And as you said the progression fo this sad state of affairs with the military could lead to the draft. Although IMHO what will happen is that some nation shall decide to challenge US interests sometime in the future, and the US military shall not be ready to handle it. And since the use of nukes would be hard to justify, and conventional means would be stretched and worn thin due to years of cutbacks and sitting on hands, then a real problem would arrise.
A good example is if China decided to attack Taiwan. And this is a bigger issue than any war with Iraq.
What would happen then?
Based on what facts are you making your judement?
They better be good because I will blow them out of the water once you post them if they're not!
Most Americans have no clue that China has a standing Military in excess of 200 Million men. One major effect of the cultural bias to keeping baby boys and killing the girls.
The one hope I have is that China will continue to fester internally and may ultimately continue to check itself as it evolves through various levels disintegration. The Bank of China is essentially insolvent. The graft that defines China is hard to imagine. The infrastructure there is still predominately provincial with an alliance of Government, Military and Gangsters running the show, listed here in reverse order of clout. There are alliances and feuds forming constantly. It is not as unified as they would like us to think but the sheer mass of it is not well understood by most Americans either.
My bigger concern with China is progressive domination of the Asian theater. One small country at a time, taken internally initially. Viet Nam is a clear example of this today. China also supports disruptive activity through other rogue nations.
If we rebuild our military aggressively and with an equal view to offense and defense we may pull to uncomfortable parity in the next three to four years. But we will never enjoy the perpetual domination we could have realized if Clinton had never been in power.