Posted on 09/01/2024 7:54:08 PM PDT by blueplum
Coverage of the wars in Ukraine and Gaza is mostly dominated by talk of weapons. Reporters and analysts focus on suicide drones, on shell deficits, on targeting algorithms. But for all the attention devoted to modern weapons and munitions, both conflicts are proving that modern war still comes down to people....
... Before Covid, fewer than 3 in 10 Americans in the prime recruiting demographic — ages 17 to 24 — were eligible to serve in uniform. Those numbers have shrunk further since the pandemic began. Only 23 percent of young Americans are qualified to enlist without a waiver....
In the all-recruited force, it is military families that have inexorably become the primary providers of new recruits. Nearly 80 percent of recent Army enlistees have a veteran in their family — for almost 30 percent, it’s a parent. In the half-century since the AVF’s birth, the US military has become a family business.
This entrenchment of a “warrior caste” presents a long-term danger to democracy: a citizenry disconnected from its military can become indifferent to the missions it performs....But the immediate danger is more concrete. Should the majority of military families decide the nation is unworthy of their children’s service, as may already be happening, the AVF will become unsustainable....
(Excerpt) Read more at msn.com ...
China is very quiet about a significant effect of their one-child policy: people are far less likely to support a war when they only have one child who may die in that war.
Who would join?
Then, they’ll call on the Chinese and/or UN to come in and round up the draft dodgers.
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That would cause all hell to break loose and even they are not that stupid.
Yeah, that's what I thought when Biden stole the election, the FBI started rounding up political prisoners, the fed started kicking in doors on elderly republicans and shooting some of them, and trying to take out Trump.
I'm still waiting on all that hell to break loose. Pardon me if I don't hold my breath.
We’ll see. It doesn’t matter because we’re seeing the steady, slow-motion collapse of the country.
Don’t hold your breath, just watch it all go down in slow motion with a major event intermingled in the process now and then.
There are degrees of cannon fodder. You are correct. We are nowhere as bad as China. However our Hans are not entirely clean.
I don’t know what that means, humans make mistakes but I’m not aware of any military that tries harder than we do to minimize our losses and make good on our dead and wounded from the battlefield to end of life back in the states.
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