It all started with a question.

In the summer of 2012, Gen. Stanley McChrystal was wrapping up an onstage conversation at the Aspen Ideas Festival conference.

He was asked if the US should reinstate the draft.



Yes, he replied, but not to grow the size of the armed forces.

He argued that since only 1% of Americans serve their country, America lacks in shared experience — there's almost no common background between the upper class and the middle class, the educated and the uneducated, the rural and the urban.

The solution, then, wouldn't be mandatory military service, but national service — programs like Teach for America and City Year, but made accessible to a full quarter of a yearly cohort rather than an elite few.

Since that conversation, McChrystal has campaigned for making a "service year" a part of young Americans' trajectories. The goal is to "create 1 million civilian national service opportunities every year for Americans between the ages of 18 and 28 to get outside their comfort zones while serving side by side with people from different backgrounds."

In an interview with Business Insider, McChrystal, who has held positions as head of US Joint Special Operations Command and as the top commander of US and international forces in Afghanistan, explained his plan for making that happen, and the effects national service could have on American society.

Business Insider: What does the word "citizenship" mean to you, and how does national service inform it?

Gen. Stanley McChrystal: When I think of citizenship, I think of a nation as a covenant. It's an agreement between a bunch of people to form a compact that does such things as common defense, common welfare, whatnot. The United States is not a place; it's an idea, and it's basically a contract between us.

BI: So if a nation is an agreement, then citizenship is putting that agreement into action?

SM: That's exactly what it is.

BI: What does citizenship have to do with having a common experience?

SM: We've become a nation that's split 50 ways.

There are fewer ties to the community today than when you lived in a small town, and everybody had to get together to raise a barn. You knew your neighbors because you had to. Grandparents tended to live in the same town as parents, and kids grew up there. Nowadays, we don't live that way.

BI: But service programs today are unreachable for most people, so how can they serve as a common link? Teach for America, the Peace Corps, AmeriCorps — these programs have acceptance rates comparable to Ivy League schools. How do you make service more accessible?

SM: What has happened is that many of our service practices have become almost elitist programs. They do it because they can, and also it protects their brand and their reputation so they can survive in tough times. But it's not solving the problem because most of people who go do those kinds of things, I think they come out better citizens, but it's too small a number — it's less than 200,000 kids a year.

BI: There are a ton of social structures at work here. How do you make a change?

SM: We've got 4 million young people in every year cohort in America, so we think that in the next 10 years we've got to get to about a million kids every year to do a year of national service. That would be 25% of the year group.

Now, I can't prove this, but our sense is that if we get to 25%, you probably get the critical mass, because what we're trying to do is get this into the culture of America so that service is voluntary but it's expected. Meaning if you go to interview for a job, you go to apply to a school, you go to run for congress, people are going to naturally ask, Where did you serve?

Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons

BI: OK, so how do you make that happen?

SM: Creating a big government agency isn't the mechanism to do this.

We're trying to take existing organizations like Teach for America and expand those. Then Cisco, the corporation, has donated money and helped to develop a digital platform that is going to give us a 21st-century ability to match opportunities and people looking for a service year opportunity.

I think we create a marketplace to do this that obviously starts slowly and then builds up momentum. And then once we get to the point where people really believe that service is not only a good thing to do — in an altruistic sense as citizen — but it also advantages them.

BI: There seems to be a lot of anxiety around doing "a gap year." Are any programs already in place that take away that anxiety?

SM: There's a program that Tufts University rolled out that's called 1+4. And I was up there when they announced it. And what you do is, you apply for Tufts — I think there are 50 slots for the class that came in last September — but you do your first year doing national service, kind of like you're red-shirted for football, and then you do your four years.

You're already accepted, so the family doesn't worry, Is Johnny going to go to college? If you're on financial aid, Tufts pays for it. They pay for the national service. Tufts believe they get a more mature freshman. We're pushing this in a lot of universities now because it's a win-win for a university.

They do get a more mature person, and parents don't worry about the vagaries of the gap year. There could be a lot of different permutations of that kind of thing, but those are the kinds of things that we see as practical steps.

BI: How will you know when the plan has succeeded?

SM: The key part of the ecosystem is the culture that demands national service. At some point, my goal is to get it so that nobody would run for Congress who hadn't served, because they think they'd get pummeled for not having done a service year.

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