I also base my views on personal experience, 8 years as a naval officer, and on commonsense. You don't build a military based on mandatory military service, but rather on the mission. You have failed twice to answer my question, "What size active duty military do you want?"
'Entltlements should be slashed with a meat axe as should the rest of the central goobermint.
Now suggest something realistic. Do you really believe that Congress will slash entitlements with a meat axe? Be realistic. We have $65 trillion of unfunded liabilities represented by the entitlement programs. SS will start being a black hole instead of a cash cow in 2017. Medicare is in worse shape with 2012 or 2013 being the date it starts going belly up. We will soon be facing the same choices that Europe has been making for years, i.e., between guns and butter. Our aging population will increase the costs of the entitlement programs and we will be squeezed in other areas as well. It is going to be harder and harder to maintain the existing levels of expenditures on defense.
Defense and character building is job # 1 of our military
No defense is the #1 job of our military. Character building is the job of parents, schools, and churches.
Please don't wave the entitlements issue at me because I don't believe in them.
Then you don't understand the issue. In 1950, there were 16 workers paying Social Security taxes for every retired person receiving benefits. Today there are 3.3. By 2030, there will be only 2. Today, 48 million Americans receive Social Security benefits, including 33 million retirees, 7 million survivors, and 8 million disabled workers. By 2030, there will be 70 million Americans of retirement age--twice as many as today. And entitlement benefits are on automatic pilot, i.e., the amount of the benefits are determined by a fixed forumula outside the normal budget process. We are headed for a major train wreck.
The Bush Administration's budget request for FY 2008 through FY 2012 shows a number of external and internal pressures on the defense budget. The external pressures are posed by the continuing and projected growth in spending for the three major entitlement programs: Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. If these entitlement programs are not reformed, the growth in entitlement spending will crowd out needed defense funding. This comes at a time when defense expenditures relative to GDP are already relatively low.
Our politicians would like to see the status quo in respect to the military because if they didn't have the underachievers the Mexican illegals (Guest Voter Program) would definiately have to go in order to make room for those not qualified to serve in our military.
No, many Dems would like to see the draft reinstituted. They see it as a way to restrict the use of the military. People who are forced into a military that goes to war are not happy campers. They can be used as leverage by the Dems, who are not happy that our college campuses are no longer hotbeds of antiwar activity.
Forget the women (any nation that places females in combat jobs isn't worth defending) you include in the 18-26 category, then subtract the underachievers and you have a figure that is easily managed.
So women get a pass, which leaves 16 million males in the 18-26 cohort. How big a military do you want? Do you want all 16 million to serve [minus those who can't meet the physical and military qualifications]? Do you know what the annual intake is now in terms of new recruits? What you are suggesting is insane and not embraced by the military.
I don't know if you served in the military and don't care. There was a classification used in the Army until those in that classifcation could be released from active duty due to their poor IQ. That classifcation was Duty Soldier..
Your call for mandatory military service bears no relation to the mission, the threat, or the costs. You are living in a fantasy world. The DOD budget request for 2008 is $647 billion. How much will your proposed massive increase in personnel add to those costs? Our money would be best spent on incentives to increase the number and quality of volunteers to an all-volunteer force than to force millions into it with no benefit to our war fighting capability.
If half the current active-duty people would be draftees, you would be drafting about 1/2 x 400,000 = 200,000 a year and if there are indeed 4 million eligible, that would be 200,000 ÷ 4,000,000 = 5%.
At present, I believe we recruit about 80,000 a year into the military. If that were all you wanted to draft, the percentage of people 19 years old being drafted would be 80,000 ÷ 4,000,000 = 2%. So the average eligible person would have 98% probability of not being drafted.
The idea of a draft is unpopular; however, with the military having to continuously drop entrance standards, raise the age limit on recruits, and even go so far as to actively recruit from prisons, it appears that the armed forces are not meeting the demand for recruits.
At any rate, I'm tired of debating this issue with you and would close the debate with a little humor.
Teenage males are singled out for registration [for what else other than a potential draft]. Some believe it's due to teenagers being most physically fit, but they'd be wrong. If physical fitness were the main reason, we would register professional athletes first. The truth is that we register teenage males because:
1-We always have.
2-Many teenage males are sullen and snotty and could use a little discipline.
3-There are fewer of them than there are of us.
4-If we tried to register older people, they would write letters to their congressmen and hire sharp lawyers, and we'd never be able to get anybody into the Army