Bingo. Taxes are the only common thread that connects the citizens to the entity called the US.
The end of the military draft was the beginning of the end for any sense of national identity.
Bilge. There was no draft between the Civil War and WWI, IIRC, and we did just fine with national identity.
Nobody who cares about winning in combat wants the draft back, it was a freakin' disaster and the Army and Air Force didn't really finish recovering from it until a decade after Vietnam.