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Here’s a couple of alternatives. Pay soldiers in combat units the wage it takes to attract all you need. A PFC machine gunner should make over 100k a year.

Crazy? National need comes first? Then in wartime why don’t we pay the CEO and Board of Lockheed a colonels pay, or cancel their DOD contracts? And everyone on the production lines gets say, E-4 or E-5 pay. Do it for the duration.
How about congress and the president are immediately reduced in pay to the level of a PFC for the duration?

Funny, the only ones exected to practically donate their labor, and often their lives are the grunts. No draft. When theres a shortage of grunts, it’s funny how free marketeers, and socialists alike start waving the flag. It never crosses their mind that “you have to pay those wages to attract the talent you want”.

A draft is nothing more than use of gunpoint and force, to circumvent the wage the free market would set.

Rhino, I like connecting the military wage scale to GS pay scale somehow.

But my biggest issue (for lack of a better term) is the troops are deploying time and time again some have served more time in the ME than they have been at home, that's just not right. We tout that we "support the troops" and that we are patriotic etc. Exactly what does that mean? If we are unwilling to commit our own to fight for the country, but it is ok if the kid down the street goes, how are we different than the left? Is it really all talk? The military is the easiest place in the world to be successful, so if one cannot go in for 18 months and do as he/she is told, then they should get a less than honorable discharge and have to deal with the consequences. Right now, it is backwards. If you served you have the social branding placed on you by the politicians, media and the left.

We simply cannot continue this way.