[Raellus]

Originally Posted by bash

One option with respect to a draft I looked at many moons ago for a game I planned but never ran was the DoD moving REMFs to infantry rolls and back filling support positions with civilian contractors or some not-necessarily-military draft. Basically find a civilian already trained to do job X and have them do that job for the military. They'd need training on DoD procedures and practices as an accelerated AIT but not have to go through BCT. Such civilians could also be trained at a random hotel convention space rather than military bases.

That is an intriguing concept. I wonder if any such system has been put into practice by a wartime army in the modern era.

Originally Posted by bash

A "soft draft" would have political cover of saying these support roles would never see any fighting so were "safe". Any deployed positions would also qualify for hazard pay so people so drafted might not feel they had a bad deal until nukes started falling. Same with contractors. They might be making good money so contracting was better than enlisting or getting proper drafted.

Great point. There's definitely historical precedent for something like that in the 20th century. For a number of reasons, during the 1930s, the USA was in the grips of isolationist sentiment. Most Americans were shocked and appalled by Japanese aggression in China and Nazi German aggression in central Europe, but didn't want the USA to get involved because we had our own problems to deal with (namely, the Great Depression). FDR, on the other hand, was an internationalist who believed that the USA had a duty to stand up for democracy overseas. He needed a fait accompli to put the USA on a war footing without angering the American public. In 1940, FDR convinced Congress to activate a peacetime draft by promising that draftees would not be deployed overseas. Enough folks in Congress either played dumb or were legitimately fooled into voting for it that it passed. The public largely accepted the peacetime draft because it created paying jobs at a time when the unemployment rate was still really high.

The USA in the mid-1990s was still slightly hung over from the last draft (Vietnam) but I could see Congress passing a conditional draft similar to that instituted by the Selective Training and Service Act of 1940 after the Soviets invade China.

Originally Posted by bash

I figured giving a cook or driver a rifle and sending them to the front was a quicker fill out of a combat position than training a recruit or draftee.

Indeed, but skilled civilians would still need to learn the "army way" to do things, and that would take some time (but, to your point, probably less than the six weeks or whatever the duration of abbreviated basic training would be).

Originally Posted by Adm.Lee

Whereas, I've assumed that combat troops too wounded to continue in the line would be rotated to those same kind of rear positions.

That would absolutely be the case once the USA was at war and started to accumulate WIA personnel. Later in the war, once the logistical chain between the US and various foreign theaters of operations were strained/severed, most military support jobs like cooking, maintaining some equipment, etc., would be handed over to local civilian "contractors" so that US soldiers who'd normally do those sorts of things could be shifted to frontline combat duty.

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