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February 17, 2011 08:45 PM UTC

Coffman: End the Draft, Cut Defense Budget

  • 43 Comments
  • by: Colorado Pols

We’ve always believed in giving credit where credit is due, and we think there will be bipartisan praise for this budget amendment from GOP Rep. Mike Coffman—Air Force Times reports:

After 31 years of symbolism, the time has come to end draft registration in the U.S., says Rep. Mike Coffman, R-Colo., a retired Marine Corps officer and a veteran of the 1991 Gulf War.

“It is an outdated program that has cost us well over $700 million in the last 31 years, and it is time for it to go,” Coffman said in a statement…

Coffman, who enlisted in the Army in 1972 and went on to serve in the Army Reserve, Marine Corps and Marine Corps Reserve, said he knows that today’s volunteer military is more effective than a force of draftees.

“Every year since the draft ended in 1973, the Army has improved the quality of its personnel, training, and professionalism,” Coffman said in a statement. “I saw firsthand how ineffective the draft Army of the early 1970s was compared to the highly professional, all-volunteer military of today.”

Ending draft registration and shutting down the Selective Service System would save about $24 million a year “without negatively affecting our national security in the least,” Coffman said.

In addition, Coffman is seeking a range of other significant cuts to the Department of Defense, for example voting to kill a duplicative fighter engine program widely considered unnecessary. In today’s Denver newspaper, reporter Allison Sherry writes about the brewing fight between Coffman and some of his fellow Republicans–at the forefront of which is another Colorado congressman, Doug Lamborn, who represents the biggest military installations in the state, and who sponsored an amendment to undo many of his fellow Republicans’ proposed defense cuts.

Bottom line: we know a lot of our readers do not count themselves among Rep. Coffman’s fans, but in bravely challenging a most hypocritical soft spot in conservative budget-cutting rhetoric, he’s actually doing his fellow Republicans a great service; showing credibility ahead of the budget battle with the President. Here’s one Republican willing to put his own sacred cow on the barby.

The question is whether his colleagues will prove to be like him, or like Doug Lamborn.

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43 thoughts on “Coffman: End the Draft, Cut Defense Budget”

    1. .

      we never would have invaded Iraq.  

      Note that the First Afghan War, 2001 – 2003, which was a war of retaliation, which can somehow be related to national defense, was completed without ever sending over 1 tank or one corps headquarters.  

      * – SecDef Don Rumsfeld, IIRC, used this adjective to explain why we were invading Iraq.  If your national army is mediocre, leave them home for national defense, should the need arise.  But if the nation has wasted trillions to build unnecessary capabilities, why not take them out for vanity wars now and then, just to show what all those wealth transfers to merchants of death have bought us ?

      You want to make the USA safer ?  Cut the military by half.

      .

      1. The reason we’re STILL screwing around in AFPAK is the fact that we outsourced the war to Afghan Hillbillies who fought against other Afghan Billbillies. And their idea of fighting is to exchange gunfire for a few hours, quit at sunset and retreat back to whatever camp they’ve already established.

        When the bombs started falling from the air power we chased the other hillbillies away, hoping they’d never come back. But they did.

        Which makes the debacle at Tora Bora look even worse. We sent two rival bands of Afghan Hillbillies to finish off A-Q & OBL when we had them enveloped, and yet one band decided to take bribe and looked the other way so the Bad Guys could run into Pakistan.

        If we had sent 10th Mountain will all the right assets and did it right, OBL is either in an orange jumpsuit in a cage in Cuba, or in bite-sized pieces in a medical waste container in Hawaii being analyzed by DoD.

        1. Al-Qaeda wanted to get us bogged down in Afghanistan, IMHO.  They wanted us on the ground, in great numbers, so that they could do what they eventually did in Iraq.

          I believe the commanders on the ground were against the Tora Bora strategy, recommending more of our own troops to finish the job.  That was the beginning of the SNAFU in the Middle East – followed shortly by the diversion of resources from Afghanistan to Iraq so that we could finish what Daddy “failed” to accomplish.

          Until that point, things in Afghanistan seemed to be going well.  The Taliban and A-Q were on the run, and we seemed to have OBL pinned down in his cave, just where we wanted him – and let him escape. 🙁

  2. Defense and entitlement programs both have to be legitimate options for a final budget solution.  I’m glad to see Rep. Coffman taking this seriously and providing some leadership for his party.

    Now we need more Republicans and Democrats do the same on their respective sides of the aisle.

    1. Find 50 more areas to cut $24 million of waste and watch it add up. Coffman never claimed this would highhandedly end the budget crisis. He’s doing what his constituents hired him to do–find ways to balance the books without doing it on the backs of the poor.  

      1. in the scheme of the Federal budget. Again, I’m not saying it’s a bad idea, but using the rationalization that it saves money–and then giving Coffman praise for finding 0.000006% to cut–is ridiculous.

        2. Defense has been untouchable since the day someone misplaced a decimal point in 1981 and proposed 10 times the defense budget that the Reagan White House actually intended to ask for. (True story – check out David Stockman’s memoirs sometime.) And the draft was such a big deal at one time.

          I’ll concede that maybe it will prove not to be much more than its actual dollar worth, but it’s unexpected enough of a development that it might herald more important concessions from the hawks.

    2. This is the exact argument that Rep. Doug Lamborn quickly dismissed when it came to determining whether to cut federal funding for public broadcasting.

      On todays Talk of the Nation Lamborn acknowledged that the cutting public broadcasting funding will have no real effect on the federal budget, but that this argument means we do nothing.

      However, when it comes to cutting “small” military programs, where do you suppose Lamborn falls?

    3. the Veteran’s Administration, in particular, would be woohooing ecstatically if they had an extra $24 million for their treatment programs.  That’s where the savings should go.

      1. But it contradicts what Coffman is saying. He’s saying the cut would be a “savings” of $24 million. I assume that means that the money would not be redirected elsewhere. So yes, I’m sure the VA would put that money to good use, but that’s not a budget cut. I would be praising Coffman if that’s what he was saying.

        Instead, people are cheering Coffman for “saving” the country a minuscule amount of money in the scope of the Federal budget. If it was being redirected elsewhere, it would make a ton of sense–especially if it was going to the VA.

  6. to call Coffman’s office to thank him for taking a stand against a blank check for  defense.

    In the same spirit, I conveyed the wish that he would also stand against the subsidies to Big Oil, the Big Five in that industry being the most profitable companies on the planet and not really in need of tax dollars from the pockets of the shrinking, struggling middle class.

    The fact that they like to threaten us by saying that, rather than seeing the slightest decrease in their stupendous profits they will charge us higher prices to make up the difference, just demonstrates their boundless, rapacious greed. As far as sacrifice goes, they, like the rest of the tiny elite that owns and controls an ever increasing piece of the pie while the middle withers, are of the let’s you and him sacrifice persuasion.

    Since there are now elements on the right  for cutting defense spending but none for ending the practice of socialism for the corporate elite, dog eat dog for the rest of us, I don’t anticipate that Coffman will be open to any such suggestion.  Still, seeing Coffman do anything the least bit noteworthy is a pleasant and rather stunning surprise.  

    1. if Coffman’s office hadn’t previously made it clear that the Representative only wants to hear from those in his party.

      Still, being the kind of guy I am — on this issue, Here’s to you Mr. Coffman (it’ll just have to be the thought that counts).

  7. If anything, we should be talking about reinstating the draft, at least as long as our nation continues to insist on sending our soldiers all around the world in multiple conflicts.

    It is not fair to expect that a tiny minority of Americans, most of them lower middle class or poor individuals, bear the brunt of advancing our national interests by wearing the uniform in wartime.

    Moreover, there is a growing divide in our culture between those who serve, or have served, and those who have not. That divide threatens the stability of our democracy and the cultural unity that is so important to it.

    There’s a financial issue, too. Maybe if more of us had to put part of our own lives on hold to experience the burdens of our wars, we’d be more informed about the fiscal toll those wars continue to take on our government and the taxpayer.

    We need to be honest about our defense policies. If America aims to continue to be the guarantor of world stability, and if we as a nation want our military to protect energy supplies, sea lanes, and the conditions that allow for commercial prosperity (big reasons for being in Iraq and Afghanistan), then we all should be asked to be part of carrying out that duty.

    Coffman’s wrong. National service in some form should be required of all of us, especially when the country is at war. Otherwise, we are not holding true to our ideal that responsibilities, and not just rights, come with the benefits of a republican form of government.

    2. The majority of enlistees are not from lower middle class or poor demographics – instead, they’re dis-proportionally from the Midwest and West, and they tend to be from the Mid-middle class (if that’s even a word.)

      Here:

      http://www.ppionline.org/ppi_c…

      While this was done in 2002, the numbers have held up. Most enlistees have High School Diplomas or GED’s (though it’s dropped) come from strong middle-class backgrounds, and are white.

      What the military needs is more people from the uppper middle and upper class,  both as officers and enlisted. A draft would provide that, but not always.

      1. that it keeps the military from becoming something completely apart. Universal conscription in Egypt probably contributed to military thinking twice about issuing orders to fire on the people.  The military brass would have been in a tight spot if the rank and file who are the people had disobeyed in droves.  On the other hand,  a lot of the people’s feeling of solidarity with the army no doubt comes from the fact that almost all adult males have served.

        I’m not a fan of the draft and I certainly wouldn’t have wanted my son to go to Iraq back in the day but I do sometimes worry about the fact that our own military is more a thing apart from the general population and probably with less diversity of political views than at any time in living memory. What are your thoughts on that, Dan?

        2. But then, you’re not Dan, either.

          Naturally if we had universal conscription, as we did until after Vietnam, our military would be bigger. My mom’s younger cousins served in peace time after WWII and Korea but before Vietnam. The thing that the guys of the several generations of my  family always have in common, no matter how  they differ on other things, is that they all served and, while some saw combat and others didn’t, they all like to share the funny stories, the boot camp stuff they have in common, the frustrations they had with army bureaucracy.

          Nobody likes the draft but you know something?  My male relatives all seem to value their experience and they all met different kinds of people they never would have known otherwise and saw parts of the country and world they never would have seen.  Not that many institutions gave big city, mean street sons of Russian Jewish and Italian immigrants and Methodist Idaho country boys something in common back in the 40s and 50s.  After WWII, many encountered racial integration for the first time in the military. My western small town spouse, son of poor widow who wasn’t going to have the money for a year in Europe or anything, experienced and really enjoyed several different Asian and Pacific Rim cultures during R&R time while serving in Vietnam. There was an upside.  

          Of course we all know about the downside like death, lost mental function, PTSD and lost limbs. It’s just something I wonder about and a very distinct, apart military class does have drawbacks and dangers, too.

          1. .

            I went before a draft board in Colorado Springs in 1971.  They decided that I would be subject to induction.  They decided that better-connected boys from better schools would not be subject to induction.  The Draft Board decided who got exemptions and deferments.  And not one single girl got drafted, as far as I know.  

            Not very “universal,” in my book.

            I went through BCT with a lot of draftees.  After I got to the 82nd, my first permanent party assignment, guys I knew went to Vietnam, which was not yet over.  

            So conscription was not “universal” until after Vietnam, at least not from my experience.  Not in Colorado Springs.  

            .

            1. But I agree by the time of Vietnam it was pretty much just for blue collar and less well connected kids, like most in my husband’s small Idaho home town.  

              If they brought it back it would have to be truly universal. And I’m not sure I’d advocate for that. I’m just thinking out loud about the dangers of the alternative, a separate military class in a largely like thinking world apart.  

        3. …if there’s one place that BushCo really whacked the spending for these wars is outsourcing every goddamn thing they could.

          We don’t need a $100K Halliburton employee to run the Rec Center on Bagram AFB, we should have enough people in pixelated pickle suits to cut loose Airman Joe/Josephine Snuffy for a day and man the desk.

          Why should we have a contractor with some sweetheart deal with a politically-connected bizniz spend 3 months in Kabul teaching news editing on PCs for $100K when we could be using military Broadcasters or Cameramen to do the same job for 30 days of extra temporary duty pay?

          During GW1 and other deployments, we seemed to be able to make due with dedicated teenagers and twenty-sumthings that now require multi-million dollar contracts with companies that get away with sending unqualified idiots that fuck things up. (The contractor that send translators that couldn’t speak any of the languages that they were hired to translate.)

          I’m not saying we need a Ronnie Raygun-sized military, but we can make a better force mix that can do the job on it’s own than what we’ve got now…

      2. .

        I don’t think the linked report says what you assume it says.  

        Of course, the confusion may arise over what “middle class” means.  To me, it is that 70% of the population with family incomes in the range of $35 – 80,000.  Roughly 10-20% make more and 10-20% make less.  

        Nobody in this “middle class” can afford to live the lives that are portrayed on TV as “middle class” lives, unless they refinance their homes and live off the equity.  On the other hand, nobody in this group goes hungry, or without adequate medical care, even if they can’t pay for the latter.  

        So, who joins the Army ?  Mostly young people whose household incomes are under $50,000, I’d guess.  Lower middle class.  Above that threshold, they have better college and job prospects.    

        I think Castle Man has it right when he says that the folks who enlist are mostly lower middle class or poor individuals.

        I appreciate you providing a link, Dan, but I scanned the whole 14 page report, and never found support for your position that he was wrong about who serves.

        .

        Why do you think that the military needs more people from the upper middle and upper class ?  Do you think that makes them more creative or more competent, or are you just looking for some sort of “diversity” in the ranks ?

        .

        1. …translating across all levels of American Society. I think those people who do a few years in a pickle suit make better citizens.

          I also think that’s true of people who do things like Americorps or whatever the hell it’s called, but a few years in a military society makes you more aware of sacrifice, discipline and it demolishes racial stereotypes.

          And it would also make people who eventually become politicians aware that sending troops into combat is a decision not to be made lightly.

  8. good for Coffman.

    I’d love to see every Congressional committee and sub-committee identify at least one program that, without controversy, can be eliminated.

  14. It’s funny how slavery ended in 1865 but the government could enslave men, not women, right up to the present if the draft were reinstated.

    And then there’s the matter of gender discrimination.  Women aren’t required to register, and men seeking higher education have to prove they have registered or are too old.

    A lot of upper middle and upper class men never got drafted, anyway.  From buying a replacement in the Civil War to gaming the system, the draft never brought in huge numbers of officer class men.  I would guess that in WWII many of them volunteered, anyway.  

  15. the positive effect of a safe district?  I like my competitive congressional district (7), but maybe, just maybe, being in a safe seat gives Coffman the ability to do what he thinks is right, cutting defense spending to help reduce the deficit, without being overly concerned about re-election.  Then again, I am probably just fooling myself.  Coffman probably has his eye on state wide office and is just trying to stake out some moderate credibility.

    1. have been known for not doing much for constituents.  Tancredo was nothing but illegal immigrant hysteria and Coffman has pretty much just punched the party line time clock.

      Lets remember that the GOP is now splitting over this and not along perfectly neat lines, either. It’s not all establishment Rs against all Tea Partiers.  It’s in flux. Indies are split, too and CD6 is Indie heavy.  

      It’s a good stance and I believe it’s sincere but it’s not as brave a stance as it would have been a couple of years ago when you were either a good Republican who never voted against a dime for defense or a terrorist loving, soft, troop dissing Dem according to the universal received GOP wisdom. Coffman is no rebel.

      You want an example of a Rep who works his butt off for his constituents, there’s Perlmutter and his is the example of a competitive district.

  16. I remember burning my draft card after I was disharged.

    I will miss registering for the draft. I have probably registered more than 1000 times as I have done so EVERY time I have gone to the post office for more than 40 years. Just for grins. Someone needs to comply.

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