Volunteers

tacitus has been a pretty reliable pro-war rightie, but he's had a not-quite-epiphany too. He spent an evening talking to a friend who had just returned from aid-station duty in Iraq, and was now tending the maimed back in the US. She's had it and she's getting out:

My friend is lucky -- she's only been to war once. I know others who have been to war twice, and probably a third time before the year is out. It's not that these people have no sense of duty: to the contrary. But they don't see the sense in the open-ended mission, plagued by strategic incoherence, and chronically undermanned. It's impossible to blame them. "I've read about the recruiting problems," she said, "And I think, no joke."

Unfortunately, the lesson tacitus takes from this is

The volunteer soldiers have proven themselves fine warriors. But the volunteer Army has failed. This is its first war of any meaningful length, and its lessons are clear: it cannot sustain this effort, through no fault of its own, because, in the end, its discrete parts are rational actors. It is impossible to externally incentivize war. The choice is therefore between that Army's continuance and a draft...

Which just goes to show that a smart guy can know the facts and still delude himself. The fault is not with your volunteer Army, tacitus, it's with the stupid war Bush and his cheerleaders (like you) led us into. Brad DeLong looked at his argument and found it wanting. The volunteer Army is not designed for wars of imperial conquest and occupation. The failure was in trying to use it for those purposes.