Posted on 12/15/2014 10:06:12 PM PST by 2ndDivisionVet
Exactly. In my book America’s Victories I found that it was the volunteer force that has been the strength of the military over time. Draftee armies are less motivated and less focused. Sometimes you need the bodies (Civil War and WW II) but most of the time there are plenty of excellent volunteers.
Bookmark for later read.
Good article.
The guy has basically taken notes from Eikenberry, and reps Eikenberry's POV, which is a good one given his duration and direct involvement in service "over there".
Keeping in mind that the chief praters and critics of U. S. Policy that he names were dubious Patriots and some, Soviet assets, there are still responsible critics of the current U. S. force structure and its demands on e. g. National Guard mobilization. (At least he knew better than to throw Slick and Teddy Kennedy into the mix. Now there were a couple of deep minds.)
He touches on a string of problems.
(It' s hard to tell whether the author regrets the division of society, or just the failure to decompose and demoralize social attitudes in the Military.)
That's not the whole list of issues, but most of the article offers support to this outline by enumerating things that actually happened w/r/t Afghanistan and Iraq that support the above agenda of problems.
I agree it’s a punishingly long read for the casual visitor, and if I’d scrolled down the whole article first, I probably would not have read it. Still, even though it took me half the night, I’m at least modestly glad I persisted.
Why post such an offbase comment if you don’t bother reading?
Or, does conscription during peace time functionally work as a check and balance on military adventurism by our career class politicians?
In other words, if you are a politician forcing people to serve, and anyone can be chosen for service, you'd better be using the conscripted wisely and for a supported cause or you'll have hell to pay.
Or does conscription during times of peace produce a low morale, lower quality military and hinder our need to competently and effectively project power and influence when necessary?
During Vietnam, we had a whole army full of draftees (never understood why the volunteers went to Germany and the draftees went to war). I remember them well in that they served with courage for the most part and I admired them since I was a volunteer, so I had no cause to gripe but they came and fought even though they didn't volunteer.
The big issue with discipline and criminal behavior in the army and the Marine Corps wasn't because of the draft - it was because of MacNamara's "Project 100,000" where they inducted/accepted enlistment for a huge glut of Category-Five mental midgets from the worst part of our society. MacNamara and his whiz kids apparently thought that just anybody can serve in our armed forces, so why not pump up the numbers with criminals and thugs? It took us years and who knows how many courts martials, expeditious discharges, and less-than-honorable discharges to finally purge the services of those scum.
Those of you who think you don't have a duty to serve your country in at least some capacity are essentially parasites: all free loading and benefits, no sacrifice. Do I want draft avoiders in my military unit? heck no! They without doubt know their own capabilities and courage levels and I am quite willing to accept their own assessments of themselves. Better for them to serve as donut dollies or maybe postal clerks and stay clear of the fighting men.
I am of the opinion though that if a man doesn't have the sand and competence to serve in uniform and maybe serve in combat, then he shouldn't try running for office or doing anything public. Best not to let the whole world know what they let somebody else take all the risks and difficulty in their place.
The Supreme Court ruled long ago that the draft does not violate the 13th amendment.
But I don’t agree with that decision, I cannot see how any plain reading of the text does not prohibit it, and forced jury service for that matter. Clearly the amendment was not intended to apply to either but I’m more a textualist than an originalist.
Anyway, the only people pining for the draft (and/or “national service”) these days are the far left. It would be a GIGANTIC wedge issue, huge electoral loser so it will never happen. But I’d love for Obama to push “mandatory national service” like that d-bag Larry Sabato wants, that would have “millennials” lining up to vote Republican, if there’s a war on their parents would line up too.
The military exists to win the nation’s wars. It doesn’t exist to educate people or to help the poor.
Our Generals exist to guide the military to win the nation’s wars. They are paid a lot and receive tremendous benefits to do their job. Too many generals are company-men when they are in uniform, and then write books pouring out their sad stories after they retire.
“The maximum effective range of an excuse is zero meters!”
That’s what I was taught.
These sad stories by retired admirals and generals do nothing but tick me off. If they couldn’t figure out how to win, then they should have quit. Those admirals and generals may not have had the brains to figure out how to win, but they sure enough had the egos to keep drawing their pay. I don’t give a s**t about drafts or politicians or social programs.
FDR was trying to cut the Officer Corps back in the 1930s. MacArthur was the senior military man. MacArthur had been fighting to preserve the number of Officers because he saw them as the foundation for a rapidly expanding American military if one was needed. FDR said he was going to reduce the number of Officers. MacArthur’s response was something like,
“In the next war, when the enemy is pulling his bayonet out of the throat of an American Soldier, the last words of that dying American Soldier will be ‘F**k FDR’ and not ‘F**k MacArthur’!” MacArthur then stormed out of the meeting.
I’m a textualist as well, but “involuntary servitude” is a term of art, and it never has been understood to cover military service or jury duty.
Similarly, when the Double Jeopardy Clause prohibits the government from placing a person “for the same offense twice in jeopardy of life or limb,” it does not permit the government to try you twice for the same crime even when the possible penalty does not include the death penalty or having an arm of leg cut off (”jeopardy of life or limb” is a term of art meaning “facing serious punishment”).
My last two years in Germany, we went from a C-3 to a C-1 battalion, partly due to discharging over 50 substandard soldiers. It wasn't easy, but it was necessary.
“Or, does conscription during peace time functionally work as a check and balance on military adventurism by our career class politicians?”
I think that’s what he is saying. Voter turnout for national elections is only 50-60%, less for local and state. Also he says the modern complete free reign of deficit spending and the public’s general indifference to it wasn’t envisioned back when the recommendation to do away with the draft was made.
Freegards
Part of this is political. i.e., a republican president would not get the pass that obama has on how he's prosecuted Afghanistan and Iraq. Where is the Nightline broacast giving a roll-call of the dead? Won't happen for a democrat president, even though the casualty numbers during the obama administration are much higher than they were under Bush.
Part of it is because the American public in general is completely disconnected from the realities of what is occurring beyond our border.
The WWII Army was 93% draftees, so obviously they do fine.
My personal experience with draftees is that there is little difference from volunteers.
Teenagers and 20 year olds, are not exactly so fixed in their world view and philosophy and grown up determinations, that Army and Marine drill sergeants can't convert them into fighting men and make them grow up and unlock who they really are, nor can they keep some of their teen volunteers from finding out that they don't like the military after all, and that they joined without thinking it through.
I am, broadly speaking, against national conscription, but with the caveat that many of the objections in the article are absolutely true. The U.S. never had a peacetime draft until 1948, and it was a major decision on Truman's part to get that past the objections of both liberal and conservative who felt it was taking the country into the status of an imperial power, manning the bastions of a worldwide military commitment that they were loathe to support.
Thing is, we really don't need the manpower. The volunteer military supported by the Reserves met the needs of a major deployment in Iraq. The advantages of volunteers in the modern, high-technology battlefield over conscripts with far less training time are obvious (that is, after all, who we were facing in the Iraqi military and the results speak for themselves). It simply isn't a very difficult case to make that the all-volunteer force is more efficient.
That isn't the reason the author is advancing as to the advantages of conscription. Those advantages involve what is essentially holding a portion of the civilian population hostage to national policy, the idea being that the general electorate will follow and resist overuse of military assets as tools of national policy if a greater portion of its sons and daughters are directly involved. That theory may be quite sound but it seems to me to be a little hard on those sons and daughters, who do, after all, have lives of their own and concomitant rights to pursue them without the hand of government throwing a uniform on them for the greater good of society. A very great deal of evil is done for the Greater Good of Society.
I remember my draft physical and the impression it made on my budding sense of the rights and obligations of citizenship. Frankly, I found it frightening and a little outrageous, and this is coming from a fellow who ended up volunteering a few weeks later.
The other side of the coin is that a citizen does have obligations and that it is not necessarily a bad thing to demand them of young citizens - they do not just represent the skin their parents have in the game, but their own. So I can see the point of view that this is more than simple involuntary servitude, although it is involuntary servitude by the very definition of the words.
So understand that we would not be doing this for the good of the military - the article makes that clear. We would be doing it for the good of the young citizens involved under the rubric of "it's for your own good," which strikes me as a rather presumptuous reason even if true. And we would be doing it to resist imperial tendencies in state policy, as the article also makes clear. I would hope there were better ways to do that than hijacking young lives, but perhaps there are not.
People involved in this debate miss the obvious: the world and our position in it has changed. We aren’t an isolated piece of the Earth with our own little moat anymore. We have cutthroats all around us and almost a billion lunatics about to get their own individual nukes to erase us.
Somewhere along this logical path, we have get our future security together and it’s got to be all of us involved or they will erase us. We have a surplus of young self-satisfied, overweight, and lazy louts who think that they should just leave the nasty and dangerous business of learning warfare to somebody else.
Wrong. Every single citizen should be ready and able to do what the country needs - just like our revolutionary forefathers knew that they had to leave the family farm to go fight the world’s strongest army all those years ago.
A short part of our lives learning which end of rifle to use while training with all the rest of the country’s kids would good for us.
serve the state, comrade!
Only those who serve the state should be able to run for office too, well golly gee, they can pay all the taxes too
1 & 2 are right on
3 is wrong
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