So the left has wrecked the educational system, both sides fed us crap dietary advice for decades, and proliferated laws to the point that now seventy percent of young people are ineligible to serve in the military. Thanks, government.
[Update a while later]
Sorry, link is fixed.
Your link is broken.
” For that to be true, two thirds of our military would have to consist of obese, under-educated former drug users and convicted criminals.”
It seems US military could take those obese, under-educated former drug users and convicted criminals, and end up with less obese, under-educated former drug users and convicted criminals,
The problem is less would make it thru basic training and therefore make basic training be more expensive to in terms getting soldiers, which can be solved by throwing more money money at it. And the drop outs might be better for the experience. Losers should aware that they are losers. And/or could point the incompetence methods of training soldiers- so, make improvements in doing this.
It seems to me, that anyone who wants to be soldier should be able to be a soldier, and question is how much does someone want to be soldier, and you can’t screen for that, rather it has to be demonstrated they have such a commitment.
So selecting the right/correct potential soldiers could allow a higher success rate in getting soldiers, but in terms of national interests that might not be the direction the military should take- not sure focus on doing something like French Legion- but draw some lesson from it.
And as mentioned before, having the Space Force should get wider population which is interested doing this specific type of military service.
It seems if pay prisoners $1 per hour to fight forest fires, those same people could also be given option to be educated, so as be able to join the military. Or in a sense one is paying them more than $1 per hour to fight forest fires as it gives them additional opportunities.
Military recruiters are now expected to be PT instructors and nutritional counselors for potential enlistees who can’t meet the physical requirements yet. Which is itself proof that the food service and physical education departments of the public schools are a disaster.
Here’s where technology can come to the rescue. Robotic “soldiers” could have the intelligence of all of humanity at their disposal, as much power and durability as we chose to put in them, greater speed, endurance, and accuracy of fire than any human soldier. According to a RAND Corporation study, the life cycle cost of an enlisted service person in 2005 dollars is $867,833. You could buy a whole lotta robot for that.
And it’s not that far-fetched. The Air Force believes that the last of the aircraft pilots has already been born. Drones are in service, after all, and though they have a pilot, he or she might never have been able to make the cut as an airborne pilot. Yet they might be able to out-fly Yeager.
It seems robots can reduce the size of military and reduce causalities
and serious injury But robots would make better suicide bombers or it requires a stronger military to defend against such enemy attacks.
I don’t think robots would make good police officers, but using some robotic riot police could be effective.
And I would guess that robots as rioters would not be effective.
But whose side will they be on? Once you replace US citizens in your military mostly with either non-citizens or robots, you run hard into the matter of loyalty. This sort of thing was a big problem in Roman civilization when the military no longer had primary loyalty to the Republic or Empire.
My take is to shrink the US military and stop treating its soldiers like dirt. I think that is sound just on the basis that we don’t need our current, expansive military. The fact that we’re running out of man-power to staff it is just a minor additional reason.
If you shrink US military, you are providing a sane and rational justification for other nations to increase their military influence- ie, for reasons of self defense.
We have a problem with NATO countries not spending enough money on their military- which is due to our US military providing for their defense.
It should noted that nuclear weapons are the cheapest and most effective way to defend a nation from aggression. So, a weaker US military will cause nations to spend more money on nuclear weapons, as cheaper way to defend themselves- and again they would have rational reasons to do so, in a more uncertain world.
Using nuclear weapons is irrational but it works as ultimate deterrent- and also provides delusion that one is safe from an military attack- or nuclear weapon use is in accordance with the mad doctrine, and it gets even crazier in relation to the weakness of one’s conventional military.
Or using nuclear weapon increasingly become the only option as one decreases one’s conventional military power.
No one thought Obama would use nuclear weapons when he was talking about red lines, but if he was lacking a conventional military, a red line would only be a threat to use nuclear weapons.
And political leaders are not going to stop making threats [people tend imagine that not all threats which are given are always necessarily, empty].
Air Force Space Command failed to properly perform Supply Chain Risk Management on four major space systems, to include the launch detection satellite SBIRS. Going all robotic has some merits, but cyber security and maintaining command and control in a contested EM environment remain difficult issues.
Thing is, in history recruiting guidelines have varied. When you’re expanding the military you lower education requirements or institute / increase sign-up bonuses, or maybe ignore some of the infractions our host mentioned if you thought a recruit might fit into a skilled position.
Hell, “Service guarantees citizenship” wasn’t just some line RAH made up! My father became a U.S. citizen by signing up to the Army just in time for Korea. It’s my understanding that this was discontinued a few years ago, but it could be brought back.
I’m sure when the chiefs got together the first topic of discussion was the shortage of good indians.
One more thing: military recruiting suffers during an economic boom when there are alternatives in the private sector. You want to improve recruiting, make Bill Maher or Paul Krugman the head of the Federal Reserve.