should spend on such an important decision would be consumed by kid extracurriculars, checking email, or watching Netflix.
What’s the difference, then? Why do we care so much more about the first decision than the second one?
The answer is obvious, of course. In the first case, we have to live with the consequences of our choice. In other words, we’ve got skin in the game.
Having skin in the game is the difference between playing poker with the rent money instead of playing with your buddy’s favorite set of chips. Or the difference between playing Call of Duty and clearing an actual building in a warzone. When we have skin in the game, we care. When we don’t have skin in the game, we care much less.
And that’s why we need to bring back the draft. Currently, when the United States goes to war, the vast majority of the country has no skin in the game. It’s not that the average American doesn’t care; it’s just that he doesn’t care as much as he would if the troops deploying to You-pick-a-stan might include his own children. And why would he? He doesn’t have any skin in the game.
War is serious business. People die. Property is destroyed. Blood and treasure are spent. And even the victors suffer consequences. As a veteran of 22 years of Army service, I’ve seen more guys’ lives and families ruined by war than I can count, and according to the VA, 17.5 more of us kill ourselves every day. War has consequences.
That doesn’t mean war isn’t sometimes necessary, but war is never good–sometimes it’s just the least bad option. War should never be waged casually.
Right now, though, it is.
When America goes to war, nobody really cares. I mean, most of us care. But we don’t care. We care enough to grouse to our friends and family about the conflict (more or less depending on whether or not we like the administration that happens to be in office, of course). We care enough to see how much the war is impacting our retirement portfolios, but we don’t care the way we would if our own sons or daughters might deploy.
The draft fixes that problem. If every declaration of war incorporated a call-up of the nation’s youth to fight that war, then the country would take war more seriously. We wouldn’t declare war quite as casually, and we wouldn’t let the wars we do fight drag on for decades with unclear objectives. We’d do what needed to be done, and then we’d end the war so our kids could come home.
Would there be difficulties in reimplementing the draft? Of course, there would. Some people would try to avoid serving; there would be endless debates about who was or wasn’t qualified to serve, and the military would have to rework all the current advertising to remove the “all-volunteer” bits. Frankly, the process of integrating questionably willing and qualified soldiers back into the force would be a hot mess.
But if bringing back the draft meant that we only went to war when we really cared, then the effort would be worth all the pain.
So let’s bring back the draft. Let’s stop treating war like something between a reality TV show and a sporting event. War is the business of killing people and destroying things, so let’s start taking it seriously again. Let’s all put some skin in the game.
The world will be a better place for it.
Dan Pace is a retired Lieutenant Colonel who served in the US Army Special Forces as well as in Iraq and Afghanistan. His latest book, It’ll Buff Out, follows a young army infantry private in the Afghan War. You can buy it here.
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