In a July 26 Department of Defense “Special Briefing on U.S. Army Transformation,” Gen. Peter Schoomaker, U.S. army chief of staff, made similar points.

“The fact is we don’t need” a draft, Rumsfeld told Radio America July 22. “We are doing well with respect to recruiting and retention.”

Edd Hendee of Radio America had asked Rumsfeld about allegations that “we’re under size in our military, we can’t hold our numbers” and that “we may bring back the draft.”

“There have always been people in our country who favored the use of compulsion—the draft,” Rumsfeld responded. After stating that the ruling class doesn’t need a draft now, he added, “We have a military today of 1.4 million active and another 800-plus thousands in the Guard and Reserve. It comes to close to 2.5 million, if you include the Individual Ready Reserve [IRR].”

The IRR consists of reservists who have completed their training but have a military obligation remaining for a period, during which they can be called for active duty.

Rumsfeld said that about 125,000 U.S. soldiers are now in Iraq, forming the backbone of the imperialist occupation forces in that country. “Now, out of 2.5 million, that’s not a lot,” he added.

In a July 16 interview on WDUN radio, Martha Zoller asked: “Two of my sons were going to see a movie and somebody came up to them about ‘Fahrenheit 9/11’ and said you need to see this movie because Don Rumsfeld wants the draft. What is the status on our readiness and whether we would be considering a draft or not?”

The interviewer was referring to the so-called documentary film by Michael Moore, now used widely by liberals and middle-class radicals across the United States as an anti-Bush show to boost the Democratic Party campaign to elect John Kerry president in November.

“When I was a congressman in the 1960s, I was one of the first people in the country to put in legislation recommending that we go to an all-volunteer military,” Rumsfeld responded. “I’ve been an enthusiastic supporter of it since the early 1960s, the mid-1960s. The United States is not going back to the draft. There are a relatively small number of people who, for whatever reason…are recommending that we go to a draft, but the president is against the draft. And there is no need for the draft.”

In another interview the same day on the National Public Radio, Rumsfeld replied similarly to questions by Juan Williams, stating that the volunteer military “has worked brilliantly for our country.” He added, “To the extent we end up with some areas of concern, all we have to do is to turn the dials up and increase the incentives and reduce the disincentives. We can do that. We’re perfectly capable of doing it. There were a lot of inequities in a draft—in any draft. There certainly were inequities in the ones that existed back in the ’60s and ’70s.”

As a news item in the February 3 American Forces Information Service, a Department of Defense publication, put it, “Attracting and keeping quality people in the military is the highest priority” of the 2004 U.S. defense department budget. The Pentagon announced that military pay raises would average between 2 and 6.25 percent this year. In order to retain experienced personnel, it would give the highest raises to mid-level grades.  
 
Liberal calls for the draft
Among those who have called for the reinstitution of the draft are some of the most liberal critics of the Bush administration. Representatives Charles Rangel of New York and John Conyers of Michigan, both Democrats, introduced legislation in early 2003 that would impose mandatory military or national service on men and women aged 18-26. If that bill had been passed, it would have brought back the draft with no exemptions for college or graduate students.

The two congressmen tried to paint their proposal as “antiwar,” introducing it as tens of thousands of people demonstrated on a number of occasions against the coming Anglo-American invasion of Iraq. They argued that by forcing the children of the well-to-do into uniform and “in harm’s way,” the measure would make politicians think twice about going to war. They also argued that the armed forces were becoming overstretched and needed an infusion of personnel.

“I believe that if we are going to send our children to war the governing principle must be that of shared sacrifice,” Rangel wrote in an op-ed column published in the Dec. 31, 2002, New York Times. The congressman noted that “a disproportionate number of the poor and members of minority groups make up the enlisted ranks of the military, while the most privileged Americans are underrepresented or absent.”

Rangel did not mention, of course, that the conscript armies in Vietnam and other wars were made up overwhelmingly of working people and that the families of the upper middle class and the bourgeoisie found a myriad of ways to avoid the draft for their children. This class divide was reflected in 1967 figures showing that 31 percent of eligible Americans who were white were inducted into the military, compared to 67 percent of eligible Blacks.

The ruling class in the United States brought military conscription to a halt in 1973 as Washington was being defeated in Vietnam. Registration for the draft was terminated three years later. Democratic president James Carter reintroduced it in 1980. Following an initial period of widespread refusal to sign up, draft registration remains in place today.  
 
‘Transformation’ of U.S. military
What is behind the often heated, but always patriotic and pro-imperialist, opposition to aspects of the White House military strategy by many liberals is what the Pentagon describes as the “transformation” of the U.S. armed forces. As the Bush administration has carried out widespread changes—including shutting down military bases, especially in Europe, and ending abruptly several arms programs to focus on more advanced weapons technology—it has aroused the ire of certain capitalist families whose profits have been affected by these shifts.

As Rumsfeld put it in a Jan. 31, 2002, speech at the War College in Washington, D.C., “During the Cold War, we faced a fairly predictable set of threats. We came to know a great deal about our adversary, because it was the same one for a long period…. But the Cold War is over. The Soviet Union is gone, and with it, the familiar security environment to which our nation had grown accustomed.” Washington no longer needs a “massive, heavy force designed to repel a Soviet tank invasion,” Rumsfeld said.

“Today our adversaries have changed,” he continued. Today “we need rapidly deployable, fully integrated joint forces capable of reaching distant theaters quickly and working with our air and sea forces to strike adversaries swiftly, successfully, and with devastating effect.”

The changes the U.S. defense secretary has described include repositioning U.S. forces away from Germany and elsewhere in Western Europe to the east and expanding the role of NATO worldwide. They also encompass giving a central role to Special Operations units, combining commands of various branches of the military, outsourcing jobs like running prisons and hospitals to nonmilitary entities in order to “turn every soldier into a rifleman” and focus on restoring the “warrior ethos” to all units, and enhancing the military’s volunteer character.

Rumsfeld returned to these themes in his latest public appearances.

“Our problem isn’t that we’re short on total numbers of people, it’s that our military needs to be adjusted to fit the 21st century and we’ve been in the process of doing that for the last two years,” he said in the July 22 interview with Radio America. “It takes some time.”

“We’re adjusting our force posture around the world—our bases, our forward operating sites, and our locations,” he continued. “We’re rebalancing the Guard and Reserve with the active force so that we have the right skill sets on active duty, so that we don’t have to call up certain skill sets from the Guard and Reserve too frequently because, clearly, those people consider themselves reservists and not full-time people. And to the extent you have to call them up because you don’t have those skills on active duty, it’s not a good thing. So we’re fixing all of that. I think that the progress that’s been made is so significant that we’re going to see over time that we’ve been able to reduce stress on the force in a rather significant way.”  
 
Iraq war boosts Army transformation
In the July 26 press briefing at the Pentagon, U.S. army chief of staff Gen. Peter Schoomaker said that the U.S.-led war in Iraq, and Washington’s broader “war on terrorism,” has helped accelerate this strategic transformation of Washington’s military.

“This war, as unfortunate as war always is,” Schoomaker said, “provides momentum and focus and resources to transform that you might not have outside of this.”

He continued, “Now, I don’t want to understate…the huge management challenge here, and that is managing the convergence of the global war on terror and the transformation. But in fact, this convergence is very fortuitous.”

In his opening statement, Schoomaker said that “while we are engaged in combat operations in both Iraq and Afghanistan,” the U.S. rulers are “making some of the most significant changes in our army that we have made since World War II.”

The army chief outlined three of the main elements of this transformation.

“The first is that we are restructuring the force into modular formations,” he said. “We’re calling these the combat forces, brigade combat team, units of action. And this is a path on the transformation towards the eventual Future Combat System—units of action.”

At the same time, he added, “We are rebalancing our force between the active component of the Army, the active Army, the Army National Guard, and the Army Reserve.”

Finally, the general said, “We are stabilizing the force.”

Schoomaker went into some detail to explain these changes.

The U.S. Army will grow in the next few years by about 30,000 soldiers, he said, as part of this process. “There’s a difference in growing the Army and increasing the end strength,” he said, and this nuance is “the essence of the issue.”

Recruitment and retention in the Army is advancing toward more than 100 percent of its annual goal this year, the military chief said. The Army Reserve is having a similar success, he added. Only the National Guard is lagging toward 88 percent of its target, “but we remain cautiously optimistic that we will make our goal.”

The Army is planning to make more of the norm the calling to active duty of members of the Reserve and the Individual Ready Reserve (IRR). Approximately 5,700 soldiers from the IRR are being called to fill vacant positions in the reserve components, Schoomaker said, adding that “this is not unusual in time of war.” During the 1990-91 U.S.-led war on Iraq, “we mobilized 20,200 from the IRR.”

Gen. Steven Blum, chief of the National Guard Bureau, who spoke at the briefing along with Schoomaker, made it clear that it won’t be abnormal for National Guard troops to be sent abroad as well. “Make no mistake; the number one priority of the National Guard is to defend the homeland,” he said. “But also don’t make the mistake, defending the homeland doesn’t mean you only do it here.”

As Washington has moved into a period of virtually permanent war, the Pentagon tops are preparing employers and others to get used to the idea that a proportion of their workers serving in the various reserve forces will often be mobilized for combat or military support operations. This has been a feature of the Israeli armed forces for decades.

Schoomaker also said that as the navy and air force are trimming their numbers, the army is trying to shift that personnel into its ranks. “We are also developing initiatives like a new program called Blue to Green,” he stated. “While the navy and the air force are trying to reduce their manning…this will allow talented sailors and airmen who have specialties that we need, that want to continue on active duty, to transfer to the army.”  
 
Redeployment in Korea
To make its armed forces around the world more effective, Washington is moving its military deployed in various parts of the globe to be closer to theaters of war and make it a more agile killing machine. One aspect of this repositioning that Schoomaker mentioned is Korea.

There are 37,000 U.S. soldiers in south Korea on 41 occupied U.S. military installations. According to an article in the July 25 Washington Post, 3,600 of these troops will be moved to Iraq in August. By October, the Pentagon will move most of its 216 troops away from in and around the Joint Security Area around Panmujom, the village on the so-called Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) that separates the Korean peninsula. The U.S. military bases in south Korea are also to be consolidated to 23 from the current 41. Plans are underway for an overall reduction of U.S. forces there by almost a third by the end of 2005, the Post said.

The purpose of these changes is to free up troops for deployments elsewhere, as the remaining imperialist forces on the Korean peninsula are relocated about 75 miles south of the DMZ—putting them out of range of the north Korean artillery.

The Post quoted an unnamed senior Bush administration official saying, “A growing number of people in Washington feel that our troops in South Korea limit our ability to respond to a crisis with North Korea.”

This provides a glimpse of the kind of devastating bombardment through advanced weapons that U.S. imperialism is planning in case of a military conflict with the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK)—instead of fighting a land war against the DPRK’s army.

In the July 26 briefing, Schoomaker said that 8,000 U.S. soldiers in Korea have voluntarily extended their tours of duty there. He and other army generals present insisted that the volunteer character of the military is an aid to the ruling class now.

“Is it true,” a reporter asked the army officials at the briefing, “that…soldiers who are deployed are reenlisting sometimes at a higher rate than those that aren’t deployed?”

“That’s an absolute fact,” replied Blum. “We are a volunteer force, a recruited force. People that want to soldier, whether it’s in the active component, the Reserves or the National Guard.”  
 
 
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