No wonder Webb held his tongue with the Kerry botched joke kerfuffle. Because check out this old article:
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/198004/webb-draft/2He was a bit of an ass in this time period (we all know this), but read a few paragraphs here:
The volunteer Army is an unmitigated disaster. Those who discovered, after fifteen years of calculated silence, that the Vietnam draft fell disproportionately on the poor and minorities, now remain mute before the hard evidence that the cure is infinitely worse than the disease. If present enlistment trends continue, the Army will be 42 percent black by the early 1980s. White enlistees have less education than black, evidence of their socioeconomic status. More than 60 percent of enlistees are from the bottom two categories of intelligence testing. It is so hard to re-enlist a soldier that the Army is now permitting those who fail their skills qualification test to re-up, thus assuring the youth of America that, if mobilization should occur, their NCO's will be unqualified to train them, much less to function themselves. This situation is getting worse every year: in 1979, the intelligence levels of recruits and those re-enlisting were the worst since the volunteer Army began.
snip
Reinstituting the draft would help in yet another, more elemental and equitable way. We created a military, just as we created a society, for ideological rather than mercenary reasons. Detractors of the draft who claim that our natural state, through history, has been draft-free fail to recognize that our position in the world until well into this century was less than preeminent. Nor do they recognize the post-World War H strategic realities. It is fundamentally wrong-and cowardly-in a democratic society to claim that those who stand between us and a potential enemy should be risking their lives merely because they are "following the marketplace," and the military is their "best deal." The result of such logic is today's volunteer Army, a collection of men and women who have been economically conscripted to do society's dirty work, as surely as if there were the most inequitable draft imaginable.
snip
But our greatest need is to get beyond those old jealousies from Vietnam, to make our military once again a fighting force rather than a social lab, and to stop being afraid to ask the men of Harvard to stand alongside the men of Harlem, same uniform, same obligations, same country.
Okay, a couple things:
1. Thank GOD the Allen people didn't find this and do a double pronged attack against Webb and Kerry.
2. Um -- kinda looks like Webb called the volunteer army uneducated, and he meant it.
3. I think that Kerry's position from 1972 and Webb's position in 1980 were very similar -- the fear of a mercenary army.
4. Within Webb's chip on his shoulder about Vietnam tone, you do hear him state what most liberals think -- that it's utter bullshit that the priviledged and the elite don't fight for our country while the working class do. That was in there in 1980, so his stance today about economic fairness is not so big a leap.
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