Good post – Funny. Ought to scare the bell bottoms of the Hippies. No draft please, I’ve worked in it both ways and you can’t believe how much better it is without the whiners. Now if you want to tie college money to a Civvie Job Corps, by all means do it.
Dear Pete Farmer,
RE: “Draftees…leaven the ranks with people who are not members of the professional military, folks who are citizen-soldiers. They serve the function of keeping the military honest, keeping it from getting too incestuous and insular as an institution, something any service member – if they are honest – will admit is occasionally a problem. The services are big bureaucracies, and engage in the same CYA behavior other big organzations do – i.e., cost overruns, burying mistakes instead of airing them, careerism over national interest and so on. Draftees are one check against that sort of behavior, because they have nothing to lose by telling it like they see it.”
Aside from being a steaming pile of c***, you DO realize your statement reveals more about YOU than anything else, do you not?
It reveals you have absolutely NO idea of what military standards, service, life, and culture is like. It reveals that you know nothing of how the vast majority of professionals who ARE citizen-soldiers think about their role and place in American life and society. It reveals you know nothing about the character of those who choose to serve: a character that I’ve found to be far higher on average than the draftable society at large. Most deliciously, your post reveals you have an irrational fear of the military that is sworn to uphold the Constitution and lives very much to meet that commitment. Do you fear the military because you fear that which you do not understand? Or perhaps you fear it for what it reminds you about yourself?
Note: This is not to say their aren’t people in the military who do not ‘get it’: there are. But they fairly rare during and are far and few between after the initial term of service and even more rarely are found in positions where they can do harm. No system is perfect, but military life tends to be very ‘self-weeding’.
