posted
Frisco as a few sergeants I'm friends with said of their time in the first gulf war, we sat around and trained like mad and then moved in for some light fighting and then it was over with. He said the thing that sucked the most was the plain suck factor of being in NBC gear and high alert for so long. The soldiers in Iraq right now get more respect from me then I think I deserve. We had it easier in Mosul than a lot of soldiers in different places. Now I could go on about how we made it easier on ourselves, but thats for a different post.
Posts: 1753 | Registered: May 2001
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posted
Fox, what do you think about those 19 cats who decided that they weren't going to go on their mission?
Posts: 5600 | Registered: Jul 2001
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quote:That and no offense Sept 11th is nothing compared to what could occur if we were not vigilant. That and you speak of freedom and rights, well the fact is that the people pay the greatest price of liberty. You deal with the fact that your neighbor is free, he could if he wanted to probably walk over and kill your whole family, probably going to happen, but it could easily happen if he desired so. For your freedom and rights innocent blood might be shed, but we should not savagely waste the lives of other peoples in the world for our sole economical or political benefit.
It has nothing to do with our economic or political benefit. Irami is not suggesting we start a draft for our personal economic benefit. He is saying we should have a draft so we are more serious in our deliberations on going to war - so we won't go to war unneccessarily.
My point is that, if we are going to war wrongly, a better tactic would be to simply have no military at all. If the cost is us having to TRUST other nations a bit to not let the world collapse, and if the benefit is we stop unjustly and wrongly invading sovereign nations, then I think the benefit is worth the cost. It's not like everyone else in the world is going to stand by as someone like Saddam conquers everything.
Posts: 2432 | Registered: Feb 2001
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posted
Fox, I disagree with the whole premise of that argument. I don't think that a draft would raise standards, although it would give you more bodies to work with. In a draft, or in mandatory service requirements, almost everyone serves when called upon to do so....all the people who aren't interested in serving at all, as well a all the people who would eventually end up in jail. It's not like you would only get the best and the brightest with a draft.
I also think that disbanding the peacetime military would be a horrible idea, and that anyone who seriously thinks that is an option is ridiculous. We are suppose to trust other nations not to attack us if we disarm? Even with the worlds strongest military we were targets...that isn't a reason to get rid of all safety percausions, it's reason to strengthen them wherever possible, within the limits of our personal liberties. Even outside of them if necessary....but I don't think it is necessary at this point. A draft IS legal, but only in certain circumstances, and I don;t think we have reached that point yet.
posted
When military service is mandatory, people are looking for the most curious ways out. The smarter ones go to school. Others get medical certificates. The less lucky ones get into the army for 2 years. They *might* learn something useful that would help them in the future, like get a free driving license for trucks. Mostly, it's the 2 years by which their life is postponed. Some don't take the military life well. Every now and then, we get news of boys who were drafted though they shouldn't have, and commit suicide cause they can't take it any longer. The stronger ones get through the first year and then revenge themselves on their younger colleagues. I sincerely doubt if many of them would make good soldiers if the war actually came.
Posts: 5700 | Registered: Feb 2002
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posted
Many of my thoughts on the benefits of the all-volunteer force are addressed well above. To summarize:
1. Professionalism / quality: we base the amount of training and education we're willing to invest in an individual on the length of time they're going to serve.
2. Motivation: To my mind this is the strongest part of the all-volunteer force. Any time you give someone at least some control over the direction of his or her life you get better performance.
Irami, after reviewing all of your posts above I think that you're not espousing a draft so much as mandatory service. Although you go back a forth a few times, I think that the benefit you see from the draft is in "socialization". I may be missing the mark on your position.
The difference between the two, as I see it, is in purpose. To my mind, the purpose of the draft is to conscript a great number of troops quickly. It is used with the recognition that the skill level of the resulting draftees will not be particularly high, but that sheer numbers will offset that low skill level. The corollary is that casualties will be high as these troops are used. Thus, the draft should only be used when the nation is under a grave threat. It should be used when the only way to defend the nation is to spend our most precious resource, our own flesh and blood, or face the destruction of the nation. Put bluntly, I believe that the draft is the use of men and women as weapons, and we must use that fact when making decisions about when and weather to use it.
Mandatory service, on the other hand, though also conscription, and also entails relatively low training levels for the troops, would exist in times of peace and conflict. The conscripted troops might or might not be used in a particular conflict based on the same criteria above. However, everyone would serve and be socialized by the experience. The "benefit" of such a system is that every citizen has a stake in the defense of the nation. The downside, as I see it, is that you really don’t plan to use those troops. The extreme cases that would merit their use are very unlikely. In fact, due to the high cost of maintaining that system, you might feel pressure to use the troops in situations that don’t meet the criteria I posed above.
So the long and the short of it is that I prefer the all-volunteer force. I enjoyed Black Fox post concerning force composition. I can see how the way we’ve designed the infantry has set us up for being highly successful at the “charge” but less successful after the battle has been won. However I don’t see this a reason to go away from the all-volunteer force, but rather as a need to examine and change the force structure of the infantry. Of course, this is balanced by the reality of motivating the troops in every specialty.
Oh, one last thing. Why, if you were really trying to win a fight (battle or war) would you go into the ring with one hand tied behind your back? Irami, when you stated that the inefficiencies of a draft might help us by making the military a less potent entity I though you were misguided.
Posts: 270 | Registered: Apr 2004
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posted
Again you make the error in my opinion that casualties are an effective indicator of military prowess. It is to a point, but as I see you missed my earlier point see it as this. Only 100,000 soldiers out of the military are really trained and supposed to close with and destroy the enemy. Its very hard to take losses if all you do is send artillery and air strikes. The fact is that I can kill a larger percentage of the enemy then he killed of me and still lose the battle, not to mention the war. It is all about what is accomplished through your force, not just sheer killing. America has simply fallen into the thought that if we aren't dying then we're winning the war.
That and you say that most people with ability or skill will get out of the draft, I personally find that problem more than easily fixed. That and as I tried to point out later the problem with the draft is that they used to send combat arms some of the least worthwhile draftees. That and the army used to have something called a category 4 ( I think thats what it was called) which was simply a person that scored around the bottom 35 percentile or so in the militaries tests. Those were what generally got given to the infantry. If remember correctly Schwarzkopf ( when he was a cadet ) was behind an early effort to get some of the higher ranking ( class rank in sense of GPA) West Point cadets to go infantry as they had generally gone engineer and many times the last West Point cadet to choose ( the one with the lowest GPA) would end up with Infantry as his choice. That has changed, but on to other things.
That and I'm not saying the draft would higher standards of tactical/technical competance. I do however believe that it will raise the morality and ethics of conduct within the military over time.
That and you worry over the ability of our military to conduct war due to a draft. No worries believe me the military will have no problems doing so. That and soldiers still volunteer for 2 and three year stints. I myself enlisted for three years on my first enlistment.
Posts: 1753 | Registered: May 2001
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Right now, part of our difficulty is that in our current infantry units, everyone is at least trained to levels that would have been considered elite in other historical armies. (I say trained, rather than is, elite.)
Basically, our infantry divisions, from light infrantry to mechanized infantry to airborne and other units, is trained as an assault force by the standards of traditional armies. And that it hasn't left the garrison forces of old -- the non-elite soldiers who held conquered ground and weren't taught much more than general soldiering.
Traditionally, those garrison forces were conscriptees and new recruits, while the assault forces were created from the most motivated and best trained. The garrison forces followed behind the assault units and held the ground, often passifying the conquered area just by their presence alone. Not assault trained, these soldiers did not live by the "close with the enemy and impose your will upon him" rule so much as they did the values they held while they were civilians. Those civilian attitudes, however, showed more of the American ideal of how to treat a conquered enemy and served, in a way, as good public relations.
Am I even close to understanding what you were saying? That we may need conscripted forces to hold territory because they would be less trained for assault and would deal better with the populace?
Posts: 2848 | Registered: Feb 2003
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quote:We are suppose to trust other nations not to attack us if we disarm?
And why not? Nations all over the world have militaries weaker than ours, and they trust us not to attack them - and they all continue to survive, except a couple whose own wrongful actions led to their downfall. Why don't we extend the same trust to the world? Are we paranoid?
quote:Even with the worlds strongest military we were targets...that isn't a reason to get rid of all safety percausions, it's reason to strengthen them wherever possible, within the limits of our personal liberties.
We were targets precisely BECAUSE we had the world's strongest military, and we used it to intervene in the Middle East. If we had not done so, we'd not likely be targets.
Furthermore, you are talking about terrorists, not nations. Our military can't stop terrorism anyway. It's other militaries they can stop - but no other military has been planning to invade the U.S., and aside from some rather weak rogue nations, none have any good reason to want to invade us.
Posts: 2432 | Registered: Feb 2001
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posted
Kuwait was not conquered. It is still alive today - because the world stopped Saddam. Given how important the U.S. is to the global economy, it is absurd to think the world would not do the same if our destruction was possible.
Tibet was conquered during the Cold War, many decades ago. Nobody was capable of stopping China then. If China did the same today, they would not get away with it, unless the world let them.
Furthermore, Tibet is a very small power next to a very aggressive one, so the world might wrongly let China get away with invading it (but again, that is our decision to do so). The U.S. is in precisely the opposite situation.
Posts: 2432 | Registered: Feb 2001
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quote: Given how important the U.S. is to the global economy, it is absurd to think the world would not do the same if our destruction was possible.
I couldn't disagree with you more strongly on this. Even if they had some economic problems themselves, I think the general attitude of the non-north american populace would be laughing at how the high and mighty have fallen, and looking at is as an opportunity for their own country to press forward.
quote:Kuwait was not conquered. It is still alive today - because the world stopped Saddam.
It was conquered. It was then liberated. By us and a lot of other nations whose combined forces did not equal ours. It was liberated because we had the military you advocated getting rid of.
And whether or not OUR military would have stopped China's invasion of Tibet, it's a clear example of a nation with a military far weaker than ours which did NOT survive, but whose loss was not due to their wrongful actions.
quote:Even if they had some economic problems themselves, I think the general attitude of the non-north american populace would be laughing at how the high and mighty have fallen, and looking at is as an opportunity for their own country to press forward.
Not unless they were downright foolish nations... Their own economies would collapse if America fell. Heck, stock markets around the world crashed just because of 9/11.
quote:By us and a lot of other nations whose combined forces did not equal ours. It was liberated because we had the military you advocated getting rid of.
It was liberated because the world cared - if we had not had the military we do, it would still have been liberated. It just would have been liberated by an army with a higher percentage of Europeans and a lower percentage of Americans. Saddam was not so powerful that the world as a whole can't stop him rather easily.
quote:And whether or not OUR military would have stopped China's invasion of Tibet, it's a clear example of a nation with a military far weaker than ours which did NOT survive, but whose loss was not due to their wrongful actions.
Yes, but there are countless examples of that happening prior to the end of the Cold War. That was a time when it WAS to certain nations' benefit to conquer others. We are no longer in that time. A global economy with a global community of nations makes that issue somewhat obsolete.
posted
I am SO glad you don't have meaningful input on our foreign policy.
Are you saying no one will invade another country now that the cold war is over? I'd be interested in your evidence on such a claim.
Kuwait was invaded after the cold war. Had Kuwait not had oil, or had the world not feared Sadaam continuing into Saudi territory, it's very possible no one would have helped.
posted
No, I am just saying the risk of the U.S. needing to defend itself against a military invasion in the modern era are ridiculously low. If you can imagine any reasonable scenario in which we would get invaded, aside from because we keep invading other nations, I might be inclined to think otherwise. But I cannot. No major power has an interest in ruining us, because it would ruin them. No minor power has the ability to occupy a nation as big as ours. And even if one of these were wrong, the world as a whole would not let an invasion of America happen, because it would devastate the stability of everyone.
It's like saying I should be afraid my neighbor will kill me because he, in theory, could. Such a fear is unwarranted paranoia if my neighbor has no good reason to kill me - and as far as the world goes today, no significant power in the world has any good reason to try and destroy/conquer America (except, perhaps, out of fear that we would misuse our military.)
It's not that a military wouldn't be useful. All things equal, I'd rather have a military option, but Irami has set up the following choice, in which all things are not equal:
1. Have a volunteer standing army, and be unable to show the restraint needed to avoid wrongly invading nations and bringing retaliation upon ourselves 2. Have a mandatory military service, and put a type of slavery upon young men (and maybe women) in America.
If the choice is between these two, I think the solution is:
3. Have no military, taking an ever-so-slight risk that someone could invade us before we had time to mobilize and that the world would let it happen, but ensuring we do not wrongly invade someone, we do not bring retaliation upon ourselves, and we do not violate the fundamental rights of Americans.
It's a cost-benefit analysis. The third option is the best, because the danger is the lowest. (Had we taken this strategy in the past, for instance, 9/11 would likely not have happened. )
The ideal would be to have a military but use it wisely, but as parents like to say, if you can't place nice, you don't get to play at all. If we truly are incapable of wisely using our military might and showing restraint (as Bush has failed to do), then it is best for us to not use it at all.
It is probably just my background speaking, but to my thinking you've got it backwards. I think that the biggest reason that more countries aren't invading each other is that the US has such a strong military, and has shown that it is willing to use it to protect the sovereignty of other nations. I'm convinced that if you removed that stabilizing force that the "good" use of US military protection applies to the world stage we would see much more aggression, not less.
posted
Except many other countries have powerful militaries and have shown an equal willingness to use their forces to protect other nations from invasion. It is not like the U.S. is alone out there protecting everyone. The stabilizing force you speak of would not disappear without us, unless the rest of the world just didn't care to keep things stable.
Should we believe that only Americans care about global stability?
posted
I think the reason that more countries aren't invading each other is because there is rarely a need to invade other countries.
Posts: 2756 | Registered: Jul 2002
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No, I don’t think that only the US cares about global stability. I think that the US is the only actor on the world stage that has the capability and will to act militarily to protect other nations sovereignty. I don’t think that other countries have shown an equal willingness to use their forces to protect other nation from invasion. I think that other countries have been willing to cooperate in a coalition including the US to protect other nations from invasion. In addition, although there are a few other countries with sufficient military might to accomplish such defensive actions for other countries, few, if any, of those countries would be trusted by the global community to accomplish it in good faith. As it is, the US is currently not trusted to be acting in good faith in Iraq. Only history will tell if the global community is right in that case.
Posts: 270 | Registered: Apr 2004
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I think that North Korea is itching for an excuse. I don't think that the last 100 years of human history support your optimism.
Posts: 270 | Registered: Apr 2004
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quote: No, I am just saying the risk of the U.S. needing to defend itself against a military invasion in the modern era are ridiculously low.
You are so wrong...the reason we don't have that to fear is the very military you are now arguing to disband. With our current forces, plus the added forces in the homeland if we were invaded (think anyone with a gun) no nation could possibly attack and hold ground here. Without the military that wouldn't be true.
quote: No major power has an interest in ruining us, because it would ruin them. No minor power has the ability to occupy a nation as big as ours. And even if one of these were wrong, the world as a whole would not let an invasion of America happen, because it would devastate the stability of everyone.
Think again. Not every country has the forsight to figure that out. Most of the educated elite could, but those aren't the people we would be fighting.
And plenty of people want us to fail.
quote: It's a cost-benefit analysis. The third option is the best, because the danger is the lowest. (Had we taken this strategy in the past, for instance, 9/11 would likely not have happened. )
I don't think you actually know the cost of what you are suggesting, or the value of what you are suggesting we leave unguarded.
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