The Coming Draft: The Crisis in Our Military and Why Selective Service Is Wrong for America (Hardcover)

~ (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The author of this lively but conflicted study, an ex–think tanker and Marine vet, is torn between libertarian impulses and a lingering social conservatism. "Conscription sucks so bad," he moans, yet he believes that "every American male should spend some time in uniform." (Women, too, he allows, despite grousing about "man-hating" feminists.) Gold (Take Back the Right) suggests that the army needs several hundred thousand more troops for its many missions, from hurricane relief to fighting wars and nation building. But he also considers conscription an intolerable, perhaps unconstitutional infringement of liberty, historically fraught with corruption, unfairness and malign social engineering. Gold squares this circle, not very persuasively, with a nod to the wisdom of the founding fathers and the nation's hoary citizen-militia tradition. People should have a choice of different commitments, he argues, from overseas deployment in the regular military to strictly domestic service in state militias—or no service at all, which would subject them to extra taxes. It's hard to see how this system would sustain a tough foreign conflict—but maybe that's the point, since Gold considers the Iraq War a disaster. He presents an engaging, down-to-earth take on the urgent problem of military manpower, without quite resolving it. (Sept. 19)
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Review

Advance praise for The Coming Draft

“The Coming Draft is a passionate and devastating polemic that at once challenges the right’s definition of patriotic service and the left’s near abandonment of the subject. Outspoken and wryly furious, Philip Gold’s book will, with luck, bring reforms as numerous as the hackles it will raise.”
–Caleb Carr, bestselling author and historian

“In a country on the verge of perpetual war, it takes an ex-marine and political scholar to think about the consequences to both the nation and the military . . . setting the table for what is sure to become the great national debate of this and the next decade.”
–Ronald J. Glasser, M.D., author of 365 Days

“The Coming Draft examines two equally crazy ideas: that a democratic state has the right to tear its citizens from their homes and send them to war, and that those citizens have the right to refuse. The relationship between citizenship and service in our country is broken. Philip Gold has written a brilliant account of how this happened, what it means, and how we can fix it. Read this excellent book as a warning–its issues will matter again greatly and maybe sooner than we think.”
–Nathaniel Fick, author of One Bullet Away: The Making of a Marine Officer


From the Hardcover edition. --This text refers to the Kindle Edition edition.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Presidio Press; annotated edition edition (September 19, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0891418954
• ISBN-13: 978-0891418955
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.2 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,364,278 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars To Draft or Not to Draft?, October 29, 2006

By	Quang X. Pham (Orange County, CA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Excerpted from my review for The Orange County Register, 10/29/06

"Hell no, we won't go!" seemingly faded overnight ... until last year, when the Army missed its recruiting goal, lowered its physical standards and raised its age limit for enlistees to 42.

Fiercely against the draft, author Philip Gold is a rare military intellectual, a self-described Jewish Marine with fancy degrees from Yale and Georgetown. Shortly after receiving his draft notice in 1970, he brazenly replied to his draft board, "I will never serve in the United States Army. Please stop wasting my time, your time and the government's postage. PS: I recently joined the Marines."

Gold has written six books and over 800 articles during his tenure as a Washington-based think-tanker. It is his humor coupled with an inundation of facts that makes "The Coming Draft" an entertaining and convincing read.

He tightly argues against the reinstatement of military conscription in America, noting that the draft has been always inequitable and rife with loopholes for abuse. Conservatives may want to bring back the draft to ready our military for more interventions, while liberals believe that more Americans will question our foreign policy when their own rears are on the line for service.

"The Coming Draft" is an important and timely book filled with insights from a deep thinker. Gold's only son recently volunteered for the Marines and may someday serve in a war that his father has strongly opposed since its inception. A draft is not needed for the Gold family, after all.

1 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars conscription is unconstitutional, January 19, 2007

By	Daniel H. Shubin "danhshubin" (Springville, CA United States) - See all my reviews

Conscription - or the military draft - is the state forcing a person to place himself in harms way - possibly to be killed - and is a violation of the most fundamental premise of the Declaration of Independence, that men are "endowed by their Creator with unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." Conscription is dictatorial and antithesis to a free society, because it deprives the citizen of his guaranteed unalienable rights.

In another respect, and this was the lesson learned from Vietnam, conscription is indirectly the state's admission of defeat in war, because if the state needs to force someone to kill or die for his country, the war is already lost.

A book on this subject is a necessity.