If you were a front-line soldier, would you really want to go into combat partnered with 19-year-olds coming straight off the street, possibly with decadent backgrounds? As an American, is this who you want on the front line defending our freedom and representing our values to the rest of the world?
Yes, we had a draft for many years, and it worked BACK WHEN MOST KIDS WERE TAUGHT VALUES AND RESPECT FROM INFANCY. If you have been in a public school or around kids much these days, you know those days are gone forever. As soon as the moral fabric of America began to unravel, our drafted forces were a disaster (Viet Nam), partly because of a lack of self-discipline and moral character in a significant portion (not all or a majority) of the troops.
Our volunteer forces, on the other hand, have served admirably and effectively from day one, at least when command and control was operating with any kind of efficiency. In the age of modern warfare, what's needed in personnel is quality over quantity. The tools of war are far more complicated, expensive, and deadly than in bygone eras when a street kid could be easily trained to march, shoot, and fire a rifle.
I agree that boot camp and two or three years of a strictly-controlled environment would do wonders for the hundreds of thousands of our youth who are growing up in a slanderously immoral and ungrounded society. I don't agree that our national military is the place for these youth in this day and age. I think we need a "peace corps" right here at home, where kids can be transformed in a remote martial-type setting and trained to take back their neighborhoods that have fallen into decay and decadence. The economic benefit alone would more than pay for what it might cost, and there is no way to measure the tremendous benefit of building moral character in our "lost" youth where lacking parents and our out-of-control, corrupt media have failed miserably.
Finally, the military often strips from its members by executive order and military law some of the rights and freedoms (free speech, assembly, due process, trial by jury of peers, I could go on) ensured by the Constitution. I find it glaringly ironic that a our democracy has always been defended by an authorized martial autocracy within. This is in some ways necessary, but no person should be forced to forgo their Constitutional rights unless they do so voluntarily.
