A national-service draft could be a very positive thing

[dairydog91]

20. Except history doesn't bear that out.

It gives the military lots of cheap cannon fodder to play with, and there's a perverse application of the Sunk Cost Fallacy. Since no one wants to admit that they just pissed away thousands of unwilling draftees in a completely pointless war, sending draftees in helps make any war in which they're involved a "necessary" war. So in Vietnam, long after it was quite obvious that North Vietnam posed no threat to the security of America or its political structures, many people probably still supported the war precisely because admitting this would essentially be an admission that the US government had dragged thousands of unwilling young men out of their towns and sent them to die solely because LBJ and Nixon didn't want to feel less manly then Ho Chi Minh.