As a former US Navy "deck ape" and current productive member of society, even when I was amongst the "dregs" of the First Division aboard a tin can, I knew that, THANK GOD, some guys I knew from high school that had gotten into the Army, weren't within 1500 miles of my ship with its dangerous equipment and large electrical and flammables loads contained in cramped and interdependent systems and spaces.
Historically, the other services have always been able to be more selective than the Army because when it gets right down to it, small arms aren't as quick to kill when accidentally misused or improperly maintained as say, is dropping an armed 1000 pound bomb on the deck or swamping a landing craft full of Marines 300 yards offshore.
Interservice rivalry aside, ANYONE who gets in the Army is a better man (or woman) than the vast majority of his or her "betters" out there busy being hothouse flowers in the leftwing green houses that pass themselves off as college campuses these days.
The answer is not a draft, not because draftees haven't performed in the past, but because the draftees of today probably couldn't. Even in the "cushier" services, one has to endure hardships that most teens today are poorly equipped to deal with, especially if they didn't volunteer for it. Even in the draft era Army, the most decorated and celebrated units such as paratroopers and Rangers, were subsections of volunteers for more hazardous duty within a drafted mass army.
I take the radical position that personnel should be a much bigger part of the military's price structure than it is even now. I felt somewhat underpaid in Mr. Reagan's Navy. People risking their very lives should be paid like they are doing just that.
The pay structure should be better at the lower and middle enlisted ranks than it is and with decent jumps in pay for grade and time in service increases.
During times of war, no one in uniform should be paying income taxes to any governmental entity at any level. If huge base salary increases are not feasible, military service should be tax free even in times of peace.
Lateral transfers to meet manpower requirements should be easier. Virtually everyone in the military is interchangeable on the basics of military bearing and such general stuff. It should never be boot camp redux even if some level of retraining is required. The recipient branch should have to make very honest attempts to match occupational specialties and ranks across branches for crossovers to assuage new volunteers for combat zones that they will not be simply given the keys to the nearest truck and told to go to it.
At the same time, the two spear point services, the Army and the Marines, should have to transform themselves to become more tooth and less tail, especially the Army. To look at Army/Reserve organizational charts is to view a brass hued glimpse into Hell. All of the services are brass heavy, but I find it hard to believe a branch that features a 1:6 officer/enlisted ratio needs to lower standards when it appears that what needs to happen is a massive redeployment of the officers already in the branch and maybe train some of them to be infantry officers rather than Powerpoint Rangers..
