Where Will the Soldiers Come From?

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A major promoter of the idea is Max Boot, a senior fellow for national security studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. Boot began beating the drum for such a plan in a 2005 op-ed for the Los Angeles Times and, along with Michael O'Hanlon, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, renewed the call for recruiting overseas last October in the Washington Post. In that piece, the two thinkers home in on possible geographic targets of such a plan:

'Since proficiency in English would presumably be important for those joining the armed forces, we might focus on South Asia, anglophone Africa, and parts of Latin America, Europe, and East Asia (the Philippines would be a natural recruiting ground) where English is common as a second language.'

'These regions,' they go on, 'have more than 2 billion people, tens of millions of whom reach military age each year.'

There is historical precedent for recruiting foreign soldiers, which supporters of US recruiting abroad (including Boot) cite as proof that it works. The French Foreign Legion is a primary case in point, as are the Nepalese soldiers, called Gurkhas, used by Britain. A disturbing colonial history, however, gets glossed over in the elevation of such examples. The Foreign Legion was shipped off to Algeria -- a violent front in France's colonial effort and a place where many French soldiers didn't want to go themselves. The use of Gurkhas, meanwhile, was rooted in an archaic, imperial British belief in 'martial races' -- groups of people thought to be predisposed to warfare.

Continuing such imperial traditions seems unwise, particularly with anti-American sentiment on the rise worldwide. What's more, if the United States chooses to lure young foreigners into a war Americans won't fight themselves, it's arguable that the prize for these recruits -- citizenship -- will be worth less than they bargained for.

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