Bringing back the draft?

“Some good news for Nigal: Yesterday, defense officials worried about recruiting announced that they will raise the age limit, from 34 to 40, for enlistment in the Army Guard and Reserve.

I guess there is nothing holding you back any more.”

“Don't count on poopypants ....I mean Nigal to ever join the Army Guard. He's a lifer in the Armchair General Corps!”

“I really don't see it happening yet, they still have plenty of people to deploy with the new rotation schedule and not to mention the IRR.

Signed: Recalled to Active duty....”

“The real question is whether the benefit of the Iraq War outweighs the cost of keeping the troops happy.

I have no doubt that with enough money, we can have an adequate all-volunteer-or-all-stop-loss-or-all-whatever military. But are we getting adequate value for the money spent?”

“Funny how Solitary Hiker would criticize me for not being a 36 year old in the military but thinks Pat Buchanan, who dodged the draft because he had VD, should be president.”

“I'm not criticizing you for being a 36 year old man not in the military. I'm just pointing out that you probably won't be joining even when given the opportunity.”

“I think that having safe places for everyone in the world is not something one can put a price on....”

“And Nigal, I don't blame you one bit. What's going on over there is insane. It makes me sick every time I see the face of a young man or woman killed over there.”

“Gee Nigal... from your comments earlier on this thread I got the impression that you'd have signed up already and the age limits were the only thing holding you back.

Guess there is something else holding you back from the duty and honor you spoke (typed) of.”

“Ha Ha
The only draft that will ever happen is if the Dems come back into power.
The liberals are the only pols screaming for a draft.
More lies from the left.”

“Gen. Richard Cody is a whacked-out leftist.”

“The Vileman needs to read Rangel's bill earlyer in the thread. You know, the liberal Dem from NY.”

“Just endless fearmogreling from the far left wackos.”

“I thought you had some prohibition against name calling.

You can read the Stars and Stripes story about Cody's comments, can't you?”

“Gee V, coming from you that means, well, it means nothing. LOL!”

“I'll make an exception for you, Vileman. ;-)
Hey, if you can do it, so can I.”

“digging feverously through his copy of Mel's BPing Cookbook to see if there are any crow receipes that are light weight and yummy. Care to make a wager SS?
last edited: 3/21/05 10:56:29 AM”

“Somebody needs to brush up on their trolling. No style. No innuendo. No humor. And no bite. J”

““The Vileman needs to read Rangel's bill earlyer in the thread. You know, the liberal Dem from NY.”
StoveStomper

Mr. Rangel is also a vet of the Korean War. He served his country and just thinks the sons of the wealthy should as well.”

“Thanks for that bateaux!
The Vileman thinks Repubs want a draft.”

“Bill H.R. 163
Representative Charlie Rangel (D-NY)
COSPONSORS(13), ALPHABETICAL
Rep Abercrombie, Neil - 1/7/2003 [HI-1]
Rep Brown, Corrine - 1/28/2003 [FL-3]
Rep Clay, Wm. Lacy - 1/28/2003 [MO-1]
Rep Conyers, John, Jr. - 1/7/2003 [MI-14]
Rep Cummings, Elijah E. - 1/28/2003 [MD-7]
Rep Hastings, Alcee L. - 1/28/2003 [FL-23]
Rep Jackson-Lee, Sheila - 1/28/2003 [TX-18]
Rep Lewis, John - 1/7/2003 [GA-5]
Rep McDermott, Jim - 1/7/2003 [WA-7]
Rep Moran, James P. - 1/28/2003 [VA-8]
Rep Norton, Eleanor Holmes - 1/28/2003 [DC]
Rep Stark, Fortney Pete - 1/7/2003 [CA-13]
Rep Velazquez, Nydia M. - 1/28/2003 [NY-12]

Bill S. 89
Senator Ernest Hollings (D-SC)
Cosponsors (None)

These are the true proponents of drafting your children into military slavery.
On record and proven to support drafting your children.”

“Stovie, I think when there is a war on we should have a draft. It is too easy for the fat ass and lazy to stand on the sidelines and not be effected. Hell, I'm even for mandatory service for all. I think everyone should be required to put in 18 to 24 months of service right after high school.”

“Who needs a draft when kidnapping is so much more fun?



http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/paynter/227497_paynter08.html
[...]
A single mom with a meager income, Marcia raised her kids on the farm where, until recently, she grew salad greens for restaurants.

Axel's father, a Marine Corps vet who served in Vietnam, died when Axel was 4.

Clearly the recruiters knew all that and more.

"You don't want to be a burden to your mom," they told him. "Be a man." "Make your father proud." Never mind that, because of his own experience in the service, Marcia says enlistment for his son is the last thing Axel's dad would have wanted.

The next weekend, when Marcia went to Seattle for the Folklife Festival and Axel was home alone, two recruiters showed up at the door.

Axel repeated the family mantra, but he was feeling frazzled and worn down by then. The sergeant was friendly but, at the same time, aggressively insistent. This time, when Axel said, "Not interested," the sarge turned surly, snapping, "You're making a big (bleeping) mistake!"

Next thing Axel knew, the same sergeant and another recruiter showed up at the LaConner Brewing Co., the restaurant where Axel works. And before Axel, an older cousin and other co-workers knew or understood what was happening, Axel was whisked away in a car.

"They said we were going somewhere but I didn't know we were going all the way to Seattle," Axel said.

Just a few tests. And so many free opportunities, the recruiters told him.

He could pursue his love of chemistry. He could serve anywhere he chose and leave any time he wanted on an "apathy discharge" if he didn't like it. And he wouldn't have to go to Iraq if he didn't want to.

At about 3:30 in the morning, Alex was awakened in the motel and fed a little something. Twelve hours later, without further sleep or food, he had taken a battery of tests and signed a lot of papers he hadn't gotten a chance to read. "Just formalities," he was told. "Sign here. And here. Nothing to worry about."

By then Marcia had "freaked out."

She went to the Burlington recruiting center where the door was open but no one was home. So she grabbed all the cards and numbers she could find, including the address of the Seattle-area testing center.

Then, with her grown daughter in tow, she high-tailed it south, frantically phoning Axel whose cell phone had been confiscated "so he wouldn't be distracted during tests."

Axel's grandfather was in the hospital dying, she told the people at the desk. He needed to come home right away. She would have said just about anything.

But, even after being told her son would be brought right out, her daughter spied him being taken down a separate hall and into another room. So she dashed down the hall and grabbed him by the arm.

"They were telling me I needed to 'be a man' and stand up to my family," Axel said.

What he needed, it turned out, was a lawyer.

Five minutes and $250 after an attorney called the recruiters, Axel's signed papers and his cell phone were in the mail.
[...]”

“Interesting overview of the challenges faced by the U.S. military:

Geopolitics, Strategy and Military Recruitment: The American Dilemma
June 14, 2005 19 50 GMT


By George Friedman

The United States Army has failed once again to reach its recruitment
goals. The media, which have noted the problem in maintaining force
levels in a desultory fashion over the past few years, have now rotated
the story of this month's shortfall into a major story. In other words,
the problem has now been noticed, and it is now important. Of course,
the problem has been important for quite some time, as Stratfor noted
in late December.

There are, therefore, several dimensions to this problem: One is
military, the other is political. But the most important is
geopolitical and strategic, having to do with the manner in which the
United States fights wars and the way in which the U.S. military is
organized. The issue is not recruitment. The issue is the incongruence
between U.S. geopolitics, strategy and the force.

The United States dominates North America militarily against all but
two threats. First, it cannot defend the homeland against nuclear
attacks launched by missile. Second, it cannot defend the United States
against special operations teams carrying out attacks such as those of
Sept. 11, 2001. The American solution in both of these cases has been
offensive. In the case of nuclear missiles, the counter has always been
either the pre-emptive strike or the devastating counter-strike,
coupled with political arrangements designed to reduce the threat. The
counter to special-operations strikes has been covert and overt attacks
against nation-states that launch or facilitate these attacks, or
harbor the attackers. Contrary to popular opinion, launching small
teams into the United States without detection is not easy and requires
sophisticated support, normally traceable in some way to nation-states.
The U.S. strategy has been to focus on putting those nation-states at
risk, directly or indirectly, if attacks take place.

Apart from these two types of attack, the United States is fairly
invulnerable to military action. The foundation of this invulnerability
falls into three parts:
1. The United States is overwhelmingly powerful in North America,
and Latin America is divided, inward-looking, and poor. A land invasion
of the United States from the south would be impossible.

2. The United States controls the oceans absolutely. It is
militarily impossible that an Eastern Hemispheric power could mount a
sustained threat to sea lanes, let alone mount an amphibious operation
against the United States.

3. The primary U.S. interest is in maintaining a multi-level
balance of power in Eurasia, so that no single power can dominate
Eurasia and utilize its resources.

In terms of preventing nuclear strikes and special operations against
the United States and in terms of managing the geopolitical system in
Eurasia, the United States has a tremendous strategic advantage that
grows out of its geopolitical position -- U.S. wars, regardless of
level, are fought on the territory of other countries. With the crucial
exception of Sept. 11, foreign attacks on U.S. soil do not happen. When
they do happen, the United States responds by redefining the war into a
battle for other homelands.

This spares the American population from the rigors of war while
imposing wars on foreign countries. But for the American civilian
population to escape war, the U.S. armed forces must be prepared to go
to war on a global basis. Herein begins the dilemma. The American
strategic goal is to spare the general population from war. This is
done by creating a small class of military who must bear the burden. It
also is accomplished through a volunteer force -- men and women choose
to bear the burden. During extended war, as the experiences of the
civilian population and the military population diverge dramatically,
the inevitable tendency is for the military to abandon the rigors of
war and join the protected majority. In a strategy that tries to impose
no cost on civilians while increasing the cost on the military, the
inevitable outcome is that growing numbers of the military class will
become civilians.

This is the heart of the problem, but it is not all of the problem. The
American strategy in Eurasia is to maintain a balance of power. The
basic role of the United States is as blocker -- blocking Eurasian
powers from adding to their power, and increasing insecurity among
major powers so as to curb their ambitions.

Thus, a strategic dilemma for the United States is born. On a grand
strategic scale, the United States controls the international system --
but at the strategic level, it does not choose the time or place of its
own military interventions. Put very simply, the United States controls
the global system, but its enemies determine when it goes to war and
where, and the nature of these wars tends to put U.S. forces on the
tactical defensive.

During the 1990s, for example, the United States was constantly
responding to actions by others that passed a threshold, beyond which
ignoring the action was impossible. From 1989 onward, the United States
intervened in Panama, Kuwait, Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia and Kosovo, not
counting lesser interventions in places like Liberia or Colombia. Nor
does it count the interventions and deployments throughout the Muslim
world and contiguous areas since 2001.

The grand strategic configuration means that the United States does not
hold the strategic initiative. The time and place of U.S. intervention
is very much in the hands of regional forces. In some cases, the
intervention is the result of miscalculation on the side of regional
forces. In other cases, U.S. intervention is shaped by some regional
player. For example, Iraq did not expect a U.S. response to its
invasion of Kuwait in 1990; Saddam Hussein miscalculated. In the case
of Kosovo, a regional actor, Albania, shaped U.S. intervention. In both
events, however, given the operating principles of grand strategy,
American military involvement is overwhelmingly responsive and
therefore, from the U.S. point of view, unpredictable.

Though others determine the general time and place of U.S.
intervention, the operational level remains in the hands of the United
States. But here too, there are severe constraints. U.S. interventions
suffer from a core paradox: The political cycle of an intervention
frequently runs in days or weeks, but the time it takes to bring major
force to bear is measured in months. That means that the United States
must always bring insufficient force to bear in the relevant time
period -- in a kind of holding action -- and contain the situation
until sufficient force for a resolution becomes available. Thus, U.S.
interventions begin with CIA paramilitaries and U.S. Special Operations
Command. At times, these forces can complete the mission. But
sometimes, all they can do is prepare the ground and hold until
relieved by major force.

Very rapidly, the United States finds itself on the tactical defensive
-- lacking decisive force, at a massive demographic disadvantage, and
frequently suffering from an intelligence deficit. Even after the main
force arrives, the United States can remain in a defensive tactical
situation for an extended period. This places U.S. troops in a
difficult position.

The entire structure creates another strategic problem. The United
States does not control its interventions. It is constantly at risk of
being overwhelmed by multiple theaters of operation that outstrip the
size of its military force or of its logistical base. Between the
tactical defensive and the strategic defensive, U.S. forces must scale
themselves to events that are beyond their control or prediction.

The unexpected is built into U.S. grand strategy, which dictates that
the U.S. armed forces will not know their next mission. U.S. strategy
is reflexive. U.S. operational principles do provide an advantage, but
that can bleed off at the tactical level. In the end, the U.S. force
is, almost by definition, stretched beyond what it can reasonably be
expected to do. This situation is hardwired into the U.S. geopolitical
system.

The U.S. force was never configured for this reality. It was designed
first to cope with a general war with the Soviet Union, focused on
central Europe. After the collapse of the Soviets, the technological
base remained relatively stable: It remained a combined arms force
including armor, carrier battle groups and fighter planes. All of these
take a long time to get to the theater, are excellent at destroying
conventional forces, and are weak at pacification.

Donald Rumsfeld has identified the problem: The force is too slow to
get to the theater in a politically consequential period of time.
Getting there too late, it immediately finds itself on the defensive,
while the brunt of the early battle focuses on Special Operations
forces and air power. The problem that Rumsfeld has not effectively
addressed is that occupation warfare -- which is what we have seen in
Iraq for the past few years -- requires a multi-level approach, ranging
from special operations to very large occupation forces.

Put this differently: The U.S. invasion of Iraq required everything
from an armored thrust to strategic bombing to special operations to
civil affairs. It required every type of warfare imaginable. That is
indeed the reality of American strategy. Not only is the time and place
of military intervention unpredictable, but so is the force structure.
Any attempt to predict the nature of the next war is doomed to fail.
The United States does not control the time or place of the next war;
it has no idea what that war will look like or where it will be.

The United States has always built its force around expectations of
both where the next war would be fought and how it would be fought.
From "Air-Land Battle" to "Military operations other than war," U.S.
military doctrine has always been marked by two things: Military
planners were always certain they had a handle on what the next war
would be like, and they were always dead wrong.

The military structure that was squeezed out of the Cold War force
after 1989 assumed that wars would be infrequent, that they would be
short, that they would be manageable. Building on these assumptions,
U.S. military planners loaded key capabilities into reserve and
National Guard units, cut back on forces that didn't fit into this
paradigm and then -- even when reality showed they were wrong -- they
tried to compensate with technology rather than with restructuring the
force.

Wars have been more frequent since the fall of the Soviet Union than
they were before. They occur in less predictable places. They tend not
to be brief, but to be of long duration and to pile up on each other --
and they frequently are unmanageable for an extended period of time.
The United States does not have tactical advantages with the forces
provided.

As a result, the force is deployed far more than planned, troops are
forced to rotate too rapidly through assignments in combat zones, and
they operate in environments where operational requirements force them
too often into tactically defensive situations. That all of this is
managed with a force that is drawn heavily from reserves is simply the
icing on the cake. The force does not match the reality.

We began by pointing out the goal is -- and should be -- to protect the
American public from war, with volunteers placing themselves between
home and war's desolation. This strategic goal, while appropriate,
creates a class of warriors and a broader class of indifferent
civilians. Given the situation, it will follow that sensible warriors,
having done their duty in their own minds, will choose to join the
ranks of civilians, while civilians will avoid service.

There has been talk of a draft. That is a bad idea for technical
reasons: It takes too long to train a soldier for a draft to solve the
problems, and today's soldiers need to be too skilled and motivated for
a reluctant civilian to master their craft. Moreover, this is not a
force that would benefit from the service of 19-year-olds. Many of the
jobs in the military could be done by people in their 40s and 50s, who
would bring useful skills into the military. We would support a draft
only if it included all ages of men and women who had not previously
served. There is no reason that an accountant in civilian life could
not provide valuable military service in Afghanistan, maintaining
logistics inventory. The United States does not need to draft children.

Since that isn't going to happen, and since the United States does not
have the option of abandoning its strategy, the United States must
reshape the force to meet the single most important reality: The United
States will be at war a lot of the time, and no one really knows where
or when it will go to war. The challenges in military retention or
inability to meet recruiting goals mean that the United States
continues to recruit children, as if this were the 19th century.”

“You suck.”

“Hi Mutt! Good to see ya!”

“Howdy! Thought I'd pop back here to see what's going on. Looks like Sarge is current hard-headed conservative geopolitical expert. LOL!”

“It's good to see you. You suck.”

“You're just jealous I subscribe to Stratfor. ;-P”

“1. The United States is overwhelmingly powerful in North America,
and Latin America is divided, inward-looking, and poor. A land invasion
of the United States from the south would be impossible.
Mutt
9:12:35 AM
6/17/05

this sounds like the old movie Red Dawn where the people came into this country thru Mexico over many yrs. They were located in the central part of the US to divide this country. Didn't work thou Patrick Swayze saved the day”

“The tactics used by Swayze in Red Dawn are proven. They used RPG's and road side bombs to kill the invaders just a few at a time. Eventually the resistance grew. Swayze the leader eventually went down but others stood up to continue the fight against those stood on his soil.
last edited: 6/17/05 10:12:42 AM”

“Yeah but he later got his ass kicked in Roadhouse...”

“LOL@Nigal

Hi Mutt, good job on the oynx troll.”

“Mutt - I take it you used to be the former hard-headed conservative geopolitical cut and paster?”

“but the point is as weak as our borders are and the way Mexicans and Middle Eastern people look alike (minus the beard)it could be happening already”

“Arabs and Mexicans don't look alike.

I have a friend from HS that's a Major in the AF. He's stationed in Japan. The locals tell him that all us whiteys look alike. I got a chuckle out of that.”

“i loved how the russians crossed the bearing strait, cut the pipelines in alaska and came down through canada for a big suprise pincher move.

LOL! WOLVERINES!

hey, and don't forget, that chick from dirty dancing helped swayze too”

“dh, I disagree with you. All it takes is cutting the beard and a change of clothes. Some Middle Eastern people have already been caught trying to cross the border as Mexicans or Latin/Central/South American's”

“Have been around many Arabs or Hispanics? I had lots of Arabs in my classes in college and am around a good many Hispanics on construction sites. There are more differences than similarities between the two. I think they're banking that white America sees all people of color the same.”

“yeah I have and your point”

“They're coming in from Canada too. To blend in they have been putting on hockey jerseys and call the border control agents, "you hosers, eh."”

“"Put very simply, the United States controls
the global system, but its enemies determine when it goes to war and
where, and the nature of these wars tends to put U.S. forces on the
tactical defensive."

There is a Rhinocerous in this guys living room. The Iraq war was a war of choice. It was a strategic attempt to be proactive and shape changes in the world. He doesn't seem to notice.”

“My point is that they don't look that much alike unless you're a combative, dumbass, redneck.

Did I say that outloud?

Ewker, like most of your arguments, this is pointless.”

“your the only one agruing. I said they look alike and have been caught trying to cross the border. If they didn't look alike they wouldn't try to cross it posing as hispanics. What is so hard to understand about that #&%!$”

“This is so out of character for dayhiker (but I like it).”

“Oops, you're not a redneck, even if you're a UT fan 8D”

“You're rubbing off on me V.”

“Don't look at me. I never called anyone a redneck.


Slack-jawed yokel maybe, but not a redneck.”

“I'll be a redneck tomorrow when I finish mowing the grass.”

“I better re-think who I'm breaking out my a$$hole personna on. Eddie has my work email address.
last edited: 6/17/05 11:05:00 AM”