New Visayan Islands wrote:Greater Los Angeles wrote:It's nowhere near fascism.
Things would probably be better for America if compulsory military service was in existence.
It took the metaphorical Pain Glove* that was Vietnam to put that idea to rest, hence the modern US military being an all-volunteer force**.
* In the sense that the ground-pounders were draftees who, upon return, would have had insult added to injury simply because their numbers were up.
** That still has Selective Service on its books simply as a Hell-in-a-handbasket thing, but I digress.
This is the common wisdom, yes. But the reason the US military abandoned conscription isn't because it is immoral or even because conscripted troops are less competent than volunteers. The number one reason is that citizen-soldiers will defend their homes valiantly and to the death, and take the fight to the enemy if that is warranted (e.g. conscript troops won WWI, WWII, and Korea). But they will not tolerate an extended war whose goals are less crystal clear than the defense of their homes. That was the lesson of Vietnam: if the answer to the question "What in the name of absolute fuck are we doing here???" has to be massaged or abstracted, you're going to get fraggings and mutinies in the field, and massive political unrest at home. I'm not a Time Lord or a psychic with access to parallel realities, but it seems a fair supposition to say that with a conscript army, the American mission in Afghanistan would likely have been get in, get bin Laden, and GTFO with a minimum of amputated limbs, trillions of dollars pissed away in corruption and waste, and native allies dishonorably abandoned to vengeful religious fanatics upon our withdrawal. The catastrophically mass-fatal and destructive invasion of Iraq might not have happened at all.
...possibly. I could be wrong, but that's what I think. Unfortunately this is one of those realms where actual scientific experimentation is both too costly and utterly immoral to conduct, and so this kind of post-hoc analysis is about the only thing we've got. What I do say with confidence is that the capital-hostage American federal government prefers a volunteer force because it empirically, factually has not created anywhere close to the same level of unrest as we saw during Vietnam, even when the actual wars being fought are no more moral, clearly motivated, or free of war profiteering than the Vietnam war was.
