I don’t even know what you are talking about, there was no draft in the 80s and there wouldn’t have been time for you to deploy to Europe if you had been drafted, as it was, we predicted 25% losses of our reinforcements that would have been flooding in to join our 440,000 American men we already had there, and NATO had another 5 million active, against what you call weaker than the 244,000 to 380,000 of the current Russian army that is stuck back in Russia now.
I guess you were never in the military as your posts and ideas seem to indicate, you really don’t know what it was like or what we were facing, or the level of fear and tension among the people facing Russia then versus now, you have some dreamy little packages of fantasies about then, and about now.
I come from a military family and know what you were facing. It was scary. Yes there was registration for the draft when Jimmy Carter was president and all of us had to register for it when we turned 18. This came about because of the Iranian hostage crisis and the Russian invasion of Afghanistan. There was plenty of fear and tension among my generation. I did not fear it because I had a real good understanding of what the military capabilities of both the East and West were. I also knew about our strategic capabilities. We had an abundance of strategic and tactical nuclear weapons which is the reason that war scenario never happened. We still do.
If you can’t remember this then you sure do not understand the changes that have occurred in military science for the last 30 years. I have watched this evolve carefully and have seen these weapons and delivery platforms advance. What we have today though less still has staggering lethality and range. It is available in enough quantities to cause global destruction of civilization. The growth of terrorism is a much bigger problem than it was during the Cold War and combining this with national tensions we have a greater capacity for catastrophe because many of the terrorists are ideologically driven and are not rational.
I have to go eat now and catch up with my family.