This week the Associated Press openly stated something that most of us have known for a while. That Biden administration is pressuring Ukraine to lower the conscription age to 18. This is the usual life cycle of facts from Ukraine. Facts are initially dismissed as “Kremlin talking points” for 6 to 12 months, then they’re admitted. So what do we make of this latest “new” fact?
Did you know that one third of all American combat troops in Vietnam were black? As 13% of the US population, black men were more than twice as likely as white men to be conscripted, and this illustrates the fundamental problem of forcing people to fight an unpopular war.
In 2017 or 18 I was one of the office peons who accompanied our commanding general on a visit to the local veterans’ hospital. This was a sad experience for me, as people don’t tend to go to hospitals when they are healthy, and the saddest residents there were the Vietnam vets. These were guys probably in their mid-60s but looked much older, with flabby and bloated bodies suffering from multiple organ failure. This wasn’t the “get well and go home” treatment. It was end-of-life care for guys with a few weeks or months to live at absolute most. The Vietnam vets were here and not a private hospital because private hospitals cost money, and these guys didn’t have any. And they were also alone, with the hospital attendant who visited every hour or so (if that) the closest thing they had to a friend.
When we got back to the office, one of my co-workers, an affluent neoliberal white lady who was a former CNN reporter married to a retired Army officer she hooked up with in Iraq, loudly complained about the Vietnam vets. She was completely indignant that someone who did 12 months in Vietnam gets free healthcare and they don’t deserve it. Indeed.
The USA managed to placate public opposition to the war by grabbing conscripts from the absolute bottom rungs of the American hierarchy. Black boys from the ghetto and white boys from Appalachia, young guys with no family connections at all and no education to speak of. Being a draft dodger requires intelligence and acumen. You can’t really expect a guy to manipulate the system for a medical or career exemption when he can barely write his own name.
Eventually, even the impoverished blue collar families were wrung dry and the US government still desperately needed cannon fodder. So they implemented the most notorious conscription program in our history, Project 100,000. This program conscripted the mentally retarded, and not for janitorial duties, but for actual frontline combat. Quite predictably, these soldiers suffered much higher casualties than normal, and also experienced far more serious social and psychological problems after returning home from Vietnam. And yes, the large majority of the misfortunate souls forced into Project 100,000 were black.
Just to further drive the point home – George Bush was the last combat veteran to be elected as president of the United States, as he served in WWII. Clinton, Trump and Biden all got exemptions from military service. Even Bush’s own son, W. Bush, hid in the Texas Air National Guard where he did not have to fear being sent to Vietnam. That last example is perhaps the most damning. One would think that as a decorated war hero, the father would have shamed the son into going to Vietnam to maintain the family honor. But he didn’t, which suggests that Bush was happy to not risk his son suffering a pointless death in a faraway land. This is not at all what happened in WWII, when even rich celebrities felt obligated to go to war. But even the most fervent supporters of the Vietnam War silently understood there was no honor or glory in it.
Ukraine is facing the same problem as the US did in the Vietnam War. Nobody in the Ukrainian population wants to go to war – the guys who did want to go to war are already there, or buried in the ground. The only people who can be conscripted are those who don’t have the money and influence to avoid it. Reducing the conscription age to 18 would likely cause extreme problems, because that would expose the university-age people to military service, including the sons of Ukrainian oligarchs and politicians. I’m confident those privileged sons could still get out of it, but such convenient exemptions would expose even more unfairness and corruption in the system.
The bigger problem is that Ukraine has an extremely finite population pool. Their future is now entirely in the hands of the 18–25 age cohort, which is also the smallest generation of Ukrainians to ever exist since the “wild fields” were first colonized properly several hundred years ago. If these men are also sent into combat and killed, Ukrainians will literally cease to exist as a nation.
I don’t know where that woman I mentioned earlier is now, but I am guessing that, after the war, if she ever finds out that a dime of US money is being spent on Ukrainian veterans, she will loudly complain. “Why should these pathetic ingrates who couldn’t even capture Crimea be getting free money for their missing arms and legs?” Indeed.
Ian Kummer
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