Jules, while your proposal for the structure of a draft may look good to many on these pages, it is foolish to assume that elected officials and government functionaries will not distort it in practice to meet their own selfish ends. This is why conservative thinkers such as Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek supported individual freedom and opposed the draft.
If you feel that American children, and America, would benefit from getting American children out of the house to perform honest, sweat-of-the-brow work on behalf of their nation (and I agree), then why not promote social changes to strengthen the filial bonds of the family and encourage parents to instill in their children this sense of civic duty?
To give a personal example, I am a third-generation Eagle scout. Despite some poor publicity in recent years, the Boy Scouts continue, I am told, to teach young boys the rights and responsibilities of being a citizen in one’s community, one’s nation, and the world. The support, encouragement, advice, and good example provided by my father helped me to learn, I hope, how to be a good citizen, in partnership with the resources offered by the Boy Scouts. (The citizenship counselor was a former Special Assistant to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs.)
A draft, military or otherwise, is forced servitude, known otherwise as slavery. To justify such a travesty on the basis that it may teach the slaves moral virtue is an exact replica of a common argument used some centuries ago to justify black slavery. This is no justification.
