Mr. Rangel’s draft

We will owe Rep. Charles Rangel, New York Democrat, at least a small amount of credit if the military-draft idea he recently voiced can succeed in prodding Washington and the nation out of its complacency on the issue of military manpower. A draft is not necessary right now, and in this case is being offered for political effect. But sometimes a bad idea and its shoddy reasoning can have good consequences.

We’re not endorsing Mr. Rangel’s quest to reinstate the draft; the incoming House Ways and Means chairman’s politically motivated remark that drafting lawmakers’ children into the military will prevent ill-advised wars is insulting and wrong on its face. No American government enters war lightly; lawmakers know that tens or hundreds of thousands of Americans are potentially in harm’s way once the decision for war is made. This burden already weighs heavily. Mr. Rangel is also wrong that military service falls disproportionately on the poor, minorities and the uneducated. The all-volunteer force is in many respects a middle-class occupation whose ethnic and racial diversity should make liberals and conservatives alike proud. We also find that Mr. Rangel’s notion of “national service,” consisting of just about any government job as superior to private-sector jobs, is a silly repackaging of the old big-government liberalism that wrongly and unduly disdains the private engines of American economic progress. And fourth, we reject Mr. Rangel’s contention that a draft is necessary right now. It clearly is not.

But Mr. Rangel points toward a necessary issue. The fact that many sober analysts are calling for greater numbers of ground forces in Iraq while simultaneously doubting the country’s ability to sustain those numbers for very long is the most pressing evidence of it. We’ve pushed for years for an enlargening of military manpower on the order of tens of thousands of ground forces, the need for which was regrettably evident in “stop loss” and the repeated deployments of the men and women of the active-duty military and the activated Reserves and National Guard in Iraq. The nation should never again be in a position to rely so heavily on so proportionally small a number of service members relative to the general population. This innovative and rapidly growing country of 300 million should be able to do better for its uniformed personnel.

The draft is the last resort, not the first. Mr. Rangel jumped the issue presumably for purposes of publicity, and the first methods to exhaust are as follows. The quest to maximize “tooth-to-tail” in the Department of Defense is ongoing and needs innovative management to ensure that desk jobs and support functions are minimized for service members in lieu of combat-related functions. The “transformation” begun by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld will also matter. So, too, will the consolidation of bases at home and overseas yield manpower gains. Making favorable adjustments to pay and enlistment incentives both help, although these options have been exercised repeatedly over the last five years. Then there are standards: The military may lower enlistment requirements to achieve greater numbers if it comes to that — which, in some limited respects, the Pentagon did this year.

Only after all those options are exhausted, which they have not been, would a draft be reasonable. And it is at precisely that point when a draft shifts from being inadvisable and unnecessary to a lesser of evils worth considering.

If only debates in Washington would proceed in this knowledge. Instead, we alternate between heads in the sand and political speechifying like Mr. Rangel’s. The best hope is that the idea could make the country take the manpower problem more seriously and recognize its revulsion toward the draft as something negotiable — as a luxury of our current prosperity and national success, which in many respects it is. So in that regard, courtesy Mr. Rangel, the discussion would be welcome.