An interesting piece by Scott Beauchamp (yes, that one) in the Guardian:
But before we pat ourselves on the back for having a progressive military that’s “on the right side of history”, a parallel and equally profound change should complicate our adulation: millennials are content to send their gay, female and Sikh friends to die on their behalf without a willingness to sacrifice themselves.
The seemingly honest efforts of the Department of Defense to make the composition of the military vaguely resemble a slice of the actual American populace are undermined by the fact that most Americans of military fighting age don’t serve. More precisely, they don’t want to serve. Which wouldn’t be hypocritical if they didn’t also want a “boots on the ground” military response to the Islamic State.
According to a poll conducted by the Harvard Institute of Politics, 60% of people between the ages of 18-29 support the commitment of American combat troops to fight Isis on the ground. At the same time, 62% of those same people say they wouldn’t join the fight themselves. The military doesn’t have an inclusivity problem. Americans, specifically millennials, have a military exclusivity problem.
***The director of the Harvard Institute of Politics, John Della Volpe, gave his explanation of the poll he led earlier in December of why millennials don’t want to fight in a war that they support as being indicative of “a deep distrust … about all things relating to the government”. Which seems facile, considering they support the government waging the war in the first place.
A more accurate interpretation might be the exact opposite, that after more than a decade of relying on a minuscule 0.5% of Americans to serve in the military, and during that same time using the military as a blunt, multi-purpose tool to solve America’s problems overseas, has led millennials to see the military as a force that constantly engages foreign enemies without requiring any direct sacrifice from them personally. When President George W Bush suggested that Americans prepare for war by shopping, he untethered an entire generation from the wars being waged on its behalf by a negligible number of its cohorts.
Even though millennials’ attitudes about war are handed-down, there still exists a moral imperative to reject the inheritance. Supporting the rights of women, LGBT and religious minorities to serve in the military is fine, but asking that they kill and die on behalf of a war that you yourself refuse to participate in is, to resuscitate a word, dishonorable.
An interesting point- if you distrust the government so much, why are you so willing to trust them to send other people off to war? Additionally, this just exacerbates the civilian/military divide. When I was on active duty decades ago, there was already an us v. them mentality about the them not understanding. It’s grown even worse, and this sort of thing exposes part of why that is the case.
I’ll let Sooner and Adam chime in with their thoughts and update this post if they have any.
———-UPDATE 12:38 AM———-
Adam L Silverman: John asked for Sooner or me to put our thoughts in, and I just got through the comments, and am now adding my take. I think there are several overlapping issues going on – and they are ones that the military is itself concerned with. My experience with this is mostly on the Army side, so please keep that in mind. The first is the separation of the Force from the citizenry. The worry is that Americans will not just see military service as something others do, but will view the military as, essentially, a permanent, self selecting/all volunteer mercenary force. This certainly goes against how the military sees itself. Military personnel, especially those who are making the military a career (and in some cases have attained sufficient rank to see a bigger picture in their chosen profession) understand themselves to be part of the Profession of Arms.* And this is, to be honest, what was so wrong with how the Bush 43 Administration approached using the military after 9-11. By telling everyone that the best thing they can do is go shopping because the All Volunteer Force (AVF) has got this, it disconnected the citizenry from those who went to Afghanistan and/or Iraq. Moreover, the fact that this is the first time I know of that war has been waged and taxes or a dedicated revenue stream (war bonds) have not been implemented further signaled that what was taking place in Iraq and Afghanistan was not something most Americans needed to worry about.
The second major issue is that the All Volunteer Force was never intended to be used to prosecute a prolonged war/conflict. It was created to do several things. One of which was to correct problems in professionalization that developed during the Vietnam War. This was supposed to lead to a follow on effect of having a professional, regular core of Active duty personnel, supplemented by the Reserves and National Guard, that could be used to get started if it became necessary to use the military. For anything prolonged and/or large scale the draft was supposed to be implemented with the Active, Reserve, and Guard components fighting until the draftees could be trained and worked into units. General Abrams, who was the primary driver for the All Volunteer Force, and General Meyer his successor, also understood the AVF to serve as a political tripwire. The working concept was that since the AVF would not be sufficient to prosecute an actual war, the draft would have to be instituted. In order for that to happen Congress would have to Declare War or pass legislation authorizing a draft for whatever contingency operation was authorized. This would require Congress to actually debate whether prosecuting the conflict was a good idea and hopefully create an American debate over whether this was a good idea. By limiting the use of the military in Iraq and Afghanistan to the AVF, and augmenting them not with draftees, but instead with contractors (often retired/former military, retired/former civilian members of the Profession of Arms, and/or retired/former civilian Intel officers), there was no real American debate on whether it made sense to make war in the wake of 9-11. Moreover, the Congressional debate for both the post 9-11 Authorization for the Use of Military Force and the 2003 one for Iraq were perfunctory.
A third issue is that its not just millennials that are avoiding military service. As Kathy Roth-Douquet and Francis Shaeffer documented in 2007, America’s upper class has also largely abandoned the military. This is a marked difference from World War II when the (then) War Department had to issue policy guidance to its recruiters that limited the number of highly educated and well off Americans who could sign up. So many of the faculty, students (graduate and undergraduate), and staff at America’s top universities and colleges, and others who were considered part of the upper echelons of society were trying to sign up that the War Department was concerned. Specifically it was concerned that if too many of these highly educated (or those pursuing higher education) Americans were killed or severely wounded, then there wouldn’t be enough qualified, intelligent, educated, and competent Americans (read American men) left to run the country.
The reason that all of this is problematic for Civilian-Military relations is not, in my view, a breakdown of civilian control of the military. Rather it is a breakdown in the relations between the military and their fellow citizens. Especially those who have done multiple deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan, which is itself a small percentage of the overall US military. Not to go all idealistic, but part of being a citizen in a self governing Republic is that we all have duties and responsibilities in exchange for the government recognizing and respecting our rights and privileges. One of these duties/responsibilities is being part of the provision of the common defense. And while I’m not sure the Founders and Framers would have understood preemptive wars of choice as part of the common defense, divorcing the military from the rest of the citizenry is not a good thing. Its corrosive – both of small c, small m civil-military relations, but also of the Profession of Arms. It risks turning that profession, which while mainly composed of uniformed personnel also includes civilians, into something so separate and alien from the rest of the citizenry that both sides eventually become suspicious and intolerant of each other. Without taking this update/addition down a rabbit hole, I’m convinced that one of the law enforcement culture issues we are currently watching play out across the country, and where communities of color seem to be bearing the brunt, is the result of a corrosive and toxic divide between law enforcement and the rest of Americans. Law enforcement officers are our fellow citizens, but too often we see news coverage of members of that profession acting as if they are somehow apart and sometimes above the citizenry. The last thing we want is for such a caustic and corrosive dynamic to develop between Americans in and out of the military.
* Full disclosure: I contributed several working papers for the strategic level portions of the Profession of Arms Study; specifically those dealing with professions as cultures/sub-cultures and how within the specific American professional culture of the Profession of Arms there are numerous sub-cultures – some of which overlap and some don’t.
msdc
I’m glad somebody is writing about the disconnect between military service and the general public, but I have to wonder if that’s a problem specific to millennials. I mean, are you telling me that Generation X was any better on this? We sure as shit weren’t lining up en masse to fight in the Gulf war. And for that matter, the Boomers really marked the start of the separation between military service and the children of the nation’s elites. Let’s give credit where credit is due.
It isn’t the millennials’ fault that they reached fighting age at the exact moment when their generational betters (Boomers all, acting on the counsel of Silent Generation shitheels like Rumsfeld and Cheney) committed the country to two neverending wars. I don’t blame the millennials for wanting no part of them. At least they had the decency to vote for the guy who tried to end them.
Gin & Tonic
@msdc: The end of the draft is what began the separation.
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
Dunno if I’d draw any conclusions from the survey:
So after the Paris attacks, the results were the same as they were in March. I don’t recall any particular Daesh news in March. This seems to indicate that the 60-to-48% swing isn’t necessarily meaningful.
That tells me that their views in this race are likely to be quite fluid. Like most Americans, they’re not political junkies glued to the TV about the latest political “news”.
I’m not convinced that lumping millions of people, who only share a generational grouping, together is enlightening. Lots of famous people were born in 1946 that don’t seem to have much else in common…
My $0.02. FWIW.
Cheers,
Scott.
pseudonymous in nc
There’s a credible argument that the majority of people actually shouldn’t want to serve in the military, but that those who do ought to be very well rewarded.
It’s worth thinking very hard about what you might call “the military function” in the modern US, where it’s often a way for young people from shitty environments with shitty prospects — whether it’s white teenagers from no-hope towns in vowel states or minority teenagers from no-hope inner cities — to get out of their state for the first time and do something that’s… something. But that something is, by its nature, the grist for the warmongers’ mill.
Suzanne
I don’t know if I count as a Millenial or an Xer, since I was born in 1980, but here’s my thoughts and experience. I personally never wanted to serve, partly because I just didn’t want to, and partly because I don’t really have a lot of respect for some of the people who do choose to serve, and I don’t really think it’s a good use of my skills nor do I think it’s good for the country for me to participate in a shitty power hierarchy. I am monstrously privileged here when I say this, but I will not say yes sir or no sir to some jackoff of higher rank if I don’t believe that what he or she is doing is right.
I only know a few people my age who served or are serving, and only one of those is a person who joined for conscience reasons. Everyone else my age who I know who joined did so because they wanted the pay or benefits, or because they couldn’t figure out what the hell else to do. The idea that we have military filled with people who joined because they couldn’t figure out what the hell else to do frightens me. I will not lend any more legitimacy to that institution that basically sucks up the don’t-know-what-the-hell-else-to-do among us and puts guns in their hands.
However, I also am very anti-war, in the vast majority of instances, and absolutely in every instance since I have been of voting/serving age. I basically think we should get involved in other countries’ business only for humanitarian reasons like prevention of genocide and the sort of massive civilian misery we’re seeing in Syria, and even then our role should be very limited. So why my generation is willing to send others to die but not themselves is deeply shitty to me.
But, you know, people are shitty. Of every age.
Gussie
I’m 100% in favor of public education, but I don’t want to be a school teacher. I eat tuna, but don’t want to be a commercial fisherman, and I am in favor of decriminalizing sex work, but nobody’s about to hire me to get them off.
There is something terribly wrong with “60% of people between the ages of 18-29 support the commitment of American combat troops to fight Isis on the ground” but there’s no additional problem if you connect that to “62% of those same people say they wouldn’t join the fight themselves.”
There’s a disconnect between many, probably most, professions and those who aren’t in them. It’s just that most professions aren’t so vocal about their jaw-dropping self-righteousness that leads them to say, “asking that they kill and die on behalf of a war that you yourself refuse to participate in is, to resuscitate a word, dishonorable.”
That’s why civilians aren’t supposed to criticize cops, too. If you don’t strap on a sidearm and make yourself the thin blue line, who are -you- to judge? Oddly, nobody says this about logging, teaching, nursing, farming, mining or songwriting.
Bullshit.
Matt McIrvin
Damn it, we should reinstate the draft so that our kids all have some skin in the game, while I remain safe and unharmed!
Omnes Omnibus
@Suzanne:
If you are really in a position to do this, then you are monstrously privileged. Never swallowed a retort? Never silently sat there while someone told an offensive joke? Never didn’t say something when a client ogled your boobs? Not many people have ever lived that life.
Carla Menssen
Here is a link to the study: http://www.iop.harvard.edu/sites/default/files_new/fall%20poll%2014%20-%20exec%20summ%20final.pdf
Harvard talked to slightly over 2,000 18 – 29 year-olds, fall of 2014. 2,000? Really? And this is enough of a poll to judge them all? The media seem to think so.
The 27 year-olds I know (only about 10 however) all voted for Barack Obama, don’t want to enlist, but don’t want anyone else’s boots on the ground either.
Suzanne
@Omnes Omnibus: yes, I am incredibly privileged.
Actually, I have done all of those things, even enduring the boob-ogling (and actual ass-grabbing). The differences being that (1) I quit jobs where I was treated shittily, and (2) my jobs never demanded that level of deference, and the stakes are never as high as someone’s life. I complained about the ass-grabbing, then quit, BTW. YES, I am privileged, which I fully admit, because I have options and other avenues available when my ass got grabbed.
Omnes Omnibus
Actually, It find it interesting how few comments this post is attracting.
Omnes Omnibus
@Gussie: Not what Cole said, but do get all self-righteous.
mclaren
Once we moved to all all-volunteer military, this kind of problem was already baked in. Look at who volunteers to serve. It’s primarily people from impoverished southern and southwestern rural communities. You don’t see a lot of 18-year-olds from either the West or East coast volunteering for the U.S. military, and you particularly don’t see a lot of high-income college graduates volunteering for military service. Mainly you see people who have struck out after graduating high school and wound up in dead-end jobs in southern and southwestern rural areas in their mid- or later 20s volunteering for the military as a last desperate effort to kick-start their lives again.
The irony? Stats show that very few people who serve in the military wind up making use of the college benefits — only 30% of all vets use ’em. This is, once again, because the people who volunteer for military service today are mainly rural, southern, impoverished, and poorly educated. Those are precisely the kind of people who tend to have a lot of trouble getting into college and graduating.
We now pause for the customary howl of “You have no idea what you’re talking about, mclaren” from Cole.
Finished? Good. Here’s the evidence:
Rural/Exurban counties provide the army with a disproportionate share of recruits.
Source: “Youths in Rural U.S. Are Drawn To Military,” The New York Times, 3 November 2005.
For a breakdown on the percentage of vets who use G.I. Bill benefits, see “Most Veterans Are Satisfied With GI Bill Education Benefits,” at gallup.com, 2014.
Evidently the New York Times and the Gallup polling organization have no idea what they’re talking about either, Cole. Who knew?
maeve
I”m a female person so have not been subject to the draft – too young to be in the age group that got sent to Viet Nam – however we all grew up with the idea of the draft and that “war”.
Flash forward – 2003
I’m in my 40’s now but taking a community college class – lots of students were in their teens – some hard working others just taking classes because their parents would kick them out of home if they didn’t either get a job or “go to college”. This particular class on web design is being taught at the last minute by an adjunct. Adjuncts can be great but this guy is full of BS. He thinks designing from scratch in HTML is the bee’s knees. Yes – you should know HTML but in 2003 designing from scratch in HTML doesn’t keep up.
He cites Drudge Report as a great site – if you know HTML you can rule the internet you don’t need that fancy CSS stuff. He runs out of stuff he can actually teach us during class so gets into discussion of Iraq.
This is when Bush is selling everyone on the Iraq War – the (young male) class is eating it up. I’m sitting there thinking “Don’t you remember Viet Nam?” – because they don’t (or don’t want to since the instructor is at least in his 50s). you don’t just invade countries and change “hearts and minds”. I’d think we’d have learned it but they keep selling the same old thing.
Suzanne
@efgoldman: One thing that I find a little bit perplexing, though, is this: a couple of the ex-military folks I know have complained, with good reason, about the level of bureaucracy they have to go through to get benefits that they are owed and how long it takes. But…..I mean, honestly, is this a surprise? Government at every level is like the DMV: really fuckin’ slow at every damn thing. And yet, they vote Republican or Libertarian, WHO DON’T HELP THEM. It makes me really unsympathetic.
Steeplejack
@Omnes Omnibus:
I’ve had a middling case of blog fatigue for several weeks.
Omnes Omnibus
@Steeplejack: Honestly, so have I.
boatboy_srq
I can recall coming to grips with two at-the-time diametrically-opposed forces in my college days: 1) wanting to follow my father’s USN footsteps and 2) dealing with being gay. At the time they were (officially) mutually exclusive. I dealt with the latter and stayed a civilian – but the dream of serving on a DDG or CG (before moving on to JAG) died hard.
I can also recall my father’s perspective on strategic arms: they were only effective if they were never used.
Hearing today’s ch!ckensh!t pols spout off about “boots on the ground” and possible uses of the US nuclear “deterrent” in an offensive (in more way than one) way, I remember both of those earlier things and my awareness of how despicable the Conservatists are only grows.
The draft may have let more than a few tRumps and Shrubs fall through the cracks, but it did a very good job scaring sh!t out of their parents and pushing against the racist ethnocentrist warmongering that was possible at the time.
What bothers me more is the “outsourcing” of so much DoD operations: everything from food service to drone operations are now the province of private contracting – and a good many “private contractors” are loud voices for the kind of interventionist positions the Reichwing pushes. I daresay their voices would be a lot quieter if the risk that their boots were on that ground were higher.
pseudonymous in nc
@Suzanne:
I think John has talked about his service in those terms. But isn’t that often the way, especially in times when a home territory isn’t actively under attack? You go into the army as an officer because you’re a second or third son who isn’t going to inherit. You sign up for the Roman Legion because you get citizenship at the end of your service.
The question then becomes whether it’s good for a nation the size of the US to have a massive military force — remember, the US still spends more than the rest of the world put together — that relies upon people who wanted to get the fuck out of wherever they were from, because there was nothing there on offer. And I think mclaren has a point here, in that the US has an awful lot of Bumfuck to generate a lot of young people who want to get the fuck out of Bumfuck and if they can’t get to college then it’s often the military or fuck-all else.
Omnes Omnibus
@mclaren: Defensive much?
Ruckus
As someone who served when there was a draft and a war I’m torn between a fair draft (whatever the hell that is) and an all volunteer force. A standing military seems to be necessary to me and so many having no skin in the game seems wrong, as they do have some responsibility in the conduct of the country. On the other hand I believe that China has a pretty big standing military and I doubt that it is volunteer, abet the average citizen is without much responsibility in the conduct of the country.
We also don’t need everyone to serve, we can get along fine without everyone serving, it is after all a big country and we don’t need that big of military. We could of course have people serve in other aspects for instance national park service, etc. And a problem comes about when politicians see a big military and decide to use it, just because. That’s always worked out well for us.
A fair draft would at least make more people think about going to war. And that old bullshit I heard about draftees being poor servicemen is bullshit. The majority of lazy do nothings and assholes I saw were lifers. YMMV. On the other hand how fair is it if the majority still don’t have to serve?
sdhays
@Omnes Omnibus: It’s a complicated subject. I’m not sure what I think. I have lots of thoughts, but as I think to write them, I don’t find them satisfactory.
Prescott Cactus
Missed Viet Nam by a couple years. The idea of joining the Services was not really a realistic alternative at the time. 5 years later I was and still am convinced that each and every US citizen should do one year of compulsory basic service and training.
You are provided with many things in life that you can use later on. Structure, organization, fragging the Lieutenant, etc.
We need skin in the game. None of this chicken hawk deferment shite either. Company clerk in a wheelchair and if you can get around any better, than grab a rifle, son. First year out of High School, wether you finished in two years (dropped out) or 5. It didn’t seem to slow Trickie Dick down, but maybe folks would be less willing to vote for Bomb, Bomb McCain if there middle class child got stuck in Trumpganistan.
Omnes Omnibus
@Ruckus: A fair draft would make the chance of anyone serving equal. A roll of the dice thing. Never has been. People I served with fell into a few categories. Family service (officer and enlisted). Search for benefits (ROTC types and enlisted serving for college benefits, bonuses, or training). People seeking adventure or to prove themselves ins some way (Most Airborne volunteers and me). FWIW, contra mclaren, a good number of my fellow officers were, like me, graduates of Ivies or will regarded LACs. Or at least my battalion and social circle was.
Cheryl Rofer
@boatboy_srq: Your father’s comment on strategic arms also applies to the rest of a strong military. The point is deterrence, and not having to use them. If you’re smart about diplomacy, you don’t even have to say anything about them. Everybody on earth who cares about such things knows that the US military is head and shoulders above everyone else’s.
The overhang of nukes, though, makes it easier for someone like Putin to play chicken, knowing that the US will be reluctant to escalate to that never use endpoint.
And others have commented that some will always see that strong military as something that must be used.
I don’t have any answers, just musing.
Goblue72
@Gussie: 10,000 times this.
Gussie
@efgoldman: I’m not replying to ‘everyone in the military,’ just the post. And I very much agree that all Americans should be paid more than subsistence wages, and get full benefits. That’s not what the post said; the post said “asking that they kill and die on behalf of a war that you yourself refuse to participate in is, to resuscitate a word, dishonorable.”
That’s such bullshit.
boatboy_srq
@Ruckus:
The distinction is not between “the majority still don’t have to serve” but “pigs will fly before the vast majority run the least risk of serving.” If there were the mere possibility that 1%er kids might get called up and told to don uniforms and board transports for parts unknown, there’d be a distinct change in public rhetoric.
See my earlier comment above. “Big military” doesn’t need tens of thousands of troops at the moment; a few dozen warheads in the 50 kiloton range seem seem to provide enough of the GOTea primary field with plenty of swagger. Strategic arms as deterrent has had no meaning for those volk since Saint Ronnie, and the troops are no longer the sum of the “big military” they expect to employ.
mclaren
@pseudonymous in nc:
To me, the big problem with military recruitment in America is that it’s being used a jobs program. Well, goddammit, if we want jobs in rural areas, why go the long way around? Why not just fucking create jobs in rural areas?
Our highways are crumbling, our bridges are falling apart, we desperately need a civilian passenger train set of rail lines alongside our commercial rail lines for freight trains (right now, the two systems share the same rail line and it creates havoc when a five-mile-long train has to be shunted off the main line onto a spur because there’s a civilian train on the track). Fixing all that would create a hell of a lot of jobs in rural areas.
I really seriously think we could do a lot better than generating jobs through the military by doing some CCC-type projects like nationwide high-speed rail or bridge maintenance or solar electric power construction to employ rural people.
The entire issue of no jobs for young people in the center of the country is creating huge problems in America. Kids grow up in the center of the U.S., find there are no jobs when they graduate high school, so they have to migrate to the West or East Coast. This drives real estate prices sky-high on both coasts and increases inequality. It also creates a horrible Catch-22 whereby the only place that has lots of decent-paying jobs has rents too high for young people to live there unless they cram in 4 to a studio apartment. It’s hellish, and it’s unsustainable.
Articles like “Do millenials stand a chance in the real world?” are just brutal. When the typical single-bedroom apartment in any major city in the U.S. requires 85% of a minimum wage paycheck, something has got to give. This can’t go on. And dumping millenials into the army and then flushing them out into society like waste when they get back from Buttfuckistan with PTSD is no solution.
Ruckus
@Suzanne:
Joined because that all they could find to do. As others have said this is in no way unusual. I knew a captain in the army who told me he had a fellow from the ozarks in his company who had 3 kids. He joined for the free medical/dental. He of course became a mud slogger in Vietnam. I didn’t hear how it turned out except that he got his dental work done and his kids were taken care of. I joined the navy to hopefully give myself a better chance (joined in 69 before the lottery but my # was 15 and I was 1A, I was going if I hadn’t) but there was no concept of asking for some type of training or assignment. And I met lots of fellows that had no job, at least of any consequence, no prospects and really nothing better to do. And the pay wasn’t worth it, it was shit, I got $115/month when I went in, after I made E5 was getting $350/month. Today it’s better pay but not all that much. So someone with no prospects or job really wasn’t getting much in trade.
Omnes Omnibus
@Goblue72: There is rather a difference between being a logger and being a soldier. Being a logger is dangerous on a day to day basis. So is being a soldier; I’ve seen soldiers killed in peacetime training. Dead is dead. Being in the military is inherently dangerous. OTOH, politicians and the voters who make choices can change the level of danger exponentially. The job is different. I am not suggesting that anyone kiss the military’s ass. Quite a few of them probably would be better off in jail (based on my experience). But if you cannot recognize that the job is rather different than almost all others, you aren’t trying.
Goblue72
@Omnes Omnibus: Well, unfortunately for you, what mcclaren is actual data, and not mere anecdote.
But please, rebut mcclaren’s data driven citation with equally persuasive snark.
boatboy_srq
@Cheryl Rofer: It was actually part of Dad’s pride of service: he was involved in the FBM programs and was convinced that they helped buy peace so long as they remained deterrent. Nothing galled him more than some wingnut pol suggesting the US actually use the arsenal. He had no illusions about conventional forces being deterrent at the same level: conventional warfare doesn’t carry the same absolute annihilation risk – or the same stigma. Dad was WW2, so his perspective on both conventional forces and on deterrence were shaped by those events; he saw that military buildup by the soon-to-be Allies in the thirties didn’t prevent the European war, and the US’ potential didn’t stop Japan from striking first. Large conventional forces in the absolute are far less deterrent than mere obstacle. Me, I worry less about the “boots on the ground” camp than I do about the “we have all these nukes;…” camp.
Suzanne
@pseudonymous in nc: It is often that way, but that scares the piss out of me. To me, having a military full of young dudes who can’t figure out what to do with their lives is insanity. Absolutely fucking crazy. These people have lives in their hands—their own, their friends’, and often the civilian citizens of other countries—and we are entrusting that sacred responsibility to some nice kids who are often struggling with the discipline of getting and keeping a civilian job or going to community college. It is to me 110% obvious that this is why we make the wrong call about how to use our military—and also why enlisted people are so likely to support wars. There is literally no other job for them to do. We have to employ them, and many of them don’t have other skill sets.
Omnes Omnibus
@Goblue72: You may or may not chose to credit my personal experience. That is fine. I was making an observation based on my personal knowledge. The fact that I was talking about officers not enlisted soldiers should tell you something.
boatboy_srq
@Carla Menssen: 2,000 is a fairly reasonable sample size. With proper statistical methods the MOA is somewhere around 2% with a sample that big. Now, if they didn’t do their homework, and selected the entire sample population from WCWs in someplace like rural Kentucky,…
boatboy_srq
@mclaren:
Far, far too much of that gets spun as “making jobs for Those People, paid for with Your Taxes.” If we’re going to build a new WPA or CCC, we need defenses for it that will undercut the racist bigotry the Reichwing uses.
Suzanne
@mclaren: I agree with you 100% here. My in-laws live in Fayetteville, AR, and they are running one of the last family farms in the area (it belongs to my MIL’s dad, who is in a nursing home). My BILs have no fucking prospects out there. The jobs are shit and pay worse. They haven’t been able to afford their own places to live, and now they are living in the farmhouse. Unsurprisingly, women are not beating down the door. If they didn’t have that farm, they would be utterly fucked. One BIL is considering joining the military, but due to his mental health, I think it is the worst idea ever.
My MIL wants us to move there. I told her COLD DAY IN HELL. Top 20 metro areas for me only.
Ruckus
@boatboy_srq:
Just because the smart son had no idea what he was doing (any more than his “advisers”), that phrase, “boots on the ground” will always be around. Always. Everything else is support to get them there, protect their backs, provide supplies and munitions. Bombing campaigns, offshore bombardment, this is to soften up the field but people with small arms and tanks is what works. And until the enemy has chips installed to guide weaponry to their location it will always be such. That doesn’t mean boots on the ground always wins, but it is the only way it’s possible. Many in the AF and Navy might argue with that.
Adam L Silverman
Per John’s request I’ve gone ahead and updated with some of my thoughts on his post.
Omnes Omnibus
@Ruckus: Artillery conquers, infantry occupies. It is ever thus. And before artillery can conquer, some poor 2LT and his team need to show up and call in fire. That’s one level of boots on the ground.
Adam L Silverman
@Cheryl Rofer: “Shiny weapons are instruments of ill omen, use them only as a last resort” – Lao Tzu; The Tao Te Ching
Goblue72
Why the fuck SHOULD we have a draf? Fuck that.
Korea – quasi-bullshit proxy war between US. & China/Soviet Union.
Vietnam – total bullshit
Grenada – chest thumping bullshit
Panama – more chest thumping bullshit
Persian Gulf – theoretically justified but surrounded by a good portion of bullshit about a former client state getting out of line with its paymasters
Yugoslavia – randomly chosen chest thumping exercise operating under veneer of “humanitarianism”
Iraq – so much bullshit
Afghanistan – sliver of “finding Osama” surrounded by a lot of bullshit
Military service since the end of Workd War 2 has largely borne little relation to true national defense, and far more often functioned as the sharp end of the spear in service to a national security state and the interests of economic elites, in pursuit of quasi-imperialist ends.
If someone wants to volunteer for that, it’s a free country. But fuck that noise about mandatorily requiring service to THAT.
As far as mcclaren’s quite correct observation that economic hardship drives a large part of those volunteering for the military. The solution isn’t a fucking draft. The solution is a robust & progressive social welfare safety net.
Adam L Silverman
@Suzanne: @Ruckus: The American military is the last functioning socio-economic escalator left in the US. All of the other traditional ones are now broken.
Omnes Omnibus
@Adam L Silverman: Thank you. With niggling details aside, I endorse your update. As an army officer who was commissioned in the late ’80s, that was what we were taught.
Adam L Silverman
@Suzanne: This is why we do Initial Military Training (IMT), otherwise known as indoctrination. Its also why we don’t let junior personnel be in charge of things. Even company grade officers placed in charge of something are paired with a much more experienced Non-commissioned Officer who is there to teach them their Profession and keep them out of trouble. We also constantly send our personnel back to school. First for training and then for education. And we are constantly doing experiential learning.
Goblue72
@Omnes Omnibus: Your personal experience is mere anecdote and evidence of nothing other than your limited specific experiences. It is not data.
Again, you responded to a data driven argument with mere snark.
Weak tea.
Suzanne
@Adam L Silverman: Thanks for your thoughts. WRT your comment regarding the concern about having enough highly educated men remaining, that confirms my belief that we as a society really don’t think some lives are truly worth very much. Despite the “America’s Finest” rhetoric, we only send the expendable.
Millenials are not wanting to join because they think their lives are worth something. Good for them. I would be interested to see how big or small the military would be if, say, we had a Guaranteed Minimum Income. If there were other financial options for people, would they elect to join? My gut SEZ no.
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
@Ruckus: But the bigger problem than deciding when/if to use bootsonnaground is deciding when/if they come home. Sure, we can “win”, but when do we leave? And who takes over when we leave? To many running for office don’t want to think about those questions…
There’s an idea in my head that I’ve mentioned before. It’s not quite fully formed, but I think there’s something to it. Namely: Wars of conquest seem to be obsolete. There are too many rifles out there, too much ammo, and it’s too easy to make explosives. Yeah, the USAF and Navy can flatten a city to rubble, but the remaining people inside won’t take kindly to it. They’ll make any occupation very, very painful. If one buys that idea, then the argument for having an Army with a few hundred thousand troops seems to me to be a very tough sell. We can’t conquer other countries any more – we can just destroy them. And that requires a much smaller force than we have now. So even less of the population will be fighting and dying over seas, but the risk to the population as a whole if things don’t go well will increase over time (oceans aren’t difficult to cross now).
So, I agree that it takes boots on the ground to “win” more than a temporary victory. But I don’t think even that is sufficient any more. Peoples don’t like being conquered and they have the means now to prevent it even if their economy is destroyed. So I think we need to think differently about what “politics by other means” really means these days and going forward.
Just my $0.02.
Cheers,
Scott.
Suzanne
@Adam L Silverman: And yet sooooo many of the members of the military favor boots-on-the-ground for the next war. And the next war. Etc. At some point, it looks less like principled use of our fighting force and more LET’S-KEEP-BUSY.
Dmbeaster
All evidence suggests that we are already at this point, although there is the homage “thank you for your service,” but dont ask the same of me, my loved ones, or anyone else I care about. The stop loss policies of the Iraq war and the overuse of National Guard also demonstrated an essentially mer enary treatment of troops. Too many who would thank them for their service has zero sympathy for the abuse of that service. After all, they volunteered.
It has also fueled a warmongering streak in tbe US.
Adam L Silverman
@Ruckus: This is exactly right. Army’s fight campaigns. Marines fight battles. The Air Force provides strategic lift, strategic strike, and tactical strike and support. The Navy provides strategic lift, strategic and tactical strike, standoff indirect fires. The Coast Guard provides interdiction, tactical strike, and brown water operations. Wars are won by personnel on the ground because that’s where people live.
boatboy_srq
@Adam L Silverman: Thank you.
I think this strikes at the heart of the debate:
The modern civilian dialogue virtually ignores this concept, in no small part because the only ones that discuss an individual’s debt to the society in which s/he lives are the Reichwingers and ammosexuals who constantly whinge “freedom isn’t free” as a mask for their various cultural vices. There is no real talk of “duties and responsibilities”: consider the “voter fraud” discussions (which are surprisingly relevant), where the debate on our side is countered with conservatist lines about the “privilege” or “option” of voting – in other words, of doing what is necessary to maintain a working representative democracy. Taxation, which should be borne with at least some dignity, is now an excessive burden to be alleviated at nearly any cost (monetary or material). You hit the nail on the head with Shrub’s exhortations to “go shopping”, but buried in that moment is the sociological payload that the civilians don’t have to foot the bill for military adventurism, much less actually go and join the fighting. After Medicare Part D and the Shrub tax breaks, it was a nearly-final nail in the coffin of civil obligation. If the US was “taxed enough already” and prescriptions would (to a point) be handed out to retirees just for being retired (with no funding to support the costs and Medicare forced to pay retail for the scrips), then waging war without paying for it was just one more magical thing that Washington could do that the citizens could take for granted. Political disengagement through removal of obligations seems far less ineffective than it looks in print.
Adam L Silverman
@Omnes Omnibus: You’re welcome. One of the hardest thing I ever watched was a colonel asking a senior uniformed official (4 stars) why we weren’t being allowed to win in Iraq after so many of her friends, colleagues, and her spouse had given there lives to achieve so many successes. It was painful, and sad because all of those hard won and dearly paid for tactical successes were never going to amount to a victory because of the strategic malpractice that the Bush 43 Administration brought to Operation Iraqi Freedom.
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
@Adam L Silverman: Excellent. Thanks very much.
Cheers,
Scott.
Villago Delenda Est
I’ve long been concerned that the AVF would be misused, in ways Abrams and Meyer never foresaw, and sure enough, under the deserting coward and the Dark Lord (both should spend the rest of their worthless lives in dank, dark cells on bread and water, tops) the AVF was misused. Even the “round out” concept failed to put a break on warmongering. Shinseki sacrificed his career to point out that the occupation of Iraq was doomed, because the US didn’t have enough warm bodies to pull it off the way von Rumsfailed and the neocons envisioned…and even worse, they sent fucking kids who were Ayn Rand fans to “rebuild” Iraq in the image of an ideology that cannot ever work.
Omnes Omnibus
@Goblue72: Other people offered their personal experience to support their opinions. You take exception to mine. I did not claim that my experience was universal It wasn’t I did a lot of protocol shit and dealt with German nobility and high ranking officers (including Claus von Stauffenberg’s son who was a senior German officer). My experience in the military is not typical, but it was mine. Is your issue that was an officer? I merely offered an observation from my experience. Snobbery, even in reverse form, is unattractive.
Goblue72
@Suzanne: Completely agree. And agree it’s a huge problem. 40 years ago, it was our nation’s cities that needed saving. Today, it is our rural and exurban communities in the nation’s interior that need saving.
Me, I want high speed rail everywhere.
Ruckus
@Omnes Omnibus:
Oh I agree with this 100%. It’s why I put in fair draft. I was 20 when I joined, I had lived with a 1A status for over 2 yrs. The stress was too much, not knowing which day when I got home, there would be that letter.
@Suzanne:
Well that is one reason that the military has the discipline and control of your life that it does and one reason that weapon safety is religious. Or at least it is supposed to be. And as Omnes stated some really should be in prison rather than the military. I know of guys who were allowed to join rather than go to jail. But for some that really can be a good thing, prison would do nothing for them, give them no reason to change. The military is capable of changing some minds.
Also almost all of the people that I know that served hate war. Those that got up real close to it, to taste it, feel it and unfortunately remember it most of them hate it. I had the fortune/misfortune of being among a group of mostly marines for 2 months who broke under the strain of war. It ain’t pretty and I’d bet that out of those about 50 men, some of them never recovered.
Adam L Silverman
@Suzanne: I think you need to take that in the context of late 1941 and early 1942 and how the people running the country understood it. I will not argue with the data that the US military is overly composed of Americans from rural communities, the South, and the West/Southwest. Many from working class or poor backgrounds. I’ve seen it and know its accurate. I also know this is not necessarily representative of the officer cohort, which tends to be from better off backgrounds. I once argued, in a job interview for the research center that does the research and analysis on how to improve recruiting (they thought having someone who specialized in culture and had deployment experience might help them) that as a citizen I want the All Volunteer Force to look like America. This way every demographic in the country had its members in and had a stake in how the military was used. This seemed to surprise the folks interviewing me. Needless to say I did not get the job. It was one of the strangest interviews I’ve ever had.
boatboy_srq
@Ruckus: Of course BotG will always be there. And the logistic train will be there too. War is costly in lives and materiel; and too many don’t recognize that fully. What I was pointing out was that there is no longer the fixation merely on the BotG side of the coin among the GOTea – and the alternative, which is far more frightening, is being treated as a legitimate military option rather than the ultimate trump card to prevent catastrophe. If my father thought that the weapons he worked on would ever be so casually discussed as weapons for practical deployment in a primary by people presuming they could be pResident he’d have walked out on the programs he worked in a minute.
Omnes Omnibus
@efgoldman: Exactly. Remember GEN Shinseki.
Adam L Silverman
@I’mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet: This is a great comment and gets at my oft stated remarks about war termination, victory, and what, exactly is winning/victory. Is it winning on the battlefield – forcing the enemy through force to capitulate to your terms and stop fighting versus securing the peace – actually consolidating the battlefield outcome into achieving one’s actual policies.
Ruckus
@Omnes Omnibus:
I figured you sign in with an artillery note!
I’m not sure it conquers as much as softens the field and makes the enemy not quite as resolute. But it is necessary for sure, all the destruction is necessary to win a war. That’s what makes it hell on earth and makes people die doing it.
Suzanne
@efgoldman: From what I have both read and seen, the enlisted ranks of all of the branches are more conservative and hawkish than the general population. I can’t help but think that part of the reason for this is to keep the jobs program going, since many of them join for the pay and bennies.
@Adam L Silverman: In 2008, when I was in my late 20s, Mr. Suzanne asked me if I knew anyone who was currently serving in the military, because apparently a huge percentage of people our age did not. I was shocked, because I knew at least ten enlisted dudes and a few officers, including my cousin. But I’m in the southwest, and grew up in a very working-class neighborhood.
Ruckus
@Adam L Silverman:
Thanks, I like the update.
Goblue72
@efgoldman: Oh blow it out your rear. Mcclaren made the quite correct observation that military service is largely drawn from poor rural and exurban communities, largely in the South and southwest, and that only 30% utilize the GI Bill after service – all supported by DATA. And the quite logical inference that there just might be a relationship between that and why the majority of Millenials don’t feel the need to actually volunteer for service – absent economic considerations.
Someone serving in the military doesn’t make them an expert on the statistics of who serves and why.
Adam L Silverman
@Suzanne: I want to caveat this that I spent a lot of time from 2010 through now dealing and interacting with the most senior personnel from all cohorts (officer, NCO, and warrant), who are also the best educated (both civilian and Professional Military Education), and the bulk of these are from the officer cohort. So take this for what its worth: my experience is that the most willing to question whether any given problem should be addressed by the military is people within the military. They recognize that a lot of what they are routinely asked to do is outside what they should be doing. They also recognize that 1) we are structured so that the military is really the only governmental institution with the personnel and other resources to undertake these missions, even if they would be better performed and we would be better served if they are done by other agencies/departments and 2) they are trained and taught from day 1 to never say no to a mission unless they are receiving an unlawful order or being asked to do something professionally unethical. One of the major problems, for instance, is that the number of Foreign Service Officers is essentially the same number of personnel in one brigade. Even with the current size of the Army, we have far more than 5,000 Soldiers to cover the entire globe. Another is that a problem with the civil service rules and protections, and one I don’t think was anticipated at the time, is that it is very difficult to order personnel into a deployment or to detail them to an assignment that was not foreseen in their normal scope of civilian service/position description. While many (most?) DOD, Army, Navy, and Air Force civilians, as well as the Intel civilians, have the possibility of deployment or detail into their position descriptions, this is not the case for many/most other agencies and departments. So if you need an agricultural specialist you might be able to incentivize and annoy the person into a deployment, but you can’t actually force them or retaliate if they don’t go. While I think we need more civil servants in general and specifically in certain departments and agencies that aren’t DOD, I also think we need some limited civil service reform so we can get people where we need them rather than just sending the military.
Adam L Silverman
@Dmbeaster: If we’re not there yet, we are certainly close. And I’m not sure we’re there yet, because I’ve not seen widespread, serious reference by military personnel to themselves as mercenaries. Should that happens, then we’ve got a reinforcing dynamic.
Omnes Omnibus
@Goblue72: Did efg say that service in the military made someone at stats expert? No. And. fwiw, I specifically limited my observations to my experience. I did not ever claim statistical significance. I was, however, my experience. Do you have a military experience that you can offer as evidence?
Goblue72
@Adam L Silverman: Some would say by intention. The military being the only economic opportunity and safety net for the lower socioeconomic orders is precisely to the benefit of economic elites that benefit from quasi-imperialist adventurism and the military industrial complex.
Our country does not dedicate such a disproportionate portion of its national budget to the War Department compared to our peer countries because we have a functioning democracy.
Adam L Silverman
@boatboy_srq: Absolutely right. Its the reason I have a problem with things like Wounded Warrior and these other charities to provide support and aid to veterans/wounded veterans. That’s our jobs as citizens. It is a responsibility. It is paid for with taxes. It is not optional if you feel like sending $15 a month! The unwillingness to budget for – both a revenue stream and a funding line – for what returning veterans would need is a national shame. Given who the bulk of the failure largely falls in, I don’t find it surprising. Love service members, but don’t think about what they’ll need once they’re veterans is all too reminiscent of loving fetuses, but not caring what happens once a baby is actually born.
boatboy_srq
@I’mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet: @Adam L Silverman: Ditto ALS.
Again, one thing that will prevent the US from winning a peace for some time to come is the simultaneous overinvestment in the DoD (and the underinvestment in everything else) side by side with the perception of federal revenue as suspect. The Marshall Plan was funded with billions (what would now be hundreds of billions) in US taxpayer dollars to rebuild Europe: without that spending, modern Europe as allies and trading partners would have been impossible. Suggesting that the same kind of effort is required in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, or anywhere else similarly devastated today is political suicide for both parties: progressives want to spend on roads and schools and transit and water and clean energy, the Reichwing doesn’t want to spend on anything but their pet rocks, and neither are overly interested in throwing wads of cash at people being cast as the modern equivalent of the Fascists.
Conversely, if the US had not demanded repayment of war debts in 1918 (impossible for the other Allies to repay because their economies were in ruins after four years of war), Germany’s Reparations would have been much smaller: “we want our money back” approaches to diplomacy may have appeased the voters at home but did nothing for world affairs besides sow the seeds for the next major conflict. Yet this is essentially the approach the modern Conservatists advocate: for example, GW2 was only acceptable to fiscal hawks because Iraqi oil sales would recoup the expenditures. “Making them pay” – and not just with bombardment – is quite popular, despite its horrendous track record.
If the US wants to win any peace, it will need to invest significant sums in international aid – with the sole dividend being a durable peace and a potential trade partner in coming decades. The electorate doesn’t seem particularly inclined to pay up: there is a significant overestimation of how much foreign aid the US provides, and to which nations, as it is. And again, this goes back to the abandonment of “duties and responsibilities” of the citizenry: there is strong support for a strong nation – but no inclination to pay, in dollars or in service, for that strength.
Adam L Silverman
@efgoldman: Thanks for including me with the others, but my service needs to be caveated. It was non-uniformed service. For my deployment in Iraq I was a contractor, as my program was a proof of concept (experiment), so all the civilians other than the director and deputy director were contractors as required by DOD/Army policy. My service at the US Army War College was as a term limited Army civilian under the Intergovernmental Personnel Act.
Suzanne
@Adam L Silverman: This is very reassuring—THX for your insight.
Ruckus
@Adam L Silverman:
@I’mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet:
Adam puts it a bit more properly than I did but that was my point and Scott it answers your question about why one needs a force on the ground rather than say carpet bombing. To win without ground troops you have to destroy everything but people will always survive (see below) and they won’t be happy. People survived the atomic bomb and some the radiation poisoning. They surrendered because more of the same would have meant complete destruction of the country. The leaders may have been left but no one to lead. And now that we all know what happens with nukes in the end and they are far more powerful and dangerous than WWII, we use the threat of them but not the weapons. It would be foolish for anyone to use them as now it would mean complete destruction of every thing living in short order and that isn’t winning.
Adam L Silverman
@Goblue72: I would not argue with that. Everything else seems to have been purposefully broken or broken by neglect.
Steeplejack
@Adam L. Silverman
Fixed. Don’t start with a clunker.
Also, please tighten your hyperlinks to a phrase or a sentence, not a whole paragraph. Awfully hard to read.
And partly that is a perversion of the “profession of arms” philosophy into the “warrior cop” mentality that infects too many of the police. Add to that the militarization of police equipment and tactics and the profiling of large segments of the citizenry as the “enemy” and you’ve got a perfect storm for bad outcomes. Which is exactly what we are seeing.
Goblue72
@Omnes Omnibus: I’m not sure exactly what else he was suggesting. My only comment this entire thread was in response to your bullshit “defensive much” snark response to mcclaren’s data supported observation. And equally inane response that somehow people who haven’t served don’t get to make certain kind of criticisms (in connection with Gussie upthread.
Goblue72
@efgoldman: Omnes response to mcclaren was “defensive much”. That’s not a response, that’s bullshit snark. I can read. Can you?
Adam L Silverman
@Goblue72: One of our biggest problems is the failure to incentivize the use of the GI Bill. This includes providing a way to pull it forward and make it useable during service, especially for educational needs that are critical. Such as language, social sciences, history, engineering, and the sciences depending on one’s military occupational specialty and/or functional area. The other problem is, because of current law, the inability to ascend anyone but lawyers and doctors at a sufficient enough rank to entice them to change careers. The result is that it becomes very difficult to bring in folks with specific expertise and credentials to do work in specific Functional Areas and Military Occupational Specialities.
I was once very flattered to be approached by a high ranking Civil Affairs officers (we were both part of the Civil Affairs Capabilities Based Assessment in 2010 – I was brought in as the outside subject matter expert just as I was transitioning into my billet at USAWC) about accepting a commission into Civil Affairs if he could swing it. I said I’d be honored, but my concern was he wouldn’t be able to get an exemption to policy to even bring me in as a captain, let alone something a bit higher. At the time I had just turned 40, was a (term limited) GS 15, had spent the previous 3 and 1/2 years pay graded as a contractor at the GS 15 level, and I have a joint/dual doctorate and a pair of masters degrees. No one wants a 40 year old second lieutenant who’s been a GS 15 or is one in his non Reserve status, with all my credentials. Ultimately he was, as I suspected, unable to pull anything off – including approval for a direct ascension.
Goblue72
@Adam L Silverman: That would require taxes. We can’t have that kind of talk.
Adam L Silverman
@Steeplejack: Fixed the grammar problem. I’ll take your hyperlink request under advisement for future posts.
Adam L Silverman
@Goblue72: This, along with roads, bridges, a power grid, education, and making sure no one dies alone, hungry, and sick in the cold, is the reason we are supposed to have taxes.
I now you know that, but it drives me nuts that this even has to be commented on, let alone explained.
Omnes Omnibus
@Goblue72: mclaren and I have a history. mclaren has accused me of being a pentagon sock-puppet and more. Don’t step in to it.
Steeplejack
@Goblue72:
I read Omnes’s “Defensive much?” as a response not to mclaren’s whole comment but to the (defensive-sounding) snippet:
Ruckus
@Goblue72:
You may be able to read but your level of understanding of complex issues is woefully lacking. You attack people for slights that usually just aren’t there. And when explained you rarely let it go but double down. In Vegas they call that losing twice as fast.
No one was arguing about mclaren’s data, in fact if you understood what many of the comments have been about you know that few would argue at all with those facts because they are correct. People with nothing to lose and everything to gain economically join the military. That’s been true for every military for ever. People generally don’t join at the lowest level just for shits and giggles. I sure didn’t and neither did anyone I ran into in my time in the navy and none of us were drafted into the navy. You do so because you believe in service or because it’s a decent choice in a group of not much choice at all. One of the things that a fair draft would do is bring people into the military who have choices, even if not all of those choices are all that good. Having no draft and no good choices gives you the people who join, lower socioeconomic. It ain’t hard to figure out. And this really hasn’t changed in over 45 yrs any more than it did a hundred yrs before that.
boatboy_srq
@Adam L Silverman: It’s the reason progressives believe we are supposed to have taxes. To the Reichwing it’s just more “free stuff” (jobs, housing, care, food, whatever) for Those People. Unless and until that attitude is consigned to the cultural wastebin, there will be pushback on every last cent of taxation. We need better arguments than “our taxes pay for [insert common weal here]” because the Reichwing steadfastly refuse to recognize that one.
Adam L Silverman
@boatboy_srq: No argument from me on any of that.
Goblue72
@Adam L Silverman: I would take that further. What mcclaren suggested above – in connection with the cited NPP study, is that when the military is enlisting disproportionately from the lower socioeconomic orders (and from the geographic areas of the country that are the most poorly resourced in terms of K-12), that it’s a reasonable inference that those enlisted will be ill equipped to take advantage of the GI Bill once they are discharged. They weren’t equipped for college going in, and they are only marginally more equipped going out. Esp given going from a life with a lot of structure & institutional supports, to a world where they have none.
And that’s not even getting into the issue that not everyone is equipped for college – and that the skills for success in college are quite specific, and may not necessarily overlap with whatever skills they acquired for success as enlistees.
Goblue72
@Omnes Omnibus: um, how about, go fuck yourself? Sir.
boatboy_srq
@efgoldman: National[ist] pride, and personal shame: the two sides of the Reichwingnut coin.
Goblue72
@Ruckus: I noted above why a draft is bullshit.
Goblue72
@Steeplejack: Frankly I find it par for the course with Omnes.
Adam L Silverman
@Goblue72: Believe me, I’m tracking. I can’t tell you how many discussions I had with my higher HQ at TRADOC about this when we were trying to develop a plan to incentivize utilization of these types of benefits to get Soldiers past Initial Military Training to take courses that involved language (ROTC cadets and the cadets at the Point and VMI are already incentivized for this and its easy to get buy in as its a collegiate setting), as well as things that fall under how the Army understands culture. This is the broad, 19th century socio-cultural conceptualization so it includes politics, kinship, religion, economics, and a whole host of other things.
Goblue72
@Adam L Silverman: Well that would be nice. I have no problem with someone wanting to volunteer for the military. I do have a problem with there being no other economic options available for the poor and working class except military service. Economic chains are still chains.
And I do have a problem with others suggestions that a draft is the answer. (I know you didn’t suggest that.) We don’t solve the problems of lack of economic freedom with forced conscription.
Suzanne
@Goblue72: This has been the experience of almost all of the people I know in my age cohort who have served, with the exception of my cousin. He did a sort of reverse GI bill, where he went to an expensive private college on the USAF’s dime, then served four years as an officer. He majored in human factors, then had a desk job for four years. Pretty sweet deal.
But no one else that I know has usd their GI bill. And honestly, I’m not surprised, because the people that I know who enlisted are, to a man, the kind of people who can’t deal well without someone telling them what to do all the time. One is a HS dropout, two had pretty severe drug use problems, one had an attitude problem that kept getting him in trouble, and one had ridiculous amounts of student loans in a film degree (he joined because the Army paid off his loans for hm). The Army gave them structure, but I can’t see any of them having much success outside of it.
Adam L Silverman
Its bed time for this Jewish-Susquatch-American… Try not to virtually kill each other (you know who you are) before sunrise.
Adam L Silverman
@Suzanne: when I taught college in Arkansas, I had a large number of students – at least a third, that were AR National Guard. And they were using their benefits at University of Central Arkansas, where I was a Visiting Professor at the time. Many had been through the multiple deployment grinder, including several involved in the lawsuit about being threatened with being stop lost if they didn’t reup in theater shortly before they were set to redeploy home.
TheMightyTrowel
@Adam L Silverman: Just as an aside, I find this fascinating.
My perspective comes from the human sciences and from within the academy (I’m a tenured prof in archaeology at a non-US world top 50 University) where we’ve been seeing a creeping attack on the humanities and social sciences for the last several decades. I’m sure you know this, but for other readers, there are all sorts of financial incentives, funding body regulations, etc. that promote STEM (science, tech, engineering, maths) research/students often through cuts to humanities/social sciences which are deemed to be less strategic, of less value for the future and less likely to lead to lucrative careers. In Australia, humn/soc sciences teach something like 63% of uni students on 52% of the research/teaching budget intentionally so that the rest can be given to enrich STEM. We spend a lot of our time shouting into what feels like a sucking blackhole of a void about how the sciences make weapons and ipads, but the humanities and social sciences make us human.
This long aside was just to say, I find it equal parts refreshing and depressing that the military might be in a position to ‘save’ the humanities.*
*Or at least those bits that can be weaponised.
Suzanne
@Adam L Silverman: I amend my statement—one other dude I knew used his GI Bill, but he used it to get his degree while he was serving. He got stop-lossed, then when he finally got out, he went to architecture school for graduate school. But of the 15 or so people I know who served or are serving in my age cohort, no one else is using it. It sucks. Basically, they’re leaving money on the table.
Goblue72
@Adam L Silverman: I would say the one salve to the frustration is that it’s probably not singular to the military.’
I’ve long felt that our educational system is in part constantly needing to be “reformed” not because our K-12 is completely broken – but because our economic system is broken. We have this odd goal of “sending every kid to college” – when the reality is that the collegiate academic system really only works well for a minority of the population. And more critically, our economy is only producing so many high skill jobs. So much of our job growth is at the other end – low paying service jobs. Which require almost no training at all. What is there to prepare kids for?
So in some ways, our lack of a national industrial policy and redistributionist tax policies drives a lot of this.
Goblue72
@TheMightyTrowel: Intercontinental ballistic Oxford commas? Satellite based semiotics? Mobile critical race theory launchers?
mclaren
@Goblue72:
Some people argue that having a draft would put a grinding screeching halt to all these endless unwinnable overseas wars, because with a draft everyone’s kid would be at risk and the public uproar would shut down the endless unwinnable overseas wars right quick.
But that’s exactly why the American military does not want a fair draft.
A fair draft, if implemented today, would immediately drastically downsize the U.S. military. Here’s the logic:
We’d have a lot fewer overseas wars because if the average person’s kids got sent to die in some third-world hellhole there’d be hell to pay, consequently we’d have to downsize our military, therefore the endless river of gold flowing into the Pentagon would greatly diminish. That’s something the E-ring colonels fear far more than Al Qaeda.
There is, however, a counterargument against this claim that a fair draft would be good because our pols wouldn’t get us involved in crazy unwinnable wars anymore. The counterargument is that a fair draft would just shift the wasted funding from ground troops to worthless Buck Rogers superweapons that don’t work. And that’s probably right.
Read articles like “GAO Blasts Weapons Budget” and “The Defense Death Spiral: Why the Defense Budget Is Always Underfunded,” and you realize that weapons procurement for the Pentagon is like drugs for an addict. There’s never enough, and you can spend a limitless amount of money on it.
People here think and talk about the U.S. military as though it was separate from the rest of the U.S. economy, but it really isn’t. Starting in 1956, Paule Nitze issued NSC 68, a national security council memo that set forth the doctrine of Military Keynesiasm.
Source: Wikipedia article on “NSC-68.”
Since 1956, we’ve followed that path of plowing more and more money into the U.S. military as a way of simultaneously containing the USSR and developing the American economy — but there are two problems with that strategy. The first problem is that the USSR vanished in a puff of smoke about 24 years ago. Russia hasn’t been a significant threat to America since 1991. And, second, the process of plowing money into the U.S. military accelerated at such a rate over the past 60 years that the U.S. military has now become a black hole sucking in unbelievable amounts of our economy. 2 billion dollars for each B2 stealth bomber. 1.5 trillion dollar for the F-35 strike fighter squadrons. Do you have any idea how much we could do to rebuild America’s infrastructure and create jobs just by slashing the F-35 procurement in half? That’s three quarters of a trillion dollars. Trillion. With a T. That’s real money.
So I don’t buy the notion of a fair draft as a magic wand to eliminate America’s problem with a miltiary-civiliand ivide. The big problem is that American culture has gotten way way way way out of balance, and we’re now plowing such a humongous amount of money into our military that it’s warped our entire society. America has become massively militarized. Our entertainment is now mainly military (ultraviolent video games that feature military scenarios like GEARS OF WAR or HALO, or movies that feature thinly-disguised sci-fi military scenarios, like THE AVENGERS or CAPTAIN AMERICA or ENDER’S GAME or actual military scenarios like ZERO DARK THIRTY or AMERICAN SNIPER, or TV shows like HOMELAND), our police are now so heavily militarized that they are geared up exactly like soldiers in a active theater like FOBs in Afghanistan, and even our political discourse is now massively militarized. Everything is now a ‘war’ on something — War on Drugs, War on Copyright Infringement, War on [fill in the blank].
This is not good for a society. A participatory democracy is not compatible with a massively militarized society. Eventually one or the other will have to go. Read Sun Tzu: “There is no instance of a country having benefited from prolonged warfare.”
Our politicians’ penchant for endless unwinnable foreign wars and America’s economic policy and the total lack of jobs in the center of the United States are all linked. They’re not separate things. Because of our Military Keynesianism economic policy we have no jobs in the center of the country, and because of Military Keynesianism
we’ve got such a massive surplus of superweapons and such a gigantically topheavy overfunded military that we keep getting tempted to use it whenever we encounter a foreign policy problem.
@Adam L Silverman:
To my mind the scariest disconnect is not the disconnect twixt civilians and the people in the U.S. military, it’s between the elite members of the U.S. military and the rest of the rank-and-file enlisted men.
In the current American military, you’ve got guys with multiple advanced degrees who have come out of the Air Force Academy or Annapolis and their priorities or just nothing like the priorities of the guys on the ground who are getting shot at. The captains and the major and the colonels on the way up just want to get their ticket punched for promotion and get into the E-Ring in the Pentagon. These guys worry about things like whether the PowerPoint presentation they’re making for their boss in the E-Ring is perfectly laid out. The enlisted men want to make it through their tour. These guys worry about things like whether they’ll get their arms and legs blown off by an IED because their lieutenant wanted to run a bunch of patrols to get his ticket punched for promotion.
Articles like “Why Our Best Officers Are Leaving,” The Atlantic magazine, January 2011, suggest that this disconnect is becoming toxic inside the U.S. military.
Source: “Why Our Best Officers Are Leaving,” op. cit.
America needs to overhaul its entire economic policy and ditch military Keynesianism, and America also needs to drastically radically reform its military personnel system if it wants to eliminate the civilian-military divide.
TheMightyTrowel
@Goblue72: The language of people you wish to invade so their compliance is more easily achieved? Psychology to make your psy ops and torture more effective? Anthropology and sociology which gives you the tools to recognise local hierarchies and power dynamics so you can assert pressure more efficiently and let local vassals/allies oppress their own people for you?
Goblue72
@TheMightyTrowel: See now that’s using your noggin’. If scarily so.
mclaren
@efgoldman:
Possibly the single most toxic comment in the history of Balloon-Juice.
Welcome to the world of Heinlein’s Starship Troopers. Haven’t served in the military? Your voice doesn’t count in a democracy.
Wellllll..that’s one way to get a Caligula-style military dictatorship, all right. History does not paint a pretty picture of such a mode of governance.
Goblue72
@mclaren: You’re preaching to the choir. I’m a socialist. I know who wins and who loses from our military industrial complex.
Suzanne
@mclaren: Oh, come on. I say far more toxic shit than that on a daily basis.
Zinsky
mclaren is right. I wish people would stop glorifying the military. The story of civilization should be about a steady march away from barbarism and war, not a constant regeneration of bogus reasons to use the military as an extremely blunt tool of international diplomacy. Read The Federalist Papers – one of the biggest debates among the Founders was over the concept of a “standing army” and how that could be misused. In fact, it was a big reason the Second Amendment exists, which will haunt this Republic until it inevitably collapses. I think a lot of Americans, including many commenters here, need to get it through their thick skulls that militarism does NOT equal patriotism!
Chris
@Suzanne:
To be blunt, I’m not sure I don’t find the “I just wasn’t doing anything else!” service members less scary than the people who actually have thought it through and decided that, in the age of Iraq and Afghanistan, this really was a totally awesome thing to do. Yes, some of these people really do volunteer out of civic duty – others do it because they’re right wing psychos. The religious right is flourishing in some parts of the military (Air Force Academy being the most famous case), just as in France the Front National is disproportionately represented among military officers.
I’m a lot less scared of the high school dropout who just wanted the health benefits than I am of those who’re on a mission.
Chris
@efgoldman:
“Jaw dropping self righteousness.” It depends on the person. What’s definitely true is that our culture as a whole is jaw droppingly self righteous on the military’s behalf, in a way that encourages utter contempt towards civilians – the “there are three kinds of people in the world, sheep, wolves, and SHEEPDOGS!” speech from the beginning of American Sniper is that in a nutshell. How many people in the actual militaryrun with that worldview with all its implicit contempt for the sheep, I don’t know.
Robert Sneddon
@TheMightyTrowel:
The STEM graduates also make roads, bridges, ports, railways, clean water supply systems, electricity generating stations, the internet, medicines, hospitals and even the university buildings that the humanities students learn in. They paint, read, write, compose and play music, discuss philosophy (badly), argue and generally do most of the things the humanities students do but in their spare time while making the world so much better than it ever was before STEM came about.
Xboxershorts
Born in ’59, a family of 7 kids in suburban Rochester, Dad got downsized in ’73, was missing/on the road for most of my HS years. I barely graduated HS in 77. 2+ years of Community College learning Auto_tech, I got laid off from my 4th dealership in 1980. Not knowing what the hell to do with my life and going nowhere very fast, I too joined the Navy. 1 and done though, not really career military material. None the less, I did extremely well on my ASVAB test that I could pretty well chose my field and I asked to learn computers and electronics. And I’ve managed to parlay that training and experience into a reasonably secure middle class career as a network engineer.
I served (without much distinction) as a Fire Control Technician on the guided missile destroyer USS Lawrence DDG4. (Someone up-thread kind of dream wished to know how it was to serve on a DDG, I can tell you. It rocked. And rolled. Literally. A lot. Join the Navy…see the world, they said…Ha! It’s mostly water)
Yup, using military service as an escalator into a middle class life was as real a thing back in 1980 as it is today. Which means these processes have been broken for a long, long time.
Funny how John Kerry was mocked by the Right Wing Authoritarians for suggesting this very same thing.
BillinGlendaleCA
@Xboxershorts: The military was the escalator to the middle class for my dad and he joined the Navy in 1937.
Kay
@Goblue72:
Part of what happened was the private sector stopped investing in training their own workforce:
It’s funded by unions and the private sector contractors who need trained workers. There’s no reason private sector employers in other sectors couldn’t do the same thing. Instead they focus all their energy on complaining that public schools don’t ship sufficient numbers of pre-trained workers. Maybe they could invest in training their own people instead of spending tens of millions a year on a couple of top managers?
Public schools are just one piece. They were never intended to cover training for every specific job or trade.
When Scott Walker stands on stage and whines that there aren’t enough skilled trades, someone should ask him whether the CEO standing there with him is contributing to any training programs. If not, why not? It’s not wholly the job of the public to fund job training programs for specific trades or industries.
C.V. Danes
It should be law that an armed conflict lasting longer than 3-6 months should require reinstituting the draft. That might force people to take ‘boots on the ground’ more seriously.
C.V. Danes
@Goblue72: The problem is that the economy is not producing many low skill jobs either. If you don’t have a degree, you’re either committed to the serf economy or are just going to be replaced by a robot.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Oh, for the good old days of the 1970’s and it’s not like General Sheridan wasn’t saying the saying the same thing in the 1870s (how under strength was the 7th Cavalry at the Little Bighorn?).
boatboy_srq
@Xboxershorts: An Adams, huh? Dad told me all I needed to know, after a year on one of these, (yes, in the Pacific, facing kamikazes) to have an idea what that would have been like. This was more what I’d have been looking at…
Starfish
@maeve: You should know how to do HTML from scratch and some CSS (but this can get complicated) and how to use some Javascript libraries like Bootstrap to make your website work on mobile.
And this glitchy website from Bloomberg that I thought was originally a mistake is the bees knees, but it is too long and I didn’t read it. Skip down to the interactive graphic at the “Let’s Begin” section.
boatboy_srq
@mclaren:
We don’t need a fair draft for that: look what the US has spent on the Nimitz-class CVN, the F-35, the M-1, the V-22 and the boondoggle that was SDI. All of those programs were executed with an AVF, and only the CVNs and the M-1 were envisioned when the draft was employed. One of the biggest debates in the USN – quickly muzzled by the "CVNs Forever" camp – was in 1982 when HMS Invincible and HMS Hermes with a couple dozen Harriers beat the pants off the Argentine air force: carriers costing 1/10 (at most) to build and 1/20 (at most) to deploy proved as effective as the modeled effectiveness of the big CVNs. Chickenhawks will fund “worthless Buck Rogers superweapons that don’t work” regardless of the makeup of the conventional forces.
Barry
People should go over to the blog ‘Graphic Firing Table’ (http://firedirectioncenter.blogspot.com/) and read some of FDChief’s writings on this. He summarizes this issue as that the US is fighting ‘colonial wars of choice’; unsurprisingly, most Americans don’t feel that these are worth their lives, or the lives of their children
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
@mclaren: You again bring up some good points, but you seem to be unable to connect the dots in the most reasonable way. As one small example:
The gigantic cost number for the F-35 is the projected total cost for the system over 55 years. Throwing around huge numbers like that and saying “Ah ha! Seee!!!1” is just as bad as those who point at municipal retirement accounts having a 30 year shortfall of $XB and saying “See!! We can’t afford it! We have to cut it Now Now Now!!!1”.
People don’t go bankrupt when they take out a 30 year mortgage for 3x their annual income. The bill doesn’t come due all at once.
US GDP is around $18T. Assuming 2% annual growth over 55 years, the total GDP would be about $54T. 1.5/54 = 2.8% The US can certainly afford to spend < 3% of conservatively projected GDP on the total cost of 2400+ new multipurpose fighters over 55 years if it chooses.
This isn't to say that the F-35 should be bought in such numbers, or that some other fighter choice wouldn't be better. But just throwing out BIG NUMBERS without context isn't enlightening.
A big part of the F-35 cost is for the people to take care of it, spare parts, and the fuel to fly it. Those costs can be much higher for other types of planes. That's one of the reasons why the Pentagon is so anxious to replace fuel hogs designed in the 1970s with more efficient planes – the DOD spends a mountain of money on fuel every year. Pilots have to fly planes all the time to keep up their skills. The USAF uses over half of the Pentagon’s annual fuel consumption, and the Pentagon is the world’s largest energy consumer. If the F-35 can replace a larger number of less capable, more expensive to operate, more vulnerable older fighter/bomber/etc. aircraft, then it can be a sensible investment.
We also know that deciding not to spend BIG NUMBERS on military equipment doesn’t mean that the money would be spent on something else. The US economy and federal budget is not constrained by objective lack of money. It is constrained by lack of political will to spend it where it would do the most good to increase overall demand, employment, economic activity.
My $0.02. FWIW.
Cheers,
Scott.
NobodySpecial
Whenever I see arguments about serving, I’m reminded of that Civil War quote from Schofield: “The American Soldier fights very much as he is accustomed to work his farm or run his sawmill; he wants to see a fair prospect that it is going to pay.” Mclaren is right about one thing for sure – the military pulls from the areas where nothing else seems to pay well enough to be worth the effort. Too bad most millenials are told that the only way to get ahead in this world is to go directly to college, and it better be the RIGHT college too, or you’re stuck as part of the permanent underclass.
boatboy_srq
@I’mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet: I’d agree on the F-35 if it were a viable warplane. There’s plenty of reason to believe it’s not, yet the DoD is still sinking billions into it and Congress wants to spend even more on it than the DoD does (google “F-35 second power plant” and you’ll see what the engine debate has been like). Cost-effectiveness is only one measure: combat effectiveness and survivability are big factors too, and the F-35 appears to have neither. Spending huge sums on a workable, survivable platform makes sense: spending the same on something that does nothing very well and is still (after twenty years of evelopment) not practical for deployment is just plain spendthrift, and spending multiples more than even the hardly-frugal DoD insists is necessary is criminal.
Dave
>Chris: Yes much preferred serving with the “meh why not” group than the true believing gun nuts (though weirdly enough know several that managed to make it through 14 years of conflict without a deployment but still much chest banging).
Dave
@Chris: I despise that language. Find it even more common amongst LEO’s but regardless it’s without a doubt toxic.
Sherparick
@Suzanne: This bugs me a bit because if the country is suppose to a Republic, then all persons should be part of the common defense for ideological reasons. However, I was around when the term “Draft Dodger” went from being a pejorative to being a kind of complement for being smart enough not to get dragged off to Vietnam. And this gets to using large, draft military to fight foreign imperial wars. It starts making Empire pretty unpopular. Also, large draft armies are not needed for dirty little insurgencies. The U.S. Army fought a long insurgency war with native Americans through the whole 19th century with essentially small regular Army that was a least as foreign to most 19th century Americans as the current military is to 21st century Americans. It then fought a second insurgency in the Philippines for very dubious reasons with little or no political cost the McKinley-Teddy Roosevel-Taft administrations. So the exception, not the rule of American History are the American Revolution, the Civil War, Spanish American War, WWI and World War II, and post Korean War to early Vietnam period, when elites joined the military. Otherwise the outsiders did any fighting that had to done.
The military is actually shrinking as weapons of killing becomes even more automated with the need of fewer human operators. The new U.S. Navy Destroyer (battleship?) Zumwalt is suppose to operate with a crew of only about 100, and its Tomahawk cruise missile can destroy targets more than 700 miles away while its radio/GPS guided shells from its 155 mm cannon can hit targets 72 miles away. With a country of 320 million people, it is not hard raise 1 million person military using volunteer system based on good pay, health care, and education benefits.
Heliopause
I dunno, I guess I’m disconnected from the disconnect. If you watch news or sports on TV at all you won’t won’t ever get through a day without a massive ritual obeisance to the military. There are two major military installations within easy driving distance of my house and if you get within thirty miles of either one of them you can’t swing a dead cat without hitting somebody in the military. I worked for 20 years for a small company and several of my co-workers were ex-military and/or in the reserves, and they talked incessantly about their military experiences. Not to mention all the movies, highly rated TV dramas, and so forth. For someone who isn’t particularly oriented in that direction I sure get many orders of magnitude more exposure to military culture than I care to.
I guess by the disconnect you mean that relatively few serve directly in the active military, which is true enough. This is a deliberate and bipartisan policy going back decades, when our elites decided that the population would be easier to control if the vast overseas Empire was neoliberalized.
Grumpy Code Monkey
My then-21-year-old neice joined the Army after realizing that she really didn’t want to go back to finish her last year of college (she went down a path that looked good at first, but by her third year was clearly a mistake). Solidly middle-class upbringing and education, not someone you’d expect to drop out of college and join the Army.
It was the best thing she ever did. She has thrived in the Army. She’s now an E-5 (maybe E-6, not sure) and is doing some really interesting work (admittedly after having spent her first few years doing really boring IT work). It’s clear that this is now going to be a long-term career for her, and she loves it.
There are days when I regret not having done a stint in the military, even though I would probably have not made it a career. I briefly thought about it after graduating high school, but in my family not going to college was not an option, even though I had no idea what I wanted to study and no real motivation (Reagan making noises about Central America also pushed me over to the “no” side). Had I not stumbled into Computer Science after three years of flailing around, I probably would have followed the same route as my neice (whether I would have been successful at it is an open question). Had a good friend who dropped out of college to join the Navy, but that didn’t work out so well.
Many of the men in my family are veterans – both my and RoonieRoo’s fathers served in Korea, almost all of my uncles were active duty or reserve (AF and Navy, mostly). One of my cousins served in Kuwait. And I grew up in San Antonio in the ’70s, where at the time we had four AF bases and a couple of Army posts; almost everybody I knew had a parent that was either active military or worked as a civilian at one of the bases.
So, from my perspective, it’s hard to understand how someone could be so willing to let other people fight and die for them.
Feathers
@Suzanne:
Actually, this concern came from the example of England in WWI, where many, many skilled workers signed up in the initial rush (and were then slaughtered in the trenches) that there were real problems caused on the home front. So I don’t think “expendable” is the way to describe the people who were accepted. How you are going to use the skills of the people available is an important factor in any large scale human endeavor.
EthylEster
@Adam L Silverman: I fear the escalator is broken.
Chris
@NobodySpecial:
I’ve never heard that, but I agree with it completely.
It seems to be a popular opinion* that the American population of today would never be willing to put in the work and sacrifice required by a World War Two/Civil War level conflict again, including the draft that would go with it. It’s unusual for me to be less cynical about my country than the norm, but for once, I don’t agree at all. The reason Americans soured on Vietnam wasn’t simply that they didn’t want to be drafted or see their children drafted to die at war, it’s that they didn’t want to die for a completely senseless war – no clear reason to be there, no clear sense of how to win, no sense that we were doing anything other than send a bunch of people to continue dying without ever actually changing the situation. Even the right wing stab-in-the-back myth that’s become their main memory of Vietnam is, in its own way, a recognition that even if you think the cause was just, the actual war itself was still being prosecuted as a pointless waste (though of course, being right wingers, they have to spin it into a conspiracy of politicians and journalists and hippies who were either blinded by Political Correctness, whatever that is, or bona fide Soviet agents). And pretty much all the wars fought since then have been in that mold – stupid, pointless, unwinnable. Give the American people a war that’s actually necessary, fight it with any kind of competence, and actually be honest with them about what you need, and I don’t think the response will be very different from the Greatest Generation’s.
* “Popular” being a loaded word; I’m not actually sure how many people feel this way, I am sure that it’s not something limited by ideology or party, and I’m not pointing fingers at anyone in this particular thread. The notion that Americans don’t have the stomach for sacrifice is, however, something that I often hear brought up sooner or later whenever a conversation like this occurs.
Chris
@Dave:
It’s actually what I find to be one of the most compelling arguments for a draft (albeit a Swiss or Israeli model of draft where everyone does a year or two of military service and then is considered part of the reserves). It helps to counteract the civil-military divide and that kind of toxic mentality – on both sides. It’s harder for career military people to see themselves as a Praetorian elite above the ungrateful cowering masses if everyone’s at least done the minimum service, but equally important is that the other citizens are less likely to have that image of the military. They see “the troops” as people like themselves, and not heroic demigods who are here to save them.
(Like I said – I don’t know how many people in the military actually believe in the “sheep and sheepdogs” view of themselves as a Praetorian elite, though I do believe it’s more than we’re comfortable admitting. The bigger problem, from my POV, is that society as a whole has come to see the military that way).
boatboy_srq
@Chris:
Crux of the problem: the Silent Generation has already done its bit, the Boomers are both past recruitable ages and impressively anti-taxation, and GenX and Millenials were flat out never asked for any sacrifice whatever. Exactly how much military recruiting has anyone seen since 2000? I’ve encountered precious little, and what I have seen is two parts we’ll-teach-you-arcane-technical-skills and three parts adventure-park-in-uniform. Nowhere is the old Uncle Sam Wants You grade of enlistment, nor the Buy War Bonds grade investment. The US has been infamously steered, not toward higher taxes or purchase of government bonds, but consumption: “investment” in the private sector to spur the essentially civilian economy. The people who would rise to the need and make the effort have simply never been asked in terms that would generate a response.
I daresay that, if the younger generations were actually asked to put it on the line for the Good Old U S of A, and their older siblings and parents were asked for some kind of material/monetary support, the response would be surprising. Those requests AFAIK have never been made – not once. It’s misleading to look at the polls (nobody sane wants to go to war, and nobody wants to pay more taxes) when the case for the investment in time, dollars and blood hasn’t been put to the public in any saleable form.
Chris
@Heliopause:
I think the pop culture view of the military you bring up is actually part of the disconnect. Watch modern military shows like JAG or NCIS. The heroes themselves are superhuman and infallible, and the military in general is portrayed as the pinnacle of all the awesome things we want to believe about America if we’re Right Thinking Patriots. There’s none of the tongue-in-cheek cynicism that you’d see on M*A*S*H or Hogan’s Heroes a generation earlier. In today’s movies and highly rated TV dramas, the viewer isn’t supposed to relate to the way war and military life are portrayed. He’s supposed to swoon at the awesomeness of it and of the rare breed of men who live it.
(Of course, you can say that comparing a comedy like M*A*S*H to an action show like NCIS is comparing apples and oranges – but that’s the point; the kind of shows we make about the military have changed completely, because the way we relate to the military has changed completely. M*A*S*H portrays war and military life with the kind of irreverent cynicism that we’d associate with a workplace drama, comedy, or dramedy today. Today, the vast majority of people can’t relate to the military that way anymore, and more importantly, society has decided that we’re not supposed to. It’s all Tom Clancy/Donald Bellisario hagiographic fantasy from here on in).
boatboy_srq
@Chris: @boatboy_srq: I should add here that, if there is a “call to action” that is generating any kind of response, it’s not the “defeat them there” pro-armed-forces type but the “Satan is among us” anti-modernist anti-Otherist swill coming from the Xtians and the Reichwing. I could be persuaded that one reason the Paulbots and the Teahadis were so easily recruited was because, after years of the GWoT demanding so much lucre and so little else, the urge to engage in anything was strong enough to be subverted by the Conservatists.
boatboy_srq
@Chris: Interesting that you should bring that up. It strikes me that, while prior generations were able to laugh at the absurdities of life in the service, M*A*S*H poked fun at the war itself – and every Hollywood generation since has been so shocked by the “disrespect” offered by that event that the pendulum has overswung. The classic example is HMS Pinafore (which dates from 1878 TYVM), but Bob Hope nearly made a career out of poking fun at the military life, and Abbott and Costello and the Three Stooges each poked fun at it more than once; and no list of military-themed comedies would be complete without Sgt. Bilko or McHale’s Navy. Whatever pedestal-placing the Silent Generation received, their ability to laugh at their military – and themselves – was refreshingly healthy, and it seems to be something that’s since been lost. Sometime – perhaps early in the 90s, perhaps earlier – the ability to find humour in absurdity (and the absurdity common in the military experience in particular) got misinterpreted as serious instead of comedic, and the public stopped laughing and started getting offended.
Goblue72
@boatboy_srq: It’s not about a fucking recruitment ad.
It’s about the fact that military service isn’t national service. It’s not about defending the “country”. It’s about being a mercenary army that serves as the sharp end of the spear in device to the quasi-imperialist ambitions of an economic and political elite.
Millenials don’t want to serve because they’ve wished up to the bullshit and aren’t interested in fighting the oligarchy’s colonial wars.
boatboy_srq
@Goblue72: May I call your attention to a certain event a little over 14 years ago, when the US genuinely felt attacked by an obscure foreign group. That was a crystallizing moment; and had the pitch been made at the time, federal coffers would have been stoked and recruiting offices been flooded with fresh faces. You may not remember the sentiment at the time, but there was a overpowering expectation of some grand mobilization. Instead, the need for servicepeople was visibly downplayed and naysayers were scorned into obscurity, and the public was told to spend on domestic frivolity instead of national need. Millenials may have come of age in that time, and “wised up” to the pattern, but the pattern is older than they are and the damage goes further back. And you can’t say that the younger generations aren’t buying the bullsh!t if they’ve never been presented with a persuasive alternative.
You want “national service” as opposed to “military service” – and that’s fine as far as it goes. But that’s a separate discussion, and one far less likely to be had at present with the Conservatists obsessed with “entitlements” and “out of control spending” (translation: freebies for Those People who can’t bootstrap themselves to success) who would kill any modern WPA-equivalent in its crib. You want a military sufficient only to defend the 50 states and assorted territories? That’s not an especially bad suggestion – if you’re prepared, for example, for predation on trade by pirates in Somalia and Malaysia to be answered by higher consumer prices instead of greater military activity. The point JC and ALS are making is that military service doesn’t have to be stupid/pointless, nor does it have to be the province of those without private-sector alternatives.
Chris
@boatboy_srq:
Actually, I think we have been asked to sacrifice. Just, not really in the form of national service or higher taxes… or most anything “public” related. But we’ve been told all our lives that it’s our responsibility to work hard for a pittance because the honor of working should be enough and we should be grateful we’re even allowed to do that at all. Inadequate to sometimes nonexistent minimum wages to go along with howls of outrage at how entitled and overpaid minimum wage workers are, the obscene amounts of debt we’re saddled with if we want to go to college with stern lectures about the importance of paying your obligations, the oodles of unpaid internships that’ve become the ritual entry fee to many professions because good heavens the world doesn’t owe us a living, the general chants of how American workers need to work harder and longer and smarter and not ask for such high paychecks or benefits or public services, you name it. (Not to mention the number of millennials who still go into the military to pay their debt to someone to send them to college). I think we’re very familiar with the general notion that we have responsibilities to society that require that we do unpleasant things or defer our dreams or generally do things we wish we didn’t have to, often at our own expense.
You’re right, we’re not often asked for public sacrifice/service of the kind we’re talking about here. But I definitely don’t think we’re any less capable of it. If the politicians hesitate to call for national service because they think we are, I think they’re full of it.
Chris
@boatboy_srq:
Wasn’t M*A*S*H a phenomenally popular TV show at the time it aired, though? If there was “backlash,” I think it came later. Heck, I still see it on reruns all the time, all these years later.
Chris
@boatboy_srq:
I think I sort of agree with both of you, actually. In the shell-shock and national unity sentiment that came immediately after 9/11, I think Bush had more leeway than any president maybe since FDR to ask us for anything and have us acquiesce to it. Not doing so was a deliberate choice. I totally believe people would have responded to actual calls for sacrifice at the time.
I do believe GoBlue’s right that (in no small part because of what a fucking disaster the actual response to 9/11 was) more people than ever aren’t inclined to military service because they don’t think it’s worth it. Most people probably don’t phrase it as “fighting the oligarchy’s neocolonial wars” in their heads (and at least a few probable see it in right wing terms such as “government fucks up everything it touches” or “our politicians aren’t willing to Do What Must Be Done”), but as with Vietnam, a lot of people simply see wars that’re going nowhere and accomplishing nothing. Why would you risk your life for that?
boatboy_srq
@Chris: Backlash was muted at first because the show and film were both so popular. Consider how All in the Family premiered about the same time: criticism was healthy then, and the West needed the laughter. It can take years to decades to get a show from concept to pilot to full season. Red Dawn was one of the biggest counterpunches, but it was hardly the only one, and AFAIK it took nearly a decade to bring to the screen (and appeared substantially different from the original premise when it did make it).
@Chris: You’re right; but those are debts to society, not obligations of the citizenry. They’re portable, and they’re sectarian; and they’re used to divide a nation where an expectation of national service would unite it. What boggles me here is that the assumptions of merely a few decades ago that each generation would have it better than the one before have been replaced by surrender to the rat race and the assumption that nobody is going to have it even as good as their parents without titanic effort; and that, instead of taxes going to things that benefit everyone, the facilities and services that those taxes provide are instead relegated to the realm of Those People and that Righteous Good Xtian Heterosexual Patriotic Real Ahmurrrcans don’t need any gummint dollars spent on them (unless it’s the Social Security or Medicare they “earned”).
boatboy_srq
@Chris: Are more people today disinclined to military service because they disagree with Washington’s uses for the military, or are they disinclined to military service because there’s minimal post-tour private sector value in service below the commissioned officer level? Honest question.
boatboy_srq
@Chris: @boatboy_srq: Afterthought: what you’re describing isn’t sacrifice for good of the nation (as a responsible citizen) – it’s the demand that the populace embrace serfdom. That is, now I think about it, distinctly different.
jefft452
“Send for the boys of the old Brigade
To keep ole England free
Send for me brother
Me sister or me mother
But for God’s sake don’t send me!”
Song from the Great War
Things haven’t changed that much in 100 years, have they?
J R in WV
@Carla Menssen: Statistics can prove that a sample of 2000 provides an excellent match between answers from that 2K sample and the results you get from either a much larger sample, or a vote of the entire cohort, in this case the cohort is all members of American population in the age group, a much smaller number than the whole population. I took way too much math/statistics in my degree program.
Suzanne, I was “enlisted” at the point of a gun after receiving my draft board’s order to report for an induction physical, presumable immediately followed by induction into the Army or Marines and a quick trip to SE Asia where I would get to live in a mudhole/dustbowl under fire. I enlisted in the Navy as a smarter option. I also completed a BS CS in computer science mostly using my GI Bill benefits. Tuition wasn’t as crazy then as it is now. Without serious career counseling from a Psychologist contractor for the VA my whole career would not have happened. I worked in serious software development for state agencies until my retirement not long ago.
I have two intelligent nephews, raised mostly in Texas, who’s plan for life involves graduating from college and enlisting in the military, which will fund their grad school. One is on the Autism spectrum and was refused his application to enlist in the Army, with a “contract” for him to enter an intelligence MOS. Of course every vet knows those contracts are only enforceable upon the enlistee, and the Army/Navy can do as it wishes with staff, but there is no telling my brother, who never had to serve, anything about the military.
The nephew who can’t enlist is now looking at various law enforcement job “opportunities”. His younger brother is majoring in physics, and wants to join the Navy to run nuclear reactors. I doubt he will succeed in Nuke School, as it is by far the most demanding Military school, but I wish him good luck. I do wonder how happy he will be in a boat, though, as most reactor-powered ships are actually subs, not surface ships.
I think a universal period of service for everyone upon graduation from high school would be a good thing, but there should be more ways to do your service than in the military. You could be trained in a trade or craft and then work for infrastructure development, building high-speed train service, or working on trains, for one example. Learning now to learn something difficult, how to work for a demanding ass of a manager, all that is valuable.
And we could create jobs in the whole country, as high-speed trains need to go from here to there, across all of it.
And of course, as often is the case, I’m writing on a dead thread, but that’s OK too. Just my opinion, which is as valuable as all the other opinions.
Chris
@boatboy_srq:
@boatboy_srq:
It’s definitely a different kind of animal, but it bears a resemblance in terms of the population’s willingness to make sacrifices at its own immediate expense for 1) the powers-that-be and 2) the possibility that they’ll be better off in the long run.
@boatboy_srq:
Don’t know, maybe both. But I would think the value of military service from a job perspective would be higher nowadays, not lower. Sure, modern soldiers might not get a G. I. Bill nowadays, but all of the other blue collar/non-college alternatives have fallen even further. Job outsourcing, stagnating wages, dying unions. As different people have pointed out throughout this thread, the military is rightly or wrongly seen as the only remaining social escalator that still works. If people aren’t signing up, I don’t think it’s because they no longer see it as good for their career prospects.
boatboy_srq
@Chris: What was “getting a leg up” with the G.I. Bill and the recognition that the experience brought has become “not falling quite as far…” It’s still more an artifact of the new pseudoservitude than an artifact of service. The problem is that military service – unless it involves highly technical, marketable skills – still doesn’t give all that much. Yes, it’s likely that a veteran will earn more than a non-veteran in the same job, but the jobs open to semi-skilled veterans are still far fewer than they were. The old model was service-to-manufacturing, which made the US middle class. Manufacturing is largely gone, and the service jobs that took the place of the skilled labor jobs just don’t pay the same; veteran status matters less to service/retail than it did to industry.
There are exceptions: skills with information security, with high tech, and a few other fields can be parlayed into prosperity; for the most part, though, there aren’t that many places to go that will offer the kind of improvement that civilian life used to offer, and compensation in the service hasn’t kept pace with costs of living or with private sector salaries.
We shouldn’t be defending veteran status just for putting the brakes on the decline of the middle class; we should be demanding better conditions for the middle class as a whole, and encouraging the DoD to make service worthwhile within that context. Otherwise all we’re saying is that military service staves off indentured servitude and final penury by N years.
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
@jefft452: Maybe 200 years?
Wikiville on the 1794 federal response to the Whiskey Rebellion:
Cheers,
Scott.
Chris
@boatboy_srq:
I agree that it shouldn’t be this way, but I still think most people perceive the military as more good than bad when comparing career options – whether that’s out of a delusional sense of what benefits the military will bring, or a realistic assessment of how much worse all the other options are.
jefft452
@I’mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet: “Because relatively few men volunteered for militia service”
But that is unpossible! Any gun nut will tell you that every able bodied man is automatically in the militia
Snark off
To be equivalent, the people of Haggerstown would have to be shown to be in full throat support of enforcing the Whiskey Tax – as long as somebody else did it
I don’t think that “even in eastern areas” of VA or MD the tax was all that popular
There was a large (in the US) or at least not tiny (in GB) anti-draft and anti-war movements during the Great War. Both of these movements had, not surprisingly, a lot of overlap
These were not the people the song was mocking, the song mocks the chicken hawks of the era
(although “chicken hawk” is not the right term for the period, it meant pedophile at the time)