Sgt. 1st Class Ronald A. Grider, 30, of Brighton, Ill., was killed by machine gun fire in Afghanistan a few weeks ago. Grider was an Airborne super soldier. He was a Ranger school graduate who was attached to Special Operations out of Fort Bragg at the time of his death. His military citations are numerous and include two Bronze Stars.
The personal tragedy of Sgt. Grider's loss will never be forgotten by his wife Brittany or the men and women who served with him. The unnoticed tragedy of his loss for you and me is that we now live in a nation where it's possible for a 30-year-old man to spend his entire adult life fighting wars for the United States. Having joined the Army in 1998, Grider's final tour was his ninth in either Iraq or Afghanistan.
For me, the sergeant's death is a decisive tipping point in favor of a return to the draft.
For the past few years, I've believed the United States should reinstate the draft. My reasons are typical - having Americans serve a cause greater than themselves, the benefits of spreading military experience throughout the populace, and good old-fashioned patriotism.
Until now, military officers and enlisted have always managed to talk me out of it. They argue the military should be manned with professionals who want to be there. That reasoning has traction with me because I served with draftees (during an assignment on an Army base) who thought more about getting out than doing their job well. But Grider's death has convinced me the Pentagon and the country would be better off with a military of citizen-soldiers who want to be someplace else.
If more of our sons, daughters, grandchildren and friends were deployed as part of mandated service, there is no way our presidents would have the political capital to get entangled in limited, non-decisive and seemingly unending warfare like that being practiced in Afghanistan.
Another troubling trend stemming from the all-volunteer force is its growing dependence on contractors to do the work citizen-soldiers performed in previous wars. Contractor duties range from cooking chow to providing security to State Department personnel. The reasoning goes that it's better to have a well paid, highly trained trained soldier, sailor, airman or Marine on the front line rather than in the rear ladling out soup or standing guard duty.
That makes sense, but not to the point where contractors begin to outnumber uniformed forces. And that's nearly the situation in modern war zones.
The Department of Defense estimates it employs more than 250,000 private contractors in the CENTCOM region. The Congressional Research Service estimates DOD-employed contractors exceed U.S uniformed personnel in Afghanistan. The split is about equal in Iraq.
In other words, you and I are funding a second, stealth force in Afghanistan and Iraq outside the direct responsibility and accountability of our military and elected leaders. Even more troubling is the fact that private contractor deaths and injuries largely go unmentioned and barely accounted for. Yet, according to groundbreaking work by Professor Steven L. Schooner of the George Washington Law School, 25 percent of U.S. fatalities in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001 have been suffered by private contractors. Even more startling is this: during the first six months of 2010, more contractors were killed in Iraq and Afghanistan (436) than U.S. troops (383).
To get these statistics, Schooner had to go to the U.S. Labor Department's Division of Longshore and Harbor Worker Compensation, which keeps track of insurance claims filed under the Defense Base Act. And contractor deaths (2,008 people since 2001) and seriously wounded (16,000) may far exceed the number accounted for by insurance claims.
Overall, the all-volunteer military has been an overwhelming success, but it shields us from two major, growing problems. With a draft, no longer would men like Sgt. Ronald Grider have to spend nearly their entire adult life in combat. And with a draft, the U.S. government would lose its justification to outsource our wars.
