BONUS PODCAST

Afghanistan Vet: Why We Should Bring the Draft Back

Author and war veteran Elliot Ackerman explains his very unpopular draft opinion and shares his experience evacuating an Afghan girls’ robotics team out of Afghanistan.

Author Elliot Ackerman says he would support a draft, but only because he thinks it could be a good thing for Americans, and ultimately create less war and more peace.

“I feel like the lesson that should be lit up in lights, at the end of the war in Afghanistan, The Forever War, is we as Americans should really pay attention and be cognizant to the ways that our wars are structured,” The Fifth Act: America’s End in Afghanistan author says of his very unpopular opinion in this bonus episode of The New Abnormal.

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“The last year America passed a balanced budget was in 2001. And there’s never been a war tax. The result of that construct is that the American people have been anesthetized to the cost of war. We don’t feel the war. It’s not a critical issue in American political life. And our politicians, thus, have been given this very long leash to go out and wage war,” he adds.

His solution? A draft. Not now, he says, because that won’t win any type of political favor, he jokes to host Molly Jong-Fast, but it’s definitely worth a conversation.

“Would every American be paying much closer attention to the issues of war and peace if they knew that when their son or daughter turned 18 years old, that young person would have a one in 10 chance of having to serve in uniform? Yeah, I think we would be paying very close attention to these issues. And it might change the conversation, or at least move the conversation of war and peace more to center stage in American life, and that could be a good thing,” he explains.

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Ackerman isn’t speaking in a vacuum either. Before he was a writer, he was a Marine Corps infantry officer, Special Operations Officer, and then later a CIA Special Operations Officer, serving in both Iraq and Afghanistan. He was even one of the people helping to evacuate Afghanistan when American troops were pulled out last year, an experience which he told Molly was “surreal.”

“It’s a 20-year war, so it has had this very consistent and enduring presence in my life. I’ve had a relationship with the war… longer than I had a relationship with my own children, or even with my wife. So when the war is suddenly ending, I mean, it’s actually, it’s a little bit disorienting,” he says.

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