Tom Ricks, veteran Pentagon correspondent and author, calls for doing away with the all-volunteer force in Sunday’s Washington Post:
It has been too successful. Our relatively small and highly adept military has made it all too easy for our nation to go to war — and to ignore the consequences. The drawbacks of the all-volunteer force are not military, but political and ethical. One percent of the nation has carried almost all the burden of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, while the rest of us essentially went shopping. When the wars turned sour, we could turn our backs. A nation that disregards the consequences of its gravest decisions is operating in morally hazardous territory.
Sounds like he may have read Battleland’s “An Army Apart” piece last fall.