Conservative columnist Tony Blankley foresees a dangerous future, in which the United States will be able to ensure its own survival only through a universal military draft and may routinely have to commit hundreds of thousands of troops to overseas excursions, including a potential invasion of Pakistan. Blankley, a former Reagan speechwriter and Newt Gingrich press secretary, is the author of The West's Last Chance: Will We Win the Clash of Civilizations? (2005) which raised the specter of a Europe dominated by radical Islam. His new book is called American Grit.
"If we don't do a lot of things smart and tough, we could get overwhelmed," Blankley told the hosts of Fox & Friends on Monday. "We've failed to exploit our energy. We're not paying enough attention to what our kids are learning -- Bill Ayers is actually a senior person in guiding the curriculum design of America."
One of Blankley's more eye-catching proposals in American Grit is that all eighteen year olds should be subject to two years of required military service.
"I don't like it, I love the volunteer army ... but we don't have enough troops," Blankley explained. "When George Bush wanted to have the surge, he was told by the senior generals we didn't have the extra 20,000 troops to finish the war. ... Now Obama wants to go to Afghanistan ... but he says we don't have the troops unless we pull them out of Iraq. What happens if Pakistan goes jihad-y? We don't have the troops to go in there and stop them from taking over the nuclear weapons."
"If we had had enough troops in Iraq, we wouldn't have lost 4,000 great young men and women," Blankley concluded. "We needed to flood the field ... with 300,000 troops occupying every village and every building and they would never have been able to rise up."
It seems possible, however, that Blankley is promoting a universal military draft not just as the necessary pre-requisite for adventures overseas but also as a means of making young Americans "grittier."
In a Washington Times editorial, written just before November's election, Blankley bemoaned the endorsement of Obama by "me-too conservatives" and suggested that "the conservative movement we start re-building on the ashes of November 4th (even if Mr. McCain wins) will have little use for over-written, over-delicate commentary."
"The new conservative movement will be facing a political opponent that will soon reveal itself to be both multiculturalists and Euro-socialist," Blankley wrote. "We will be engaged in a struggle to the political death for the soul of the country. ... I will certainly do what I can to make it a big-tent conservative movement. But just as in every great cause, one question has to be answered correctly: Whose side are you on, comrade?"