There are some rumblings that I expect to get louder now that our elite is realizing that they have totally alienated the traditional Americans who traditionally make up our Armed Forces, and that they are thinking about the necessity of a draft. The Army War College, of which I am an alum, recently published an article that talks about the casualties you can expect in high intensity warfare – several thousand a week.

So, in a few weeks, you’ve got more dead than you had in Afghanistan and Iraq combined over 20 years. Our military, which has shrunk dramatically over the last three decades, simply cannot accept that rate of casualties, especially when it can’t fill its ranks with volunteers anymore. So, the answer is apparently to not rely on volunteers.

Don’t count out establishment pressure for a new draft. After all, it’s not a meat grinder without meat. The bodies have to come from somewhere. There’s no calling guys back to active duty. At the height of the global war on terror about 20 years ago, we had a lot of dudes signing up because they were excited and patriotic and wanted to avenge 9/11.

Well, they learned, the hard way that this establishment is not only grossly incompetent but cares nothing for them. When you treat troops like garbage, they know it. And it’s not like you can call them back. Their service obligations are up. Most of them are pushing 40 at the low end. Do you know what you call a 40 year-old infantryman? Sergeant major or colonel. And we’ve got plenty of those. In fact, we have too many.

The ridiculous Mark Milley, basically Alexander von Sausage Vindman with more stars, waddled his way up to a podium to retire the other day. He’s a freaking disgrace to the uniform. This is the guy who wanted to know what “white rage” was in front of one audience, but in front of another denied that he knew what woke is. I wonder if they really think their soldiers are stupid enough not to know when they’re being lied to. Well, our troops are not that dumb. And they certainly know when their lives are being squandered, as 13 of them were in Kabul.

It’s not a question of patriotism. Our guys are loyal to our country. But our senior leaders, from our Commander-In-Crusty to the newest woke major at Fort Saul Alinsky, are loyal to social justice ideology.

They pretend the organization that used to be the most respected institution in American society is still the institution that America once respected. But it isn’t. And they will not guilt us into unseeing that reality. Who wants to serve in the Great Pronoun War of 2023? Who wants to be forced into taking vaccines that don’t vaccinate? Who wants their commander to have breasts and a penis?

Not anyone normal. They will try to play the service card. That might work better if that service would be protecting our borders instead of Ukraine’s. When one of these hacks asks you to go serve your country, your proper response should be to ask what is the name of the general fired for what happened in Afghanistan. The fact that they can’t answer that question is all the answer you need.

But they need troops – it’s no fun being a general without any. Who would a draft be targeted at? Traditional, conservative Americans, from mostly the rural South and Midwest, the traditional recruiting grounds for a substantial percentage of our troops.

And those are, not coincidentally, the very people that the folks in charge hate the most. Our soldiers understand that and our soldiers are leaving in droves while young people are foregoing the military. Much of that is because vets are telling them not to join.

Let’s be really clear about what’s going on in the veteran community, because what you hear in the media is a lie. There is almost no one out there who is a veteran who is excited about having his or her kids serve.

It is not that we are not supportive of the troops – if they serve, we back them 100%. But we’re not recommending that they do. The fact is that the leadership of this country is unworthy of our troops, and our potential troops are refusing to volunteer. It’s only going to get worse as the military gets woker and the establishment gets more warmongery.

So, of course, the establishment’s answer to young people’s failure to volunteer is to volunteer them. But we all know who’s going to get volunteered. It’s not going to be Kayden and Ashley from Santa Monica.

It’s going to be your kids. Right now, 70% of kids cannot join the military because of various physical mental and other qualifications. When there is a draft, they may try and be clever and not have the kind of student deferments that made sure that college kids like Joe Biden never saw action, except in mortal combat with Corn Pop.

The way the rich kids will get out of it is to have some psychiatrist talk about their PTSD from being exposed to non-gluten-free noodles or the like. The rich kids are going to get out of it again, or they’re going to get some baloney “alternative” service reading stories to gang members. Your kids won’t get that option. Your kids will get sent to some foreign hellhole for some purpose that our glorious establishment doesn’t feel it needs to explain to you, and they’ll get killed.

But I’m not sure we’re going to see passive compliance here. In Vietnam, few people know that most of the folks who fought were actually volunteers. Yeah, a lot of the rich college kids weaseled out of their duty, but a lot of others signed up voluntarily.

They did it because their dads did it and their dad’s dad did it. But right now, all the dads are saying “Hell no, you won’t go,” not because they hate the red, white, and blue, but because they hate the desiccated old pervert in the White House masquerading as our commander-in-chief, and his coterie of morons that has failed every national security challenge in the last 30 years.

If you start trying to make normal Americans send their kids off to yet another stupid war, that may be the line in the sand where things get ugly. After all, you saw what the moms did over drag queen story hour. What happens when the moms see their sons being sent off to get killed so Lindsey Graham can be the toast of Kyiv? It’s not going to be pretty.

And do not think boots on the ground in Ukraine can’t happen. That big offensive we’ve been hearing about has gone almost nowhere. It has stalled. And the Russians are going to build up their forces, like they have through history, and they’re going to counterattack, and there is a significant chance the Ukrainian army – despite gallant resistance – is going to collapse.

This doesn’t make me happy, because I like Ukrainians – I helped train them. But the facts are the facts. At some point, to save Ukraine, or some piece of it, somebody’s going to get the bright idea to send American bodies in and we’re going to realize what high intensity combat against a peer competitor looks like.

And it looks a lot different than chasing a bunch of goat herders around the Hindu Kush. We’re going to see young Americans get killed in numbers that we can’t even conceive of today. And heaven forefend that it goes off with China, because you can double that figure. If you tell America we can’t lose 5,000 souls on an aircraft carrier pulverized by hypersonic missiles, then you are either lying to us or lying to yourself.

To fight a modern war, they are going to need bodies in numbers not needed for generations. They’re not going to fill the ranks with volunteers. They will have to draft them. That kind of move could re-define American politics because you’re going to get a lot of people elected on an isolationist platform at the next election, assuming there is one.

I am not an isolationist. I’m a Jacksonian. I believe in fighting when you have to, and then you kill the SOBs. But our foreign policy establishment doesn’t believe that. It considers itself smarter than the teachings of 5000 years of military history. And it doesn’t care about our young people.

That seems pretty harsh, but let them try to tell us it’s not true. Let them make the case that our foreign policy establishment believes it has some obligation not to squander the lives of our young people on poorly conceived, planned, and executed overseas military misadventures. They can’t. Their whole response would be “You love Putin,” or something along those lines. But the truth is undeniable. To them, our sons and daughters are nothing more than cannon fodder.

Hell no, our young people will not go.

Follow Kurt on Twitter @KurtSchlichter. Get his non-fiction book We’ll Be Back: The Fall and Rise of America, as well as the newest volume in the Kelly Turnbull People’s Republic series of conservative action novels set in America after a notional national divorce, Overlord.