If you're looking for some volunteer work to do, you might want to check out whether your local draft board has vacancies. Bush and Rummy are recruiting; they want to fully staff the draft boards, the first push of this kind since 1981.
Dave Lindorff has the latest in Salon.com. Nick Confessore looked at the situation in a pre-Iraq War piece in the Washington Monthly. And he had a comment on Monday as well.
In all the discussion about showing "will" and "resolve" in Iraq, the manpower crunch in the armed forces tends to get neglected. The Pentagon is already pushing the reserves and National Guard resources hard; it would be difficult for Bush and Rummy to keep the current level of US troops in Iraq (130,000 or so) past next April or thereabouts.
I can hardly get my head around the idea that even though the US is said to be spending half the military budgets of the entire world, we can't field enough soldiers to stabilize the situation in Iraq. But part of the reason is that as the services get more high-tech, they require more personnel in support functions for every soldier put in the field. Plus we're spending megabucks on mega-boondoggles like the Star Wars "missile defense" scheme.
There are only a few countries that could provide a significant number of troops to support the "coalition" occupation in Iraq. The ones that come to mind are Britain, France, Germany, Russia, China, Turkey, Iran, India, Pakistan, Japan, Canada, Australia, South Korea, North Korea and Vietnam.
Britain is unlikely to boost their presence by much. Most of the others have already declined, and aren't likely to change their minds. Iran and North Korea are part of Bush's "axis of evil." China and Vietnam are unlikely prospects. Vietnam does have a lot of experience in insurgency-type operations, though.
So if Bush and Rummy expect to escalate in Iraq, or take over some more Middle Eastern real estate, they will have to have a draft.
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