Let's honor our veterans—those who stand "between their loved home and the war's desolation"—by making our military into an occupation that attracts the best and the brightest, offers opportunities for education and advancement and a good future for those who need a hand up, provides well for their families, prioritizes their physical and mental health when they return home, and above all has the policies and direction to be a place where our service men and women can serve with honor and integrity.
That's the least we can do, and the alternative is a military draft. I lived through times of conscription, and don't ever want to see those horrors again.
What made conscription so horrific?
Why would it NOT be?
Remember, Switzerland's army is mostly made up of conscripts, so my context is completely different. War is horrific; conscription seems to me to be a pretty even-handed way of enlisting people to participate in it. Sure, one might still get out of it with bone spurs or academic deferment or knowing the right people, but a conscripted force should conceivably more closely represent the actual population than a force that predominantly recruits idealists or people who need the money.
