I propose switching the focus to the national guard instead of the US military.
Please hear me out on this. It’s not a common reasoning that I’ve seen before.
I disagree with mandatory enrollment in US military service by US citizens because we can’t control our government warmongers from abusing our insane amounts of military power for selfish reasons around the world.
I only recently changed my mind on Select Service and programs like the one proposed because these programs will be abused by the military industrial complex/government complex to send troops wherever because the military participants, willing or not, will be required by law to participate.
I am 100% for all the outcomes you laid out, and I even agree that mandatory participation in the US military would serve to those ends. We simply can’t risk what those in charge of that kind of power would do with it if they had millions of guaranteed enrollees, and through the draft, the ability to get millions more.
I was first exposed to this risk in the context of the recent changes to the Selective Service (men will now be automatically registered, and the laws are being teed up now to automatically register women as well). I’m pro-American Military and was very much for this kind of proposal for exactly the reasons you mentioned. I was also of the opinion that “If we need it, I want us to be able to get it” but then it was pointed out that the threat isn’t that Americans wouldn’t answer the call to volunteer for a just war; it’s that the neo-cons and others heavily financially incented to make sure the USA is in a war of some kind, and preferably several, would absolutely abuse that power, if they had it, to force people to go to war in order to make them more money.
We are simply too powerful a nation to let that kind of thing happen.
Demanding the US military be populated with volunteers only (ending the draft permanently) is a kind of check on our government’s ability to abuse those forces.
Hence, I propose to switch the focus of the policy to the National Guard service where these forces are focused on more domestic affairs and foreign humanitarian based efforts instead of outright wars.