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In Praise of National Service
Alarming statistics are increasingly published suggesting that our nation is in danger of creating a military class in this country, if we have not already created one.
“The Iraq and Afghan campaigns represent the first protracted, large-scale conflicts since our Revolutionary War fought entirely by volunteers,” Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates said in a speech at Duke University in September, 2010. “Indeed, no major war in our history has been fought with a smaller percentage of this country’s citizens in uniform full-time, roughly 2.4 million active and reserve service members out of a country of over 300 million, less than one percent.”
The grim prospects for democratic societies that reject broader public participation in the institutions of national service are rich in historical precedent. In her monumental post-war work The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt examined the impact of the Dreyfus affair on the French Republic. Alfred Dreyfus, a captain of the French General Staff was privately tried and convicted of espionage for Germany in 1894. Sentenced to life imprisonment on the infamous Devil’s Island penal colony, Dreyfus was eventually cleared of the charge. But the Dreyfus affair exposed the corrosive element of an insular military class within the French republic and aggravated the destructive tensions between loyal republicans, such as Albert…