SHARMINI PERIES: This is the Larry Wilkerson Report on the Real News Network. I'm Sharmini
Peries coming to you from Baltimore. Larry Wilkerson is a retired United States Army
colonel and former chief of staff to the U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell. Larry, thank
you so much for joining us today.
LARRY WILKERSON: Thanks for having me, Sharmini.
PERIES: Larry, you've been reading a very important book, Skin In the Game: Poor Kids
and Patriots by Gen. Dennis Laich, where he makes a compelling case that the all-volunteer
military force no longer works in a world defined by terrorism and high debt and widening
class differences. Tell us more about the book and the case he makes in it.
WILKERSON: Gen. Laich, Dennis Laich, is a 30-plus year member of the United States Army
Reserves. Obviously became a general officer, and now he's written this book. And this book
very vividly and very dramatically illustrates how what the Gates Commission created for
Richard Nixon in 1972-73, the all-volunteer force, is no longer sustainable. It demonstrates
it's not sustainable physically, that is to say it's not sustainable in dollar terms,
and it probably is not sustainable in terms of the moral impact on the nation.
As we've seen throughout these last 14 years of war, we've had poor people, essentially,
less than 1 percent of the nation, bleeding and dying and defending the other 99 percent.
This is an ethical and moral position I think that's unsustainable. The fiscal position,
though, is such that if you just do a linear progression of the defense budget and the
cost of people out to about 2025, 2030, you wind up spending almost the entire Army and
Marine Corps budget on people. So it's impossible to sustain this force. Another indicator is
how we've gone from 2.7 percent women in the ranks to over 15 percent women in the ranks
because we can't find enough men. This is not the way to fill out your military. However
equitable and egalitarian you may think it is, it's not the way to fill out your military.
And it's not the way to build a military that is sustainable over the next few years.
We've come up with a solution, I think, and the solution's rather unique. It's drafting
by lottery into the reserve components. Not into the active components. Therefore I think
deflecting some of the political criticism and political opposition we'd get, though
we don't hesitate to say this is going to be a difficult task to achieve.
PERIES: And one of the other issues surrounding this question is the fact that the United
States used to have a military, and military that is equipped to respond in a situation
of war if needed. But now we seem to be in a perpetual state of war where we are constantly
financing the military and arms and the military forces to be able to respond to all the time.
What do you make of that?
WILKERSON: I think you're onto a point that we see as part of this ethical, moral dimension
of this all-volunteer force. It is clear to us after lots of conversations with military
leaders, with civilian leaders and actual security experts and others, that part of
the reason that the president of the United States feels no real strain or pressure about
going to war and staying at war is the fact that no one has any skin in the game. When
you've got people who are not capable, really, because of their intellectual capacity or
more often their ability to pay, to be in college or to be in some other more productive
employment than being in the military, then they have to be in the military.
And that's how we're creating our military these days. We're taking the 1 percent that
can't get it anywhere else, by and large, and we're putting them in the military. And
we're putting upon them the burden of defending this nation. Defending the other 320-some
odd million people in this country who don't have any skin in the game at all. When you
have congressmen with no skin in the game, when you have business leaders, corporate
leaders, others, religious leaders, no skin in the game, then you have the ability to
go to war without any real restraint on you. And this is in addition to other problems
we have, the military-industrial complex, other forces that are constantly agitating
agitating for conflict, for war. And it makes it just too simple for the President of the
United States to go to war.
PERIES: Larry, if you replace the current volunteer system to address the class nature
of our military with a draft system, how would it change the nature of the force?
WILKERSON: We put it this way. You don't find the Ivy Leagues in the Army. You don't find
the Ivy Leagues in the Marine Corps. If you do it's the exception that proves the rule,
like Seth Moulton from Harvard, for example, now a congressman. But there are not many
Ivy Leaguers in the Army or the Marine Corps.
And what's happening in order to recruit those people who are in the services, especially
in the infantry, the Marine Corps and the Army, is really unconscionable. Let me just
point out a few factors here. First of all, of the 2-2.5 million 18-year-olds that come
into the Selective Service system every year, roughly one-third of them are not recruitable
because they're too fat. They're too obese. Another third can't pass the ASVAB, which
is the basic entrance exam for the armed forces. So that cuts the pool to a third of that 2-2.5
million every year.
On top of that you have, as I said before, this phenomenon of the people in that one-third
who could pass the tests, who are not obese, are apt to go somewhere else. They're apt
to go to college, they're apt to go to more productive employment and so forth and so
on. So what you're left with is that bottom 1 percent of the clientele you're looking
at.
Not always. You have a few, like Pat Tillman, you may recall from the St. Louis Cardinals,
and others. Seth Moulton, for example. But basically you're drawing on the lowest ranks
of your society to defend the highest ranks of your society. And for that matter, the
middle class, too. That's why you find so many soldiers coming from states that are
deprived economically, like West Virginia, for example. Like Maine, for example. Like
Oklahoma, for example. There's a problem here that we have in this country, it's an ethical
and moral problem. But the fiscal problem, the dollar problem, is going to eat our lunch.
To recruit enough people we're spending billions of dollars every year, in recruitment bonuses
and reenlistment bonuses, paying for people to go to college, paying a full ride and so
forth as a payback for having been enlisted in the first place, or having reenlisted.
This is an extremely expensive proposition to maintain this force, and as I pointed out,
we're going more and more to women in the forces not because we want to be egalitarian
or recognize women's right to serve, which we of course do. It is because we can't find
enough men. The problem is acute and the problem is not going to get better. It's going to
get worse.
PERIES: And Larry, is there any other model in another country that you think would work,
particularly what you're referring to here, which is somewhat of a lottery-based system?
WILKERSON: Sharmini, I think this is a unique problem. We have the same problem we had with
George Marshall and Harry Truman in the post-World War II period when they were trying to implement
universal military training. We have the same problem with the group right now that's meeting
to try and determine if we can do national service.
The cohort that comes into exposure to selective service or to national service is so big that
if we were to employ them universally we'd bankrupt ourselves, too. You'd have to pay
them something and we'd bankrupt ourselves, whether they were in the Peace Corps, in Teach
for America, in one of the five armed forces or wherever. If we employed them all we'd
bankrupt ourselves. And we already know from what I just told you that only a third of
that cohort is able to get into the armed forces.
So when you look at this, and you look at it closely, you begin to understand that you
need some form of mandatory service that's selective. That is to say, it's not the whole
cohort. And what we're talking about is running a lottery-based, fair, fair, no one's exempted,
no one. Not a billionaire's son, not the police person on the block. They're not exempted,
they're all exposed. Draft into the reserve components. So we would actually have conscripts
coming in to what is the strategic reserve of the country, the reserve components. That
would make the reserves, who are now falling apart because of the situation that exists
with Iraq and Afghanistan, the global war on terror. They've turned into an operational
reserve rather than a strategic reserve, as they've always been before. You have reserve
component soldiers, sailors, [inaud.] marines now deploying every three or four years. That's
unacceptable to employers who will refuse to rehire them. It's unacceptable to governors
who need their national guard, and so forth.
So we're talking about beefing up the reserve components. We're talking about drafting into
the reserve components on a lottery-based fair draft, and we're talking about reducing,
to a certain extent, the active components because of that. And we're talking about saving
anywhere from $50-70 billion a year by doing that, which is essential if we're going to
survive physically in terms of the armed forces.
PERIES: Larry Wilkerson, thank you so much for joining us today.
WILKERSON: Thank you for having me, Sharmini.
PERIES: And thank you for joining us on the Real News Network.