Re: Thinking Big
On Sep 13, 2007, at 11:48 AM, BklynMagus wrote:
Because there is no draft. A volunteer army is exactly what hawks want since it is more likely to operate as a mercenary group.
I’ve mentioned this before, but it’s really worth reading:
http://www.chss.montclair.edu/english/furr/Vietnam/heinl.html#0
THE COLLAPSE OF THE ARMED FORCES
By Col. Robert D. Heinl, Jr. North American Newspaper Alliance Armed Forces Journal, 7 June, 1971
THE MORALE, DISCIPLINE and battleworthiness of the U.S. Armed Forces
are, with a few salient exceptions, lower and worse than at anytime
in this century and possibly in the history of the United States.
By every conceivable indicator, our army that now remains in Vietnam
is in a state approaching collapse, with individual units avoiding or
having refused combat, murdering their officers and non
commissioned officers, drug-ridden, and dispirited where not near
mutinous.
Elsewhere than Vietnam, the situation is nearly as serious.
Intolerably clobbered and buffeted from without and within by social
turbulence, pandemic drug addiction, race war, sedition, civilian
scapegoatise, draftee recalcitrance and malevolence, barracks theft
and common crime, unsupported in their travail by the general
government, in Congress as well as the executive branch, distrusted,
disliked, and often reviled by the public, the uniformed services
today are places of agony for the loyal, silent professions who
doggedly hang on and try to keep the ship afloat.
The responses of the services to these unheard-of conditions, forces
and new public attitudes, are confused, resentful, occasional
pollyanna-ish, and in some cases even calculated to worsen the
malaise that is wracking. While no senior officer (especially one on
active duty) can openly voice any such assessment, the foregoing
conclusions find virtually unanimous support in numerous non-
attributable interviews with responsible senior and mid-level
officer, as well as career noncommissioned officers and petty
officers in all services.
Historical precedents do not exist for some of the services’
problems, such as desertion, mutiny, unpopularity, seditious attacks,
and racial troubles. Others, such as drugs, pose difficulties that
are wholly NEW. Nowhere, however, in the history of the Armed Forces
have comparable past troubles presented themselves in such general
magnitude, acuteness, or concentrated focus as today.
By several orders of magnitude, the Army seems to be in worse
trouble. But the Navy has serious and unprecedented problems, while
the Air Force, on the surface at least still clear of the quicksands
in which the Army is sinking, is itself facing disquieting difficulties.
[…]