Via James Joyner, here's Slate's Phillip Carter on yesterday's base closings announcement:

There are several clear trends in the BRAC list: the elimination of many bases in the Northeast, the shutting of myriad civilian defense agencies' offices, and the elimination of reserve armories in towns across America. The Pentagon says the closings will save $48 billion over 20 years. But they will also have one dramatic negative effect. BRAC will separate America's military even further from America's citizenry by consolidating military bases and removing the presence of the military from hundreds of towns across the country. . . .

Today's civil-military divide is greater than at any time in American history, and these cuts will widen it. The burden of voluntary military service today is heavy, but it is being borne narrowly. And as Eliot Cohen points out in Friday's Wall Street Journal, the chasm between society and the military is widening in the area of higher education today, thanks to the scuttling of some professional military education programs and the absence of ROTC from many elite campuses. Such a gap is not healthy for a democracy which vests the ultimate decisions over whether to go to war in its political branches of government. [Emph added]

No, it isn't. In fact, over the long term, it's damned dangerous -- and one more very good reason to start taking Glastris and Carter's 21st-century draft proposal seriously.