It seems my complete unemployability may save my ass yet. I'm more than confidant that I have no "critical skills" that the military would be interested in. Sucks for you engineers and medical personnel though.
Unless we see autonomous Iraqi police and military forces spring up soon I'm fairly certain there will be a draft. The Stop-loss system for keeping troops in Iraq seems to be stressed to it's limit. There are troops that have spent five of the last six years in the field away from home in Bosnia, Afghanistan, then Iraq.
The day the much-maligned "missing explosives" story broke was the same day that 50 Iraqi police volunteers were stopped at a checkpoint, disarmed, proned flat to the ground, and summarily executed. I don't see the Iraqi's being able to police themselves any time soon.
We've recently sold 500 bunker-buster bombs to Israel, which it's not unfathomable they will use to attack Iran's nuclear energy and weapon facilities a la
Iraq 1981 . I don't see Iran hesitating to invade Iraq if this occurs in which case I'm not sure even a draft will do much good. I don't think Iranians see much of a difference between Israel and the U.S. This is all worst-case-scenario of course.
The more important question here is of course
could there be a draft? Does the military still have the capability to indoctrinate and train conscripts? I could see a lot of 18-20 year old boys being succeptable to military brain washing, much older than that I'm not so sure. One thing our culture drills into Americans at an early age is a (mostly imagined) need for individuality. Not a value prized by the military.
All this talk of a gender-neutral draft is interesting to me also. I know some fairly tough 18-25 year old women who could probably hold their own in a warzone. I also know quite a few young women who would be completely useless in battle, I don't care how much training they have. Hypothetically it's pretty hilarious to think about GWBush sending wave after wave of 18-year-old girls at the enemy, buy I wouldn't put it beyond him.