Interview: Noam Chomsky supports a draft army without class bias

NOAM CHOMSKY: I think it's extremely unlikely. I should tell you this as a
word of personal background. I was very much involved in the resistance
movement in the 1960's. In fact, I was just barely -- the only reason I
missed a long jail sentence is because the Tet Offensive came along and
the trials were called off. So I was very much involved in the resistance,
but I was never against the draft. I disagreed with a lot of my friends
and associates on that, for a very good reason, I think at least as nobody
seems to agree. In my view, if there's going to be an army, I think it
ought to be a citizen's army. Now, here I do agree with some people, the
top brass, they don't want a citizen's army. They want a mercenary army,
what we call a volunteer army. A mercenary army of the disadvantaged. And
in fact, in the Vietnam war, the U.S. military realized, they had made a
very bad mistake. I mean, for the first time I think ever in the history
of European imperialism, including us, they had used a citizen's army to
fight a vicious, brutal, colonial war, and civilians just cannot do that
kind of a thing. For that, you need the French foreign legion, the Gurkhas
or something like that. Every predecessor has used mercenaries, often
drawn from the country that they're attacking like England ran India with
Indian mercenaries. You take them from one place and send them to kill people in the other place. That's the standard way to run imperial wars.
They're just too brutal and violent and murderous. Civilians are not going
to be able to do it for very long. What happened was, the army started
falling apart. One of the reasons that the army was withdrawn was because
the top military wanted it out of there. They were afraid they were not
going to have an army anymore. Soldiers were fragging officer. The whole
thing was falling apart. They were on drugs. And thats why I think that
they're not going to have a draft. That's why I
m in favor of it. If there's going to be an army that will fight brutal,
colonial wars, and that's the only likely kind of war, I
m not talking about the militarization of space and that kind of thing, I
mean ground wars, it ought to be a citizen's army so that the attitudes of
the society are reflected in the military.