The Coming Draft: The Crisis in Our Military and Why Selective Service is Wrong for America - Hardcover

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

This book explains how a strange alliance of neo-conservatives and liberals is preparing America for the resumption of the draft, while the military policies of the Bush administration keep pushing towards it. For those in favour of continuing the war on terror the draft is becoming more and more an unavoidable option. But they are not alone. Even liberals are seeing the draft as an answer to inequality and other social ills. But now, especially now, according to Gold, conscription is not only a bad idea militarily, but conscription as it would be used today would be both immoral and unconstitutional. About the Author Philip Gold is the author of five books including Take Back the Right (2004) and over 800 articles, columns and reviews. He has served as a Marine officer, covered defense issues for a national news magazine, taught at Georgetown University and was most recently a Senior Fellow in National Security Affairs at the prestigious, conservative Discovery Institute in Washington DC. Mr. Gold holds a B.A. in history from Yale University and a Doctorate in history from Georgetown University where he taught history and defense policy for fourteen years.