The Post has an unexceptional piece today making the familiar point that the draft would be bad for military readiness, which makes perfect sense to me. But I still think there would be enormous social benefits to universal (male) military service. I’ve long thought the way to reconcile this would be to have one-year mandatory service in the National Guard (or the reserves or the militia, which some states still have) — this would be separate from the active-duty military and could in fact serve as a recruiting vehicle for regular service. Essentially, this would amount to one year (say, July to July after graduation from high school) of basic training and emergency assistance (floods and the like), after which you either try to get in to the regular military or go on with your life. Has anyone written about this, supporting or debunking it in any substantial way?