Just a Gwai Lo fun within prescribed limits [?]

Fred Kaplan on whether the United States should institute the draft: “What is the purpose of a military? Is it to spread the social burden—or to fight and win wars? The U.S. active-duty armed forces are more professional and disciplined than at any time in decades, perhaps ever. This is so because they are composed of people who passed comparatively stringent entrance exams—and, more important, people who want to be there or, if they no longer want to be there, know that they chose to be there in the first place. An Army of draftees would include many bright, capable, dedicated people; but it would also include many dumb, incompetent malcontents, who would wind up getting more of their fellow soldiers killed.”

Niall Ferguson: “A very large proportion of Americans don't have passports. But even more striking to me is the fact that the kind of people you might expect to be well-equipped to engage in what we rather euphemistically call nation-building—that's to say, the graduates of the elite universities—disproportionately avoid overseas engagements. The ambitions of the educational elite in this country are quite domestically focused. They really would rather be running a Wall Street law firm than governing Baghdad. And I think that's a fundamental social-cultural reason why the United States is bad at empire.”

In the following paragraph, Ferguson makes a very interesting point about drafting soldiers (which I oppose on the grounds that it weakens the army because volunteers are more likely to follow orders than those there unwillingly). He says that when you draft people in the military, you increase the likelihood that soldiers will have a diverse range of talents, and these talents came into play during the post-WWII period nation-building in Germany and Japan because soldiers were drawn from more walks of life than those who would join the army anyway.