The American military learned in Vietnam that the American public will not tolerate significant casualties in any conflict which does not directly threaten the existence of the United States. Therefore, ever since the Ford administration, our armed forces have been transformed into smaller, more technology dependent entities. We had many fewer men on the battlefields of the first Gulf War than did Saddam Hussein. However, our tanks, aircraft and other means of war were dramatically superior to his. In effect, we have substituted machine power for manpower.
Those wonderful machines of war cannot be operated and maintained by persons of low intelligence or those with little education and/or training. For the urban elites to expect that the American military of the 21st Century can be manned primarily by ill-educated denizens of our poorest neighborhoods, they must not understand this basic fact.