Premier Debate
September/October2017 LD Brief
Premier Debate Institute
Premier Debate Today
Introduction
Friends of Premier Debate,
This is Premier’s first brief of the 2017-2018 season, and the topic is “Resolved: In the United States, national service ought to be compulsory.”
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Bob Overing & John Scoggin
Directors | Premier Debate
Table of Contents
Contents
Introduction
Table of Contents
Affirmative
Advantage Areas
Adventurism / Militarism
Civil-Military Gap
Gender
Military Readiness
Passive Public
Race
Unemployment
Virtues
Volunteering
Plan
Draft
Case Blocks
AT Exemptions Harm Solvency
AT Military Readiness High
AT Not Feasible – Too Extreme
AT Tech Renders Soldiers Obsolete
Off-Case Blocks
AT CP – Incentives
AT CP – Non-Combatant Only
AT CP – Non-Military Options
AT DA – CMR
AT DA – Politics
AT DA – Readiness
AT DA – Spending
AT K – Militarism
AT NC – Freedom / Kant
AT T – National Service
Negative
CPs
CP – CMR
CP – Incentives
CP – Libertarian Exemption
CP – Non-Combatant
CP – Recruiters
CP – ROTC
CP – XO
DAs
Adventurism
Crime
Readiness
Politics
Spending
Wage Deflation
Ks
Capitalism
Gender
Militarism
Race
NCs
Constitutionality
Freedom / Libertarianism
Quaker Coercion
Virtue
On Case
AT Advantages from Proposing the Bill
AT Adventurism / Militarism
AT Civil-Military Gap
AT Econ / Spending
AT Race
AT Readiness
AT Political Participation
AT Unemployment / Econ
AT Volunteering
Miscellany
Actor / Agent
Normal Means - Congress
Normal Means – Executive
Exemptions
Affirmative
Advantage Areas
Adventurism / Militarism
Plan solves interventionism—drafts spur increased interest
Oatley 15 Thomas Oatley (Thomas Oatley teaches international politics at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He has published his scholarly work in many of the field's best journals, including International Organization, the American Journal of Political Science, and International Studies Quarterly. Dr Oatley has also written two market-leading textbooks on international political economy, edited a handbook on the political economy of the international monetary system, and written a number of commentaries on contemporary affairs that have been published in outlets such as Foreign Policy and the Washington Post). A Political Economy of American Hegemony. Cambridge University Press, Feb 23, 2015 [Premier]
Any transformation must therefore occur through American poli- tics. Yet, finding domestic solutions is tricky, for as we have seen, the political economy of imbalance is not the strategy of a unified rational actor that we can change through persuasion. Instead, imbalances have been unintended consequences of the opportunity structure established by America's decentralized political institutions and its global financial power. Responsible policy thus requires some way to break the gridlock induced by American institutions. This is challenging; gridlock has been studied by the best students of American politics (Binder 2.003; Mann and Ornstein 2012). This research has yet to identify the Archimedean Point from which an outside observer could leverage institutional change to solve problems. Consequently, even the most prominent scholars con- clude that policy reform requires extrainstitutional change. Mdiarty, Poole, and Rosenthal (2.013: 170-271), for instance, assert that “the best hope given the stability of the political system, is to begin to build a new public philosophy for dealing with the challenges of our time.” What should a new public philosophy look like to generate a more responsible global engagement? I believe that the requisite public philosophy is one that emphasizes civic engagement in foreign policy. During the last forty years the American public has disengaged from meaningful and informed discussion about foreign policy challenges. Between 2001 and 2.013, the US. government spent approximately six trillion dol- lars fighting two wars. (Ilose to seven thousand American soldiers were killed in action, approximately 59,000 were wounded, and an unknown number of others returned home with posttraumatic stress (United States Department of Defense 2014). And yet, according to a recent Pew Research Center study, two-thirds of the American public report that these wars never come up in the conversations they have with family and friends; half say that these wars have made no difference in their lives (Pew Research Center 2.01 1). And what we observe in regard to these specific wars seems to characterize the public attitude toward for- eign policy more generally. In poll after poll, the American public rarely ranks foreign policy issues among the most important problems facing the nation. Many have attributed the American public's disengagement from foreign policy and decisions about the use of force to the shift from a draft-based to an all-volunteer military. Julian Zelizer (10:0: 2.3 5 ) asserts that “eliminating the draft weakened the most immediate connection that existed between the national security state and average citizens.” Andrew Bacevich claims that the results have been “anything but dem- ocratic.” “Current arrangements have allowed and even encouraged Americans to disengage from war at a time when war has become all but permanent. Rather than being shared by many, the burden of service and sacrifice is borne by a few, with the voices of those few unlikely to be heard in the corridors of power” (Bacevich 2.013; see also Bailey 2.009; Eikenberry 2.013). To put this in perspective, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were the longest in American history, and yet were fought by the smallest share of the American public - about one half of 1 percent - of any of America’s wars (Pew Research Center 2.01 l: 8). In contrast, for instance, 9 percent of the population fought in World War II, and about 2. percent fought in the wars in Korea and Vietnam. The public seems fully aware that the burden of war fighting has been highly concentrated on a small segment of American society. According to this same Pew Center study, 83 percent ofthe American public believed that military personnel have made significant sacrifices over the last thir- teen years. And only 43 percent of the same respondents thought that the American public at large had sacrificed significantly. Moreover, 70 per- cent responded that they thought this distribution of the burden was fair (Pew Research Center 2.01 I: 63). By concentrating war fighting on to a very small proportion of the Amaican public, the all-volunteer force has enabled the American public to view war as something other people do and as a consequence, as something that has no particular relevance to their lives. Understandably, they invest little energy becoming informed about foreign policy to influence its direction. America's financial power has also encouraged the public to disen- gage from foreign affairs. The Gates Commission, convened by President Nixon in 1970 to evaluate the impact of shifting to an all-volunteer mil- itary, discounted concerns expressed at the time that ending the draft would reduce public engagement in decisions concerning the use of force (United States Government 1970). The Commission argued that any major expansion of military force would require additional reve- nue. And “if tax increases are needed or military spending claims priority over other public spending, a broad public debate [will take placel” (ibid: 155). Indeed, Commission members believed that “recent history suggests that increased taxes generate far more public discussion than increased draft calls” (ibid: I 55). Thus, they concluded, an all-volunteer force would actually produce greater public participation in decisions about military force (ibid). America's financial power has undermined completely this expectation by enabling politicians to use military force without needing to ask the public to pay for it or scale back expenditures on other government programs. The end of the draft and the enhancement of America’s financial power have thus weakened substantially the democratic participation in and constraint on decisions about the use of military power. Because the typi- cal citizen bea rs no direct human or economic cost from the government’s use of force, he or she has little incentive to monitor and try to limit the government’s reliance on military power. As a result, the United States probably pursues military solutions to its foreign policy challenges more often than it would if the public expected to hear some of the human and economic costs arising from military action (Eikenberry 201 3). How do we foster the civic engagement needed to constrain the exec- utive branch's use of force? The most likely solution is instituting uni- versal national service. The Aspen lnstitute’s Franklin Project. initiated in mid-2.011, offers one approach. Retired General Stanley McChrystal initiated the Franklin Project as a means to address his concern that the typical American had no real understanding of what service to the nation entailed. He was concerned in particular about the emergence of a huge experiential gap between the fraction of the population that serves in the military and the rest of the American public. He proposed as a means to reduce this gap that every American serve for one year in either a military or civilian capacity (The Franklin Project 2013). The Franklin Project claims, and not without reason, that the Greatest Generation was forged through such national service obligations, and as a consequence “voted more, entered public service in greater numbers, and enjoyed much lower levels of political polarization” (ibid: 5). One might hope that a renewed culture of service would have a similar impact on the next generation. Universal national service is no panacea. Yet, it can contribute impor- tantly to the reconstitution of citizen engagement necessary to dampen the political economy of imbalance and create a more responsible form of American engagement in global politics. There is no guarantee that such measures will prevent future imbalances and financial crises. Financial markets are complex adaptive systems that react to and amplify developments elsewhere in the global political economy. And while America’s postwar deficit-financed military buildups have constituted a very important source of such developments, they are certainly not the only source. I do not claim. therefore. to have found a magic bullet with which to end financial instability. I do believe, however, that relying less on military power and paying for the wars we do fight will make us less likely to shoot ourselves in the foot.
Open media and civilian controlled media means conscription deters conflict
Choi and James 08 SEUNG-WHAN CHOI; Department of Political Science, University of Illinois at Chicago; Patrick James; School of International Relations, University of Southern California; Journal of Peace Research; 2008; “ Civil-Military Structure, Political Communication, and the Democratic Peace;” [Premier]
Second, we introducea reduced form of Model 2, in which Oneal & Russett’s democracy variable is dropped from the equation to extinguish any remaining concerns about a possible conceptual incompatibility between open media and democracy in the same logistic regression model. Model 4 reveals that open media have a strong dampening effect on the onset of MIDs. In other words, although we remove the democracy variable and rerun the reduced equation, the results in Model 4, especially with respect to open media, are very similar to those in Models 2 and 3. In sum, civilian control over the military, diplomats, and open media appear to be contributing factors in connection to peace at a dyadic level of aggregation. Model 5 distinguishes between those MIDs where the threat of force occurred and MIDs where military force was actually used. The dependent variable is the onset of war. When we ran this war initiation in model, the open media variable was automatically dropped out of the equation because there was no variation between media and war, which reduced the total dyad years to 78,327, dropping 17,653 observations. In other words, all the open media dyads (i.e. a value of 1) perfectly correspond to no onset of war (i.e. a value of 0). Consequently, the equation could not estimate the effect of the dropped observations on the other 11 variables. Model 5 reports the results free from the dropping problem by not including the media variable in the Stata command line. In this way, we keep the same dyad-years of 95,980 as the previous models for comparison.25 As speculated upon earlier, the onset of war is related closely to the civil–military structure (i.e. both military inf luence and conscription), but not related to diplomats. It appears that civilian supremacy is likely to contribute to a more peaceful world; in addition, the presence of voluntary soldiers is likely to lead to a more conf lictual world. The conscription variable turns out to be insignificant when the dependent variable is the onset of MIDs, but becomes significant when it is replaced withthe onset of war. This evidence suggests that the conscription hypothesis works well only with war initiations that tend to evoke the worst casualty phobia among ordinary citizens. Each of the three Kantian peace variables seems to lose its effectiveness in predicting war occurrence. Model 6 reports the results where the dependent variable is ICB’s onset of international crises. The results are similar to those in the MID onset Models 2, 3, and 4, except for the democracy variable, which shows statistical significance at the 0.001 level, but in a counterintuitive direction. This is a startling result that will require more attention in future research, perhaps with modeling that focuses on stages of escalation. Perhaps the more democratic dyads are at greater risk of crisis onset, but less so for escalation from crisis to war. At any rate, with the many precautions concerning overlapping concepts (e.g. democracy and open media) and multicollinearity, we believe the basic association revealed here to be credible and worthy of further investigation. The results in Table III are obtained for politically relevant dyads only, which students of conf lict processes look into most commonly, owing to their relatively dispute-prone nature, that is, the most ‘dangerous’ ones. In terms of the effect of each variable of interest, the results are similar to those in Table II. In sum, it appears that international conf lict is related closely to the characteristics of regimes such as military inf luence, diplomats, and open media (and conscription with war onset), but not likely with regime type in and of itself (i.e. in the context of democratic versus non-democratic). In addition, conf lict processes do not seem to occur as a side-effect of the free market economy, at least in the light of economic interdependence in the empirical analysis reported here. It is possible that, with large samples, even a small effect can be statistically significant, but substantively trivial. Thus, it becomes increasingly important to estimate the substantive effects of variables as the sample size increases. Table IV shows the substantive significance of the seven theoretically interesting variables in the logistic regression models. As compared with a typical dyad during the period from 1950 to 1992, the likelihood that the more military-inf luenced dyads in the second column will initiate a dispute is increased 91%; for voluntary military manpower systems, the increase is 24%; for diplomats, the decrease is 24%; and for open media, the decrease is 82%. For democracy and international organizations (IOs), the increase is 20% and 23%, respectively, with a decrease of 9% for independence. As compared with a politically relevant dyad, the likelihood of a dispute in the fifth column is increased 74% with strong military inf luence and 28% with voluntary soldiers; but decreased 21% for diplomats and 71% in the presence of open media. For democracy, the increase is 17% although the coefficient is not statistically significant; for IOs, the increase is 24%; and for interdependence, the decrease is 10%. Substantive analysis for war (i.e. in columns 3 and 6) and ICB onset (i.e. in columns 4 and 7) produces a similar conclusion. This analysis of substantive effects reinforces the importance of military inf luence, diplomats, and open media (and conscription in case of wars) in the quest for peace.