Posted on 10/12/2014 4:21:23 AM PDT by iowamark
Yeah - incentivized to get as political as possible as early as possible.
We are retiring thousands of our military,voluntarily and involuntarily,and we are replacing them with Mexican illegal aliens.
There fixed that problem
Every organization has a sclerotic bureaucracy. The military in no exception.
Sounds like a good idea to me
The big issue is the WH controls every aspect and the Brass are still fighting the last war they fought. Fighting Terrorism is a new ball game.
And the WH STUPID ROE’s are getting our men and women now KIA or maimed for life. With crappy gov’t health care.
Patton was 60.
Pretty well kills that guy’s argument.
A Frenchman apparently without any military experience at that.
Gory mistakenly believes that high-level decisions about limitations and ROEs are decided by uniformed officers. Not since the Korean War has that been so in America. Civilian political appointees make those decisions.
TC
Thanks. That was going to be my first question.
Aging - has always been a risk of an all volunteer army. While I do agree that today’s military is the best we have ever fielded, there’s a downside to it. The downside being that very few Americans have any skin in the game. This has led to an elitist mentality of a good part of our population who believes that the serving and fighting should be left for others. Personally, I’m for reactivating the draft, with so exemptions or deferments except for physical or mental problems. Yes, this means no national defense deferments for working for defense contractors, nor for being cops, teachers, peace corp, college, senate/congressional aides, etc. when ones number comes up one serves. We could use the additional bodies to militarize the border as one action. And, being this war on terror will be multigenerational, our military forces will require beefing up across the board. It’s all about skin - skin in the game, skin, skin, skin.........
First term (contract enlistments) retention levels are down below 30%...
My nephew who took the Marine Corp and everything it challenged him with and totally screwed that career up...He made corporal, not a slouch achievement, and is coming back from his last deployment to Afghanistan as we speak...
Ironically his new wife, just completed basic, and is trained as a combat medic in the Army...She is in the reserves and just told me her unit was just activated, and she is do to deploy for somewhere between Kuwait and Afghanistan soon...
Which leads me to believe, that I thought we were done over in that particular area...Something must have happened??? /SARC
You know, political lies do not fare very well with the guys and gals filling those boots on the ground you don’t want to insert into a situation that needs to support the gains you think you are achieving thru air power...
And the Zoomies are not all that excited about not having backup available for timely extraction if Jeb Clampett manages to get a lucky shot off on their ride...
So all in all, our administrations handling of international crisis has left an even bigger hole in world relations than actually doing something about it...
I’ll coin the phrase “Doofus Diplomacy”...I got dibs on that one!!! ;-)
Beat me to it.
The military has rules foisted upon it by civilians with no concept of how to win a war.
There are pluses and minuses to the system - they get cheap labor for simpler tasks and don't waste training resources on those who will not stay. They also have a bunch of untrained folks at any given time who could potentially drop the ball if called in for some serious support.
“A Frenchman giving advice to the US Army.”
Snicker, snicker.
I have no military experience but if I were president, I’d have a group of former military men as advisors to go with the usual Pentagon and state department people.
Douglas MacArthur was in his 60s during WWII and 70s during the Korean war. Chester W. Nimitz was 55 at the start of WWII. There were several Colonels and Generals in their 20s on both sides of the Northern War of Aggression.
Just sayin...
With them gutting up to 20K lower ranks, and putting in fast track citizenship for ILLEGALS, we won’t have a real Military.
I’m a Ret. SCPO’s wife. My dad fought under MacArthur for 6 yrs, my BIL fought under Merrill, I have cousins who went to Nam, cousins in this current war. Hubby’s bros both served 1 WW2 aboard the New Lady Lex. Middle bro was Korea. Hubby was on the Midway when the pulled the Amb. out of Nam, off the coast of Cuba during the Missile crisis.
We sure don’t need them for meals on wheels, or trying to stem Ebola and the other deadly viral out breaks in countries that practice NO Sanitation.
I am not in favor of starting up the draft again. It is involuntary service.
Almost all of the draftee’s will serve well, do they duty and get out when their time is up.
But a number will be dragged kicking and screaming into service and become every First Sergeant’s nightmare taking up far too much of the unit’s time and energy.
Also the service time will have to be short to remain politically palatable to the American population. It was two years the last time and I would assume it would be similar if reinstituted.
Special Forces training is two years long from street to graduation.
Is the training worth the amount of service you’ll get out of the trainee after AIT.
The Military does not need everyone to reenlist - but they do need to get some bang for the buck out of their troops who only do one tour and out.
And bringing back the draft is the left’s dream. Think of all those college protests being brough back.
In the case of WWII such a policy would have put Patton, MacArthur, and Eisenhower (ages 56, 61, and 51 respectively in late 1941) on their sofas in retirement. There are no doubt many examples of generals who were past their prime after fifty, if they ever had a prime at all, whose lack of energy and stodgy ways got men killed and battles lost. But making a certain age a blanket cutoff date for, well almost anything, is absurd.
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