From the Post-Dispatch this morning, long-time Military Affairs reporter Harry Levins has a revelation [or, more likely, finally found a suitable way to get his previous revelation into print]:

Longtime military man wants citizen Army back
By Harry Levins
POST-DISPATCH SENIOR WRITER
11/04/2006

In my 16 years as a military writer, I’ve said (and written) the same words again and again: “The draft won’t come back. That’s because nobody in uniform wants the draft back. I’ve been around a lot of military professionals, and I’ve yet to run across a single one who favors the return of the draft.”
But now, thanks to Proceedings magazine, I’ve run across Navy Capt. John Byron — and I stand corrected.
OK, Byron is retired. But he spent 37 years on active duty, which gives him the credentials to have an opinion. Byron writes regularly for Proceedings, the monthly magazine of the U.S. Naval Institute. The Naval Institute is a private group, with no official tie to the Navy. But its offices are at Annapolis, and its magazine is all but required reading for Navy officers.
When Proceedings speaks, the Navy listens — and lately, Proceedings has taken a sometimes contrarian edge. Take last month’s issue, which ran Byron’s pro-draft essay under the headline, “The Failure of the All-Volunteer Force.”Most officers to whom I talk give the all-volunteer force a high grade. Their reasoning: Because today’s Army consists of people who want to be soldiers, it’s a more professional, better-disciplined Army. And in truth, that’s the conclusion I draw when I compare today’s Army with my own draftee Army. From a strictly military point of view, today’s Army is vastly better.But any change comes with trade-offs, and today’s Army has made a huge trade-off. As I’ve said before: Today’s Army is a lot less representative of the society it defends. In many ways, today’s Army amounts to a bigger Marine Corps — long-term professionals living in isolation in their ultimate gated communities.Byron puts the thought this way: “Thirty years of the All-Volunteer Force have given the President a mercenary military unrepresentative of the nation it serves. These kids in uniform aren’t our kids, so those close to us can dodge the risks of military service as we blithely accept the war’s cost in young lives shattered. What happened to the citizen-soldier, to John Kennedy’s ‘pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship’? The (all-volunteer force) killed all this.”
Then Byron carries that thought one step further, to a place my own thinking hadn’t gone until now.Consider, he says, “the ease with which it allows the President to make war. Give the chief executive his own army, and by golly, he’ll use it. Well, we did, and he has, starting a war of choice in the Middle East and bogging us down for a dangerous future we could have avoided if he’d had to ask the American people to raise an army, the Constitution’s splendid phrase.”Byron’s essay will surely upset supporters of the war in Iraq. But when that sort of thinking appears in a forum such as Proceedings, maybe it’s time for some second thoughts.

[italics are in the original]
———————–

Levins is just now figuring out that the Constitution maybe favors democracy over huge, professional standing armies dispatched by executive fiat? Welcome aboard, Harry. What Levins referred to as the “huge trade-off” wasn’t supposed to be military’s decision to make. The decision against professional armies was made in 1789, and it requires the democratic process of amending our Constitution to change that decision.

Article I, section 8: “The Congress shall have the power… to declare war,” … “To raise and support Armies, but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years.”

Article II, section 2: “The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the United States.” [i.e. by Congress]

[Though the third amendment (ratified 12/15/1791) seems to contemplate standing armies:"No Soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the Owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law."]