Ralph E. Luker, Andrew
Bacevich on 9/11 Plus 7
http://hnn.us/blogs/entries/54352.html
At the end of our previous folly, in Vietnam, we abolished
the military draft. Shortly afterwards, in the mid- 1970's, four
young men did things which they could not have done in 1960,
because it would have resulted in their being drafted and sent to
peel potatoes in Germany, and which they could not
have done in 1970, because it would have led to their being
drafted and shipped out to Vietnam. These young men dropped out of
school and founded little companies in garages, with negligible
capital, for the purpose of "interpreting" the emergent
state of computer technology into viable consumer goods. These
companies, being focused on essentials, did not have most of
the usual trappings of a small business (no storefront, etc).
Their business methods often approximated those of a confidence
swindle. The line between an entrepreneur and a vagabond is often
very thin, and a certain proportion of entrepreneurs do
eventually go to jail for fraud. Reputable manufacturers and
engineers publicly described the products of these companies as
"shoddy," and this was true. The product was made only just good
enough to accomplish its intended purpose, and no better, in order
to keep the cost down to what a typical customer could
afford to pay. These young men did not have any of the kinds
of requisites to obtain deferments from a draft board. They
could do what they did because the draft board was off their
backs. I refer, of course to Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Paul
Allen, and Bill Gates, the founders of Apple and Microsoft.
Steve Jobs is an interesting character. He was the least
academically talented of the four, with the thinnest
technical skills, but he was the least introverted as well. His
talent was that of being a "fixer," ie. what the Army calls a
scrounger. This is, by its nature, a borderline criminal
occupation. Steve Jobs connected up Steve Wozniak's technical
talents to an underground market for "blue boxes" to defraud the
telephone company by making free long-distance telephone calls,
but he also connected Wozniak up to a legitimate market for the
first Apple computer. To further complicate matters, Jobs had an
illegitimate daughter, whom he abandoned (*). He eventually did
the right thing, but the operant word is eventually, and
this did not extend so far as marrying the girl's mother. A draft
board in substantial possession of the facts might very well
have said that the Army would make a man of young Steve Jobs.
However, men of uniform virtue do not make good fixers.
Bill Gates is a more virtuous man than Steve Jobs. Among other
things, he begat no bastards. However, he also followed a step
behind Steve Jobs, in an environment where greater honesty was
possible. Like Jobs, he was born in 1955, and was therefore just
young enough to be draft-immune. If Bill Gates had been
answerable to a draft board, it seems probable that, like his
contemporary Richard Stallman, he would have found his way from
Harvard to the MIT computer labs, and the orbit of Marvin Minsky.
Minsky was pursuing what turned out to be a technological
dead end, so-called "hard" Artificial Intelligence, but he was
doing it with the sanction of the Pentagon, and with DARPA
funding. Minsky was thus in a position to protect young men from
the draft. Of course, by Gates and Stallman's time, this
consideration no longer applied. Stallman was a
schoolteacher's son, and it was natural for him to find himself
some kind of academic niche. Gates, the son of a corporate lawyer,
tended to see the world in terms of business
opportunities, and in the absence of the coercion of the
draft, he was off and away to New Mexico to work for a
disreputable little company named MITS, and then to start his own
business.
The implications of Apple and Microsoft triggered an economic boom
which lasted twenty years, in which practically everything came to
be computerized. The draft, as planned by Gen. Lewis B. Hershey,
back in the late 1930's and 1940's, had a subtext that young men
shall do as they are told, and shall not follow up their own
ideas, not just in the Army, but in colleges and in industry as
well. Thus the draft enforced economic stagnation. The end of the
draft thus liberated all kinds of mental potentials.
One of the subtexts of the Volunteer Army system is that the
package of government welfare benefits should not be too good, for
fear that veteran's benefits should lose their ability to motivate
the reluctant enlistee, the kind who feels no calling to be a
soldier, but merely feels trapped by his economic circumstances.
A deficient system of social benefits has economic implications.
For example, Universal Health Insurance makes it easier for people
to change jobs, to move to places where they may be more
productive. The same applies to greater portability of pensions.
(*) Randall E. Stross, Steve Jobs & The Next Big Thing, 1993,
p. 282
See also: Bacevich's Appetite for Destruction
http://www.amconmag.com/article/2008/sep/08/00018/