THE MYTH OF THE VOLUNTEER ARMY

A huge battle over the U.S. Army is being waged in Washington. Everything from missions to equipment is up in the air. The generals are warring with each other over the size of our modern all-volunteer Army. Budgets and egos are at stake.

In the middle of all this disarray, there is one thing the generals agree on: the modern volunteer Army is superior to an Army made up of draftees. The politicians agree, for different reasons.

Is everybody right?

Is this Army better than the draftee Army that fought World War II? Better than the Army filled with draftees that fought in Korea? Better than the Army that fought in Vietnam?

Or is everybody in Washington wrong?

General George Washington certainly wouldn't agree with today's generals. Washington was constantly beleaguered by the massive desertions and the short enlistments of his volunteer army. The politics of state militias made things even more uncertain. He constantly begged the Continental Congress for an army of conscripts whose service would last a minimum of 12 months. But the feather merchants in Congress never gave him the army he requested. Still, he won.

General Andrew Jackson would hardly have agreed with today's generals. When he defeated a superior British Army in the Battle of New Orleans, his troops consisted of civilians, pirates, Indians and a few Tennessee professionals. Yet he won the battle that gave his fledgling country control of the vital Mississippi River.

President Abraham Lincoln certainly would agree. He got Congress to conscript so many civilians that riots resulted in major cities from Chicago to New York. The draftee army under General McClellen lost every battle to the Confederacy's Robert E. Lee. But when this same draftee army was given over to Generals Grant, Sherman and Sheridan, the South was as good as dead. The Civil War proved that a draftee army under poor leadership will perform poorly, while a draftee army under good leadership will perform superbly.

In World War I, General John Pershing took a bunch of untrained kids over to England, where he trained them for a year before entering battle. His non-professional army quickly routed the Germans, whose spring offensive, led by General Ludendorf, was defeating the French and English armies. The poor leadership of French and English generals mired their armies down into a tragic, no-win trench war. When Pershing decided that his troops would never learn trench warfare technique, he was well on his way to victory. Another case where leadership made the difference.

In World War II, incompetent military leadership was a major cause of our initial disasters in the Atlantic and Pacific. But when General George Marshall fired all the senior commanders who didn't know how to fight and replaced them with young tigers like Eisenhower, Bradley, Patton, Nimitz, Leahy and Puller (and one old tiger named MacArthur), the tide turned and we started winning. We fought World War II with a military that was 95 percent draftee. Unlike the modern Army, whose morale is shattered if kept at war for more than a year, the draftee army fought its way across Europe and the Pacific with only the badly wounded going home. It's amazing that Eisenhower's khaki-clad draftees never expected to go home until the war was won. Ditto for the sailors under Nimitz in the Pacific.

The disgraceful performance of the American Army's 24th division in the first year of the Korean War was a matter of leadership. Our so-called professional officers ran like rabbits before the hounds of North Korean burp guns. Newsmen caught one American Colonel keeping his troops from running by threatening to shoot them with his .45. The armed forces of the greatest military power on earth were pushed down into the "Pusan perimeter" and couldn't get out until MacArthur made his famed high-risk landing at Inchon. Korea proved once more the importance of leadership and how little performance differences there were between professional soldiers and draftees.

In the period before Vietnam, the draftee army was largely at peace. Filled with college graduates whose deferments ran out, the drafted force was vastly superior to the regular army volunteers in every conceivable way. College educated specialists were running organizations headed by incompetent Regular Army officers and non-commissioned officers. The draftees had great contempt for the professionals, referring to them as "RA's." At Camp Fuji, Japan, a Northwestern graduate with the exalted rank of private first class was teaching college courses in Psychology and Far East History to officers up to the rank of Colonel who needed two-year college equivalency in order to retain their commissions.

Vietnam is generally cited by those who dump on the value of a draftee army. According to the generals, it is the only war we ever lost and therefore it was the fault of the draftees. There are just three things wrong with that analysis:

• First, history has shown that the leadership and strategies developed by General Westmoreland were entirely inappropriate for an insurgent, jungle war. Then soldiers lost all respect for their officers, who constantly demanded faked enemy body counts.
• Second, like Revolutionary War British General Howe, Westmoreland confused winning battles with winning wars. Winning battles was of no use to the British in 1776 or to the Americans in Vietnam. Successful battle outcomes produce victory only when territory is gained as a result. As the war dragged on, American and South Vietnamese forces controlled progressively less and less territory.
• Third, the war simply lasted too long. Everybody -- professionals and amateurs alike -- gets demoralized when the killing and mayhem goes on for too long. (Remember that Russian and Austrian soldiers revolted and overthrew their emperors after just four years of World War I.)

The failure in Vietnam was not due to a draftee army. It's just that generals are far more comfortable blaming draftees instead of leadership. America fought the wrong war, against the wrong foe, with the wrong strategy at the wrong time. Draftees don't make those kinds of bad decisions. Only generals and Presidents do.

Do we need a much larger army? The kind that only a draft can produce?

If we are going to have any more Iraqs, we do.

The number of troops we have in Iraq is no longer sustainable. It is no longer an issue of "cut and run." It is now a case of "exhaust and withdraw."

We did not have a sufficient Army to defeat and occupy Iraq, with "occupy" being the operative word.

According to a Rand study, effective occupation requires troops force numbering at least four percent of the population of the country occupied. With Iraq's fractious populace of 25 million, we should have sent in 500,000 troops. Instead we tried to make do with a little over 150,000.

If the Iraq adventure fails, it -- like Vietnam -- will be judged by history as a failure of presidential and military leadership.