Committee Opposed to Militarism and the Draft (COMD)

: Peter G. Anderheggen; Articles Archive; 01 July 2017; Hits: 3028

Connecticut Peace Group Engages Students with a Peace Wheel

From Draft NOtices, July-September 2017

— Peter G. Anderheggen

Winsted Area Peace Action has been visiting high schools in northwestern Connecticut for at least ten years. The purpose of our visits has been to introduce and discuss with students alternative methods of service to the country and non-military means of earning money after high school. Our goal is to bring some contrast to the appeal of the military, which spends many millions of dollars in its recruiting efforts. We make information available on such organizations as AmeriCorps, Peace Corps, Peace Brigades International and Heifer International, all of which take people who are age 18 or older.

We are usually invited during the lunch periods, often with a table set up in the vicinity of the cafeteria. There are several lunch sessions and invariably the students arrive in droves, hungry and eager to visit with friends. Our challenge is to present something that catches their eyes and engages them.

About five years ago, one of our members who was carrying out research for a book, Seth Kershner, went to Austin, Texas, and visited a high school along with Sustainable Options for Youth (SOY). He saw how a peace wheel could be effectively used to attract students to a table. The wheel intrigued our members and we ordered one from Thomas Heikkala, a Vietnam veteran and skilled carpenter who was one of the founding members of SOY.

So, what is a peace wheel and how do we use it? Ours is a piece of plywood about twenty-four inches in diameter attached to a tripod. The wheel is divided into 12 segments separated by wooden pegs on the outer edge of the wheel. There is a small piece of plastic at the top of the tripod that hits the pegs as the wheel spins. When the wheel stops spinning it leaves the piece of plastic pointing to one of the segments, each of which contains a question. The student who spins the wheel is asked to answer or discuss the question. The purpose at this point is to engage the student, who is rewarded with a prize even if he or she cannot answer the question correctly. These days the prize is an apple; previously, members of our group handed out candy. About 25 percent of the time the experience leads to a deeper and more informative conversation and follow-up questions from the students. The major problem these days is that we have four or five students waiting in line to spin the wheel.

: Marc Norton; Articles Archive; 01 April 2017; Hits: 2819

Trump Means War

From Draft NOtices, April-June 2017

— Marc Norton

On the afternoon of Saturday, January 7, 2017, I attended an indoor rally titled United Against Trump at the Women’s Building in San Francisco. The room was packed to the rafters. The spirit of resistance was high. There were inspiring speeches on defending immigrants, on fighting the Dakota Access Pipeline, on fighting for health care, on taxing the rich. There were calls to reform the Democratic Party, to get into the streets, and to make socialist revolution.

But during the discussion period that followed the speeches, one lone woman got up and said she was disturbed that, for all the speechifying, she had heard nothing about Trump’s foreign policy. The speakers seemed to be so focused on our immediate concerns that we had forgotten the world outside U.S. borders. Diamond Dave later reminded us that those borders are just lines on a map.

We forget at our peril that Trump has made it clear through his political appointments that his administration will be the most militarist, warlike and jingoist administration in modern times.

Trump and his cohorts will command the most powerful military machine in history, with the ability to conduct war on any and every portion of the globe. The Trump regime will inherit the ability to conduct unchecked drone warfare, special operations forces already deployed in the vast majority of the countries of the world, massive surveillance systems firmly in place, and Guantanamo.

The possible flash points for war are almost too numerous to list. The Middle East, already a theater for war and instability from Syria to Afghanistan, will be rocked further by Trump’s belligerence toward the Islamic world in general and Iran in particular, along with his fanning of Zionist aggression. Trump’s planned trade war with China could make the Great Recession look like just the warm-up to an economic crisis unprecedented since the Depression, which did not end until the whole world went to war. For all of Trump’s ambiguity toward Russia, the U.S. and NATO have been gearing up for war against the stepchild of the Soviet Union for the last 25 years. Standing down from that confrontation while Trump muses on refueling the nuclear arms race will be difficult indeed. And, of course, the people of Africa and Latin America are in perpetual revolt against U.S. hegemony, with who knows what crisis on the horizon.

Army Tries to Avoid Recruiting Crisis with New "Offers"

From Draft NOtices, April-June 2017

— Rick Jahnkow

In February, the Pentagon announced additional recruiting quotas for the 2017 fiscal year. Millions of dollars will be spent increasing the overall military force size by up to 13,000 personnel (separately, Trump has mentioned wanting up to 60,000 more soldiers!).

The Army alone has so far been tasked with recruiting an additional 6,000 soldiers by October 1, and to get them it plans to spend an extra $200 million on bonuses, $100 million on marketing and at least $10 million for more recruiters and processing capacity for the new recruits.

Meeting the challenge of this enormous jump in enlistment goals will be extremely difficult. Knowing this, the Army has announced that for certain jobs it will now offer two-year active-duty enlistments (normally, terms are for three or more years). After their first two years, the enlistees will be placed in the drilling reserves for two years, and then the Individual Ready Reserves.

Major General Jeffrey Snow, commanding officer of Army recruiting, says the goal of these short-term enlistments is to appeal to high school students who might not relish going straight into college after graduation. One potential problem for them, however, is that they could be called back to active duty while in the reserves. Thousands of reservists were activated and sent to our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.