What the Pentagon needs in volunteers to conduct war and what the Peace Corps needs in volunteers to preserve its mission and credibility with host countries are distinctly different. Peace Corps volunteers work in difficult conditions within some of the most politically unstable countries on the globe. Blurring the line between U.S. military defense operations and the peace initiatives of humanitarian volunteers in those countries exposes Peace Corps personnel to grave danger. It also can cast suspicion on Peace Corps intent in host countries.
The Daytona Beach News-Journal says: Keep military enlistees out of Peace Corps initiatives
No place for warriors
Keep military enlistees out of Peace Corps initiatives
Last update: August 06, 2005
Within a year of then-Sen. John F. Kennedy's 1960 appeal to students at the University of Michigan to consider living and working as volunteers in developing countries, the idea took form as a national program called the Peace Corps. Since then, 178,000 volunteers have served in138 countries. Presently, 7,733 American volunteers are working in 73 countries, delivering humanitarian service, teaching, helping small farmers and business owners improve production -- the work is varied and important, for the peace-promoting relationships it forges with America over long years as much as for the immediate benefits to those countries.
Now, in an ill-conceived move to bolster military recruiting, the U.S. government would jeopardize the mission, and potentially the lives of Peace Corps volunteers. What's more, Congress and the Bush administration concocted the recruitment plan hastily and obscurely in 2001 without consulting Peace Corps officials, who could have flagged the dangers inherent in the so-called national Call to Service Act.
The act, sponsored by well-intentioned Sens. Evan Bayh, D-Ind., and John McCain, R-Ariz., allows military recruits shorter active-duty service for an eight-year commitment that includes the option of longer reserve status or service in the Peace Corps. Formerly, only the Army and Navy had short active-duty enlistment programs. Worrying that all branches of the military would have difficulty -- as they are now -- meeting recruitment needs as U.S. commitments of armed forces expand globally, the sponsors designed the program hoping to attract not only more recruits but also better educated ones.
It seemed to be working before the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Only about 6 percent of enlistees in traditional enlistment programs have any college education. But 27 percent of the initial 600 recruits to the National Call to Service program had attended college. None of those recruits have completed their military obligation to be eligible to start Peace Corps work. If they opt for that service, there's no guarantee they will be accepted. The Peace Corps receives 12,000 applications a year for about 4,000 positions, and nothing in the law requires the Peace Corps to accept the military personnel. Prudence would advise rejecting all of them.
But more to the point, the service act should be changed to eliminate the military-volunteer link altogether. What the Pentagon needs in volunteers to conduct war and what the Peace Corps needs in volunteers to preserve its mission and credibility with host countries are distinctly different. Peace Corps volunteers work in difficult conditions within some of the most politically unstable countries on the globe. Blurring the line between U.S. military defense operations and the peace initiatives of humanitarian volunteers in those countries exposes Peace Corps personnel to grave danger. It also can cast suspicion on Peace Corps intent in host countries.
Had the Bush administration not butchered Americorps, the national domestic volunteer program, military recruiters would at least have had a less objectionable option for the shorter active-duty enlistees to complete their service obligation. But linking military recruitment to either of the other national volunteer service programs is an uncomfortable marriage of military and civil activity.
McCain and Bayh should take the lead to amend the Call to Service Act.
