As I'm sure F_B knows, the late M. Scott Peck ("The Road Less Traveled") wrote "People of the Lie: The Hope for Healing Human Evil" and included a section that dealt with the military. He chaired a committee of psychiatrists chosen by the Army to study the My Lai massacre in the hope of preventing something like that from happening again. All of the recommendations of the panel were rejected, but that's another story.
Years later (in "People of the Lie") he advocated a reinstatement of the draft. My simple synopsis of his position: A volunteer army allows us to hire someone else to do our dirty work for us and remove us from the pain and from the proximity of the moral struggles inherent in going to war. War should hurt, he said. It should not be "easy" to go to war. He pointed out the Vietnam War did not become a significant problem in America until it became a white, middle class problem. When it touched your street and mine, and you lost your cousin, and the guy from your high school class, you felt it. To limit our fighting personnel to volunteers shields us from many elements of war that force us to confront evil more honestly, he said.
For our mental and moral health, he argued, a draft would keep us more honest about the decision-making governing our foreign policy and keep more vigorous the power of democracy with respect to choosing war. There's much more than that, but that's the basic argument. It's a compelling read, and only part of why the book stayed close to me for years.
