Posted on 02/08/2012 5:46:40 PM PST by 2ndDivisionVet
As U.S. forces come home from Iraq after nine years at war, the nation is facing professional troops sufficiently bruised and isolated from American society that some defense experts whisper we may need major changes in military education and even a conscription-based national youth service program to reboot our fighting forces.
Painful reminders are everywhere of an unpopular U.S. military venture that began with grave strategic miscalculations and is ending with violence and political instability in Iraq. In Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai is openly contemptuous of his U.S. protectors, while Afghan security forces murder allied officers.
These U.S. military campaigns have cost $1.3 trillion, helped cripple the economy, extinguished 6,400 American lives, more than 150,000 Iraqi and Afghan lives and left disturbing rates of suicide and post-traumatic stress disorder among returning U.S. veterans.
The wartime shortcomings of the all-volunteer military are a legacy, in part, of the draft's end 40 years ago. There's been a growing disconnect between the American public and the U.S. armed forces.
Outgoing joint chiefs chairman Adm. Mike Mullen declared last year that "America no longer knows its military, and the U.S. military no longer knows America."
As late as the 1980s, some 40 percent of 18-year-olds had at least one veteran parent. A recent Pew poll confirmed that only 33 percent of Americans between 18 and 25 now have a family connection with the military. Most Americans simply no longer have the same personal stake they once did in the military's actions.
The challenge facing the American military today is as much moral and ethical as budgetary and economic.
The state of constant war has exposed serious limitations in our high-tech, all-volunteer force. This force, the envy of militaries around the world, was created in the wake of Vietnam.
Milton Friedman, a Nobel Prize-winning University of Chicago economics professor, saw the military as a labor force that would respond to economic imperatives like any other: the appeal of a job, a steady salary and a secure career. Friedman's economic theory ended the unpopular draft.
Forty years later, the American people's instinctive interest in their troops' welfare has inevitably atrophied.
Tentative questions about the sustainability of the volunteer military, and the growing civilian-military cultural divide, began to surface in earnest last year.
The consensus among enlisted soldiers and officers I've spoken with recently is that the 235,000-member U.S. officer corps, the volunteer forces' engine, is in a state of professional and ethical exhaustion.
Several studies have documented the flight of junior officers from the Army and Marines since Iraq spun out of control in 2005 and 2006. Repeated deployments have left even the best officers stretched thin, overworked and often under-resourced.
Despite their tactical and technological sophistication, mid-level officers are divided over shifting strategic aims and military doctrine, wavering civilian leadership, bureaucratic rigidity and indecisive in-theater operations.
The way forward is a systematic retooling of how our professional military educates and chooses its leaders and recruits its soldiers. Contemporary U.S. officers require technical expertise in the military sciences, the traditional core of a military education. But they need an equally sophisticated grasp of international relations, political history, legal systems, languages and foreign cultures.
The military's emphasis should be on rigorous graduate studies for commissioned officers and ongoing education for noncommissioned officers and senior leaders that meet the standards of the best civilian universities. Officer selection should broadly reflect American society, rather than discourage recruitment from among the nation's economic and social elites.
To reduce the military's isolation from civilian life, the Pentagon should begin by deeply cutting manpower and supporting renewed conscription in the form of a three-year mandatory national service program (including civilian energy, education, infrastructure, environmental and urban service options) for all Americans between 18 and 25, with special benefits for military service.
A well-designed national service program is not a comprehensive prescription for what ails the U.S. military. It is not a return to the draft. But it would restore a needed sense of civic responsibility among young Americans. It would supply manpower demands during wartime and replace most private contractors with responsible enlisted troops.
Most important, it would reconnect our standing military forces with the restraining influence and support of the American people.
Of course, we will never go back to the draft as it was in the last century, and if reconstituted, it would surely deteriorate into what has been written about on this thread. I was just writing about what I would like to see, but I’m realistic to know that it will never return.
I am sure that it would deteriorate into what you and others write of on this thread. Did you or someone else write about the military as involuntary servitude? Is that the way you view serving your country as a soldier or sailor? Boy, how sad.
Did you serve? My bet is “no.”
If only our Commander-in-Chief had these attributes.
Who wrote this drivel? Haven't they heard of ROTC?
And that's not to imply that our military academies don't produce well-rounded graduates.
I graduated from a Jesuit university with a BBA, a major in Public Accounting, and an unofficial minor in ROTC (we all spent a minimum of 10 hours a week on ROTC activities). There was a core curriculum encompassing 12 hours of philosophy, 9 hours of theology, and 6-9 hours of history.
No. I said those words but you obviously misunderstood what I meant.
Wait...didn’t 0bama just downsize the forces?
Actually the liberals have been looking for a way to instate the draft for over a decade now...
I served in a support position in a military intelligence outfit in Korea and most of our analysts were college graduates. However, almost none of them were interested in becoming officers. You see, they were draftees and didn't want to add to their service time obligations. But here's what I think is important: the military benefited enormously from having this amount of brain power available from DRAFTEES.
Please don’t be polite. It sounds like you might be a Dick Danzig, Bill Clinton & Laurence Korb school of military readiness. I’m more of the Jeremiah Denton or Charles Krulak variety. Since you asked, you can read more about it here:
http://www.newtotalitarians.com/index_files/Danzigization.htm
and that should provide a good basis for you to do a little more research. Ten years is kind of limited, so I accept your lack of knowledge.
But I bow to your extended knowledge of fleet readiness despite the fact that my last active duty billet was training and testing most of the ships on the West coast. You have a website on your side. Guess I can't believe my lying eyes.
Navy civilian? You mean, alot like Dick Danzig? Probably with the same amount of combat time as Dalton, Danzig or Korg as well, I’m sure.
I can tell you that I have seen political correctness destroy a ship's morale, but it was in the 70's, not now, and I was there to clean up the mess. And you don't have a clue what I'm talking about, do you, "expert"?
You’ve done readiness? How is the rate of out of wedlock birth’s among your sailors? How much does that cost the taxpayer? How is that affirmative action doing at the Naval Academy? Are you folks getting the right percentages of each group in, regardless of their qualifications? How about race and sex quota’s for promotion and command? Is the Navy living up to Dick Danzig’s expectations? Did you get invited to Lieutenant Ross’s “marriage”?
Of course, it is.
But there is a very real problem: About half of the civilian community IS out of touch with the military. The leftward half...
Oh, my, the little “expert” is throwing up a smokescreen now to cover his retreat. Answer my question - do you have any idea how readiness is even measured? I’ll give you a little clue - we don’t give a rip about the crap you just posted. The ship sails, it operates, it fights, or it doesn’t. The rest is for amateurs. Like you.
Now answer my question regarding time in combat? Have you ever served under fire? Where? I assume you're a Dick Danzig/John Dalton "warrior" so I am just trying to get a feel for you knowledge of combat...because I know how much the surface navy has suffered against the Afghan and Iraqi navies.
Maybe more than that - certainly the authors of this editorial are out of touch. It's well-meant, and I do give serious consideration to the arguments in favor of a draft in that regard. But I think on the whole there is more bad than good to come out of it.
Why would that be Bill? Have you fought with draftees? James Webb said they made fairly good soldiers. What was your experience in combat?
My Daddy was a WWII combat veteran. He didn’t think much of the idea of women in combat.
Also, an acquaintance was a CO in the military. He stated that they would get a “bugout” order; but the women were not physically able to lift the heavy stuff, so they simply didn’t “bugout” when ordered.
The women’s “movement” is just that, a big pile of steaming BM - and all so little Gloria could prance around, diss men, and show off all her abilities, but, then she found herself a man after all, didn’t she? Guess fish do need bicycles after all.
No, I'm talking about the Norton Sound. Now go google that one up and see what your little "experts" have posted on the web about it because that's all you're really all about. I can tell you that not one-tenth of what really happened has been published. I helped uncover the other nine-tenths. I wasn't the TRAREP then, thank God - you don't even know what that is, do you, "expert"? But the guy was looking shell-shocked when I interviewed him.
As for the rest, we're done here. You can continue to defame men and women better than yourself and I'm going to let you wallow in it.
Well the gals may not be able to do basic damage control (as the New York Fire Department proves regularly in their real world tests) but the REMF’s like billthedrill and Larry Korb will assure us all that reduced standards are OK. Draw your own conclusions.
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