Empires require standing armies, with professional soldiers, whose loyalty is to the Emperor.  Wars of conquest require Conscription, Deficit Spending, and Emergency Wartime Powers. Wars for purposes of defense are never short on manpower, while wars of conquest cannot long be sustained using volunteers who have loyalties to anything beyond war itself and the power it accrues.  But they are very expensive to maintain, and your professionals get ideas. 

Any remaining doubts about whether our current foreign policies are sustainable were demolished by the news that the Army has missed its recruiting goals for the fourth straight month. The Marine Corps has missed its goals for four out of the past five months. If the Bush administration and Congress do not fundamentally rethink their attitude toward the use of force abroad, then they will wreck the finest military in the history of mankind.

Hopefully someone in Washington outside of the Pentagon is paying attention to the recruiting numbers, because Donald Rumsfeld needs to be taken out behind the woodshed before America doesn’t have the troops it needs to defend itself anymore.

If we see our future as continued warfare, perhaps we should open a national dialogue on requiring every 18-year-old male and female to give two years of national service - some military, some not - as a normal and natural stage in growing up, as in Israel. Universal experience of military and quasi-military teamwork and discipline could have a positive effect on society, and on the education and careers of these more mature young men and women entering the workforce.

For years people will debate the real reasons the US invaded Iraq. Was it an honest mistake, based on the belief that the Hussein regime was hiding weapons? Was it revenge for political disobedience? Was it about oil or regional control, Bush’s place in history, or bolstering the US military budget? Maybe it was only to satisfy the post-9-11 blood lust.

A draft for the 21st Century is the only answer to our national security needs. Such a draft would have three tiers of youth service, with 18-month tours of duty for citizens ages 18 to 25. The first tier would be modeled after a standard military draft. The second tier would be for homeland security, such as guarding our borders, ports, nuclear installations and chemical plants. Included in this category would be police officers, firefighters, air marshals and disaster medical technicians. The third tier would be for civilian national service, such as the Peace Corps, AmeriCorps, Habitat for Humanity, Teach for America, assistance for the elderly and infirm, environmental work and the like.

One of the more bizarre aspects of the Iraq war has been President George W. Bush's repeated insistence that his generals tell him they have enough troops. The truth, of course, is that there aren't nearly enough troops. "Basically, we've got all the toys, but not enough boys," a Marine major in Anbar Province told the Los Angeles Times.

The theme of Woodrow Wilson’s 1916 re-election campaign was: "He kept us out of the war." Numerous historians, both partisans and detractors of Wilson, have documented that the slogan was a cynical lie. The same was true of Wilson’s repeated public statements in opposition to the restoration of the draft. In his April 2, 1917 address to Congress seeking a declaration of war against Germany, Wilson approached the subject of conscription from an oblique angle, stating that the war would "involve the immediate addition to the armed forces of the United States … at least 500,000 men, who should, in my opinion, be chosen upon the principle of universal liability to service…"

America’s policy of foreign intervention, while still debated in the early 20th century, is today accepted as conventional wisdom by both political parties. But what if the overall policy is a colossal mistake, a major error in judgment? Not just bad judgment regarding when and where to impose ourselves, but the entire premise that we have a moral right to meddle in the affairs of others?

What do you get when you combine nose-diving military enlistments with a bleak assessment from the Pentagon's top brass that the ongoing Iraq-tastrophe hampers U.S. military readiness -- leaving the nation perilously short handed in the face of North Korean and Iranian provocation? The answer: A lot of nervous-twentysomethings.