Update: I’m not the only one who thinks this.
Resistance is futile?
Coming from the demographic that has historically been the most vein-in-the-forehead, screechingly, spittle-fleckingly opposed to a draft for the military, one has to wonder why the new standard bearer for the Progressive Utopian VisionTM is now marketing the idea of compulsory service as a core patriotic duty?

Hitler Jugend
And just why do you suppose that it’s targeted at our high school and college age youth? Via Wikipedia:
The HJ was organized into corps under adult leaders, and the general membership comprised boys aged fourteen to eighteen. From 1936, membership of the HJ was compulsory for all young German men.
The HJ was organized into local cells on a community level.
For example, many HJ activities closely resembled military training, with weapons training, assault course circuits and basic strategy.
Me, I’m wondering why we need a civil defense service. We have the Civil Air Patrol, the Boy Scouts, the Explorer program. Against what are we defending? As well funded as the military? Isn’t that called the National Guard? The Police? EMS?
There is only one reason you need an organized civilian “militia” made up primarily of young, energetic, and quite impressionable youth.
The HJ maintained training academies comparable to preparatory schools. They were designed to nurture future Nazi Party leaders, and only the most radical and devoted HJ members could expect to attend.
Another branch of the HJ was the Deutsche Arbeiter Jugend – HJ (German Worker Youth – HY). This organization within the Hitler Youth was a training ground for future labor leaders and technicians.
One can only imagine the screeching, flailing flame wars that would ensue where a Republican President to suggest this. Do you thing that the Nazi analogies wouldn’t be flying thick then?!
Remember towards the end of “The Sound of Music?” All the eager young men in their bright new uniforms, “watching” for “criminal” elements, as in, those who won’t get on board with the program? It won’t be a neighborhood watch…it will be your neighbors watching YOU.
You can invoke Godwin’s law all you want, but there’s a reason the Brown Shirt analogy keeps popping up. Or perhaps, the Young Pioneers in Soviet Russia.
Because it looks and sounds exactly the same. Does anyone really believe that this will just be a domestic peace corps, going around cleaning up graffiti and picking up trash?
Then why is it called a “defense” force? It just fits all too neatly into this grand new socialist paradigm B.O. is preaching. Expect that this will not go away. It is an essential element of ground-roots social re-engineering. Otherwise known as Change©.
It’s in the freakin’ manual. Get the youth first. 1960’s ringing any bells?
Once in power, communist leaders made the transformation of the younger generation central to the attempt to create new communist societies. Because young people lacked prior political experience and were considered more malleable than adults, communist leaders believed they could be transformed into ardent supporters of communism and builders of new socialist societies.
Watch as this idea, this program, is steadily retooled, renamed, reinvent and remarketed over time,all to make it sound more palatable and to respond to its detractors. The words and labels will shift and change to counter opposing rhetoric by making the critics look increasingly petty and confrontational. The consensus process will be brought to bear to marginalize dissent and encourage conformity through the use of emotion-laden catch phrases and rhetorical questions like, “Surely you care about X” or “You wouldn’t want Y to happen, would you?” Just like it has with global warming, gay rights, radical environmentalism, and every other Progressive pet program.
It is not paranoia, political partisanship, racism, or ODS to look at the examples history gives us of “boiling the frog slowly,” to draw parallels to today’s burgeoning political trends, and then be watching and prepared for the next steps. It is simply discernment and prudence.
And yeah, what she said. Cuba’s “Committee for the Defense of the Revolution”
The concept behind the CDRs was to create a citizen force that would reinforce the dictates of Cuba’s government, establishing a kind of omnipresent peer pressure network among next-door neighbors. Leaders of CDRs could put Castro’s every public thought directly and rapidly into the hands of every Cuban, so the government would not have to rely solely on mass media.
So, essentially, yeah. That’s EXACTLY what I’m saying B.O.’s new militia will become.