Doing your duty may become mandatory again. Missed recruitment goals have fueled more talk of restarting the military draft. This could become a frightening situation for many Americans.
On ,' Delaware Senator and top Democrat of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Joe Biden warned the U.S. would have “to face a painful dilemma on restoring the military draft if recruitment goals continue to be missed.”
Translation: trouble.
The draft raise many serious questions and passionate feelings for all Americans — including those on MSNBC-TV's new show, 'The Situation with Tucker Carlson.' Here, host Tucker Carlson and panelists Rachel Maddow and Jay Severin repond to the possibility of this new situation.
TUCKER CARLSON, 'THE SITUATION' HOST: This is, in my view, serious, totally ridiculous and political. It's serious that there are these great shortfalls in recruiting. It's ridiculous we're going to get a draft. Were not going to get one. Nobody wants it. The public doesn't want it. The Pentagon doesn‘t want it. A volunteer army is just more effective.
This war is increasingly unpopular with the public. It just makes sense that recruiting is falling off. In other words, our foreign policy may be driven by public opinion through the recruiting system, if you see what I mean.
RACHEL MADDOW, 'THE SITUATION' PANELIST: Well, and yes, it's interesting. Nearly 6 in 10 Americans want our troops in Iraq, the troop strength either reduced or want people brought home immediately. Americans are increasingly turning against this war.
But Biden's talking about something important, which is that you can‘t continue to have recruiting shortfalls month, after month, after month, and still say we‘re maintaining military readiness. We're overextended and we need to start talking about that as a consequence of our foreign policy.
JAY SEVERIN 'THE SITUATION' PANELIST: There is one legitimate need of a draft. If there is a Bush doctrine, if we are really are engaged for a long time in a war against terror, and we really do have to locate, identify, eradicate terrorists, no matter where they are all over the world — which is what I think the president of the United States said — we‘re going to need draft everyone between the age of 4 and 90. Everyone will be in uniform.
I don't think that's going to happen. The illegitimate part of the draft is when you fight a war like Iraq, where you go for what I thought was a good initial reason, but then you stay for seven or eight subsequent lousy, stinky reasons, and the hand that rocks the cradle is telling the kids, “Don‘t go.”
And you know, that's one of the things about the hyper media coverage of this. This became Vietnam zero to 60 in a year-and-a-half, instead of over 10 years. People are looking at these deaths and saying, “Not my kid.”