Today's "utes" don't have a clue how great this country really is, so a further requirement would be to serve at least six months in a foreign country - preferably, third world.
War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.” John Stuart Mill, English economist & philosopher (1806-1873
One of my all time favorite qoutes.
However it speaks to a moral and patriotic feeling which is something you either have or you do not have. Being drafted is not going to make you patriotic or improve your moral compass per se.
I served during the Vietnam War which had a draft. Though I was not in combat I was stationed with many people who did not want to be in the military and was thankful I was not in a combat area. I can not imagine having to watch out for the enemy in front of you and in back of you.
Since th dawn of time they have been those that are willing to fight for themselves and others and those that would not fight for thier own children if the need arose. Nothing will ever change that.
Great quote! I think I’ll send to the liberal preacher at our church. Fits him to a T!
The problem with the draft is that today’s army requires highly-skilled professionals. They also need to be highly motivated.
Ever since the late 1970s, volunteer armies made up of highly-skilled, and highly-motivated professionals have cleaned the clocks of conscript armies and irregulars. Examples include the Falklands War, the Gulf War, and our current conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Conscript armies — including that of Israel — have not done as well, even against other armies of conscripts and irregulars. The Arab-Israeli War of 1973 was the last hurrah for the conscript army of a democratic nation, in the sense that it was the last unambiguous triumph of that type of army.
To train soldiers to the effectiveness of the current US military require lots of time — really a recruit is in training for most of the first year they are in the service. Conscripts traditionally serve for two years or the duration of the emergency. That means you will be discharging them almost as soon as they are effective.
It also means you need a lot more NCOs in order to churn recruits through training, since you need to be training a LOT more recruits than with the current all-volunteer army to maintain the combat troops at the same numbers at the same level of effectiveness. If you can get the same level of effectiveness with many soldiers leaving a unit (through discharge) at the end of only a year.
To maintain as many soldiers in combat units as in today’s all-volunteer army you would need an army three to four times larger, due to the increased training requirements. You don’t get the type of small unit leaders that we have (fire team, squad, and platoon) until a soldier has two or three years experience under their belts.
The net result is that we would have as many volunteers as we currently have (to provide training and leadership), with a whole bunch of conscripts added on, churning through the system weakening unit cohesion in the process. We would get a lot more army for a lot more expense with a lot less effectiveness.
Which is the real objective of many of those advocating a return to conscription.
Reinstate the Draft?
Only once the enemy has initiated operations on OUR soil..
THEN, draft all the Leftist Professors, politicians, teachers, Hollywood “artists”, America haters, multiculturalists, KOS kooks, Diversity worshipers, the Boobs not Bombs babes and the bleeding heart “Make Love not War” naive fools — and throw them into the fight....
Throw them right into the teeth of the enemy’s strongest points.
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!!!
That said, I believe that our spoiled rotten, unsupervised, disrespectful, non-responsible kids could use 13 weeks of basic training, plus some advanced training, before they are set loose in the adult world.
Then again, having served, we’d have to have special units for them to serve in, since no volunteer active duty soldier in their right mind should ever have to serve with the draftees.
The Lebanese-Council Coordination Council? What, pray tell, is that?
The strongest assets in our military are the cohesive units of well-trained, well-motivated individuals who share a strong commitment to their responsibility, their shared values and to each other. These assets are just as powerful as our military’s advanced equipment. Conscription would severaly undeermine that strength.
There was a gigantic lesson to be learned from VietNam and the US military learned it but, somehow or other, it has never been publically stated or written down or codified. The lesson is that there needs to be an absolute minimal set of circumstances in place before you ever use draftees in combat and that should include a full declaration of war by the US congress and a full committment to utterly destroy and defeat a recognizable adversary. Anything less than that is a geopolitical game of some sort and there are geopolitical games which need to be played, but you cannot play them with draftees or with gigantic sums of treasure; you play games with professional soldiers and/or soldiers of fortune and petty cash. You cannot tell the boy next door that it is his patriotic duty to go into harms way for any sort of a cause or any sort of a game. That doesn’t compute. In the case of Nam, we sent an army of American slaves to fight for somebody else’s freedom; it clearly did not work.
Yes. Draft the kid who lives up on the corner. He is halfway from being let out of prison and being put back in. Draft him, save him from himself.
They want equal rights, equal pay, equal everything, then they get equal draft status.
Well folks, he might not be calling for reinstating the draft but according Gen. William S. Wallace, commanding general of the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command at Fort Monroe, Va.:
“The U.S. Army today faces an imminent and menacing threat to our national security. Failure to resolve this problem could leave us vulnerable and our enemies victorious.
The threat? The lack of fully qualified young people to serve in the military.
Many young Americans are willing to serve, but too little is made of the declining number of young people who are qualified to serve. This is the real story and it’s a shocking one. Only 28 percent of the 17- to 24-year-old population qualifies to wear a military uniform. The other 72 percent fail to meet minimum standards on education, character and health. Of those eligible to serve, many choose not to for a variety of reasons.”
http://www.charlotte.com/409/story/647515.html
Both I and my younger brother served full careers as volunteers, I in the AF and he in the Marines. I'm glad we've done away with the draft. The all-volunteer force is a much better arrangement.
The problem with people being sent back to Iraq several times is not from the lack of a draft, but from the deliberate decision not to expand the size of the Army. A deliberate tradeoff was made, to reduce the number of troops in order to pay for new equipment. I think it was a bad decision, and the strain on the troops is the price the Army is paying for that decision.