I am, broadly speaking, against national conscription, but with the caveat that many of the objections in the article are absolutely true. The U.S. never had a peacetime draft until 1948, and it was a major decision on Truman's part to get that past the objections of both liberal and conservative who felt it was taking the country into the status of an imperial power, manning the bastions of a worldwide military commitment that they were loathe to support.
Thing is, we really don't need the manpower. The volunteer military supported by the Reserves met the needs of a major deployment in Iraq. The advantages of volunteers in the modern, high-technology battlefield over conscripts with far less training time are obvious (that is, after all, who we were facing in the Iraqi military and the results speak for themselves). It simply isn't a very difficult case to make that the all-volunteer force is more efficient.
That isn't the reason the author is advancing as to the advantages of conscription. Those advantages involve what is essentially holding a portion of the civilian population hostage to national policy, the idea being that the general electorate will follow and resist overuse of military assets as tools of national policy if a greater portion of its sons and daughters are directly involved. That theory may be quite sound but it seems to me to be a little hard on those sons and daughters, who do, after all, have lives of their own and concomitant rights to pursue them without the hand of government throwing a uniform on them for the greater good of society. A very great deal of evil is done for the Greater Good of Society.
I remember my draft physical and the impression it made on my budding sense of the rights and obligations of citizenship. Frankly, I found it frightening and a little outrageous, and this is coming from a fellow who ended up volunteering a few weeks later.
The other side of the coin is that a citizen does have obligations and that it is not necessarily a bad thing to demand them of young citizens - they do not just represent the skin their parents have in the game, but their own. So I can see the point of view that this is more than simple involuntary servitude, although it is involuntary servitude by the very definition of the words.
So understand that we would not be doing this for the good of the military - the article makes that clear. We would be doing it for the good of the young citizens involved under the rubric of "it's for your own good," which strikes me as a rather presumptuous reason even if true. And we would be doing it to resist imperial tendencies in state policy, as the article also makes clear. I would hope there were better ways to do that than hijacking young lives, but perhaps there are not.
I believe that we are short on manpower, so short that we have to take the men’s sisters and girlfriends to make up the shortage.
It got so bad in recent years, that we started accepting grandmothers in their 40s.
We have been exhausting our troops with our current limited needs and fighting a major war with losses in the tens of thousands, or having to fight on two fronts, seems a little daunting right now.
Eventually this house of cards falls apart, as the military becomes 50% female, becomes risk averse and focused on quality of life issues and garrison life, and pay and benefits hungry, and comes to resemble a federal career job rather than a male bastion of a war fighting machine.