And while this former infantry officer's blood boils when he reads the editorials from jack-asses who never served about how we can afford to reduce our ground forces because their noses are up Obama's bunghole, I go back to this quote from Fehrenbach:
“You may fly over land forever, you may bomb it, atomize it, pulverize it, and wipe it clean of life. But if you desire to defend it, protect it and keep it for civilization, you must do this on the ground the way the Roman legions did, by putting your young men into the mud.”
Fancy drones don't change this reality. But since few people read real history anymore, we are doomed to repeat our mistake.
For what we are doing, Fehrenbach would argue for professionals. And by the way, the purported former SS Officer turned French Foreign Legionaire who wrote The Devil's Guard said the same thing about Vietnam.
If we ever fight a war like Korea again, we’ll move back to conscription rapidly. There is nothing ‘professional’ about sex and racial preferences in promotions, lowered standards for females, low density MOS’s decimated by pregnant nondeployable females, etc. Jim Webb has regularly made the point that the best military he served in was the military of the mid-sixties. I agree with him. Keep the standards high and draft from the entire able bodied MALE population. As the force is now, if we ever had to fight a Pusan type action with our CS and CSS forces in the trenches we’d be screwed.
And then Roman turned to professionals and paid bribes to other countries, called foreign aid, and then what happened.