Source: http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20050612/ts_alt_afp/usiraqrecruitment
Time for Daddy's Little Princess to go to war!
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Grab your boots, Army recruitment shortfalls make draft a possibility.
- Thread starter Macam
- Start date
- Status
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20050612/ts_alt_afp/usiraqrecruitment
Time for Daddy's Little Princess to go to war!
Mike Works
Member
Just draft everyone who voted for the president. Simple.
Please stay the fuck out if this happens
We've already had several threads on the Army failing to meet their goals in the last week. We're not going to have a draft. Throwing out the spectre of the draft is a pretty straightforward political tool. Actually instituting a draft is very clearly political suicide under today's circumstances.
keeblerdrow
Member
What, this old scare tactic again?
Instigator
Banned
loxy said:
People who claim that should at least add whether the missions abroad will be scaled back or if the voluntary military will continue to stretch its forces thin.
There will not be a draft.
The administration will sabotage a war that it starts by shorting the number of troops before it takes a political risk that large. Not that extra troops would be able to solve the security situation in Iraq at this point anyway.
As an aside, during Vietnam the US never used the National Guard in the war, apparently since that was considered a huge political no-no. Now the Guard's been called up but the draft is a third rail.
The administration will sabotage a war that it starts by shorting the number of troops before it takes a political risk that large. Not that extra troops would be able to solve the security situation in Iraq at this point anyway.
As an aside, during Vietnam the US never used the National Guard in the war, apparently since that was considered a huge political no-no. Now the Guard's been called up but the draft is a third rail.
tedtropy said:
Hah.
As a purely personal aside, my favorite television ad for the army is where the guy in the uniform is talking to his friends. When the friends ask what the guy is doing in the armed forces he says, "I'm working on computers!" They all look suitably awed.
I suggest everyone sign up for the army and tell them you don't want to fight, you just want to work on the computers.
Disco Stu said:
How about I tell them I want to work on computers, but only in a LAN party capacity? Surely there's some sort of murder machine they can hook me up where my l33t gaming skills can benefit the march towards democracy. Surely.
Spike Spiegel
Member
Uh, no. Just no.ge-man said:
King Jippo
Banned
At this point? Sure.ge-man said:
Spike Spiegel said:Uh, no. Just no.
What do you suppose that we do then? Where are we going to get the man power? If we don't get out of Iraq, the US will have to get some bodies on the ground from somewhere. Furthermore, the insurgency is fueled by our continual prescense in the area.
If we want to seriously handle this issue, we need pull out and get the UN in on rebuidling Iraq. That doesn't mean they we throw off our obligations, though--we must foot the build because this is our mess.
If we keep going on this same path, Iraq will further resemble the mistake that was Vietnam--a costly half assed war fought against an enemy that is more determined to succeed.
Instigator said:
Voluntary military will continue to stretch its forces thin. The people in power already believe that those kids should expect to die, and that if they bring them home alive they're doing the soldiers a favor. You're gonna start to see the backdoor draft continue, as well as this stop-loss shit really start to fuck the soldiers over. Case in point? My buddy's contract is up in February, and they're shipping him for another year to Iraq in November, heh.
We've got a lot of reservists and national guard people back home now, which is ideally the best situation. They'll all be sent back for second tours if the need for soldiers really becomes apparent. Furthermore, we don't need 15,000 troops stationed in Germany, 20,000 in South Korea (Whether we have 2000 or 20,000, if the DPRK wants to move on South Korea, those boys are dead... regardless of how many soldiers you put on the DMZ) and another 10,000 in Japan.
Contrary to what the DNC is telling everyone to try and scare support away from the GOP, a draft is not inevitable. These politicians aren't stupid... they understand that the moment they initiate a draft and make people who don't want to fight fight, then the odds of their assassinations go up immensely.
And ge-man... maybe you don't remember but the UN is the one that backed out of rebuilding Iraq. They lost about 40 guys and went running. Do you really want them helping us out? Of course not. You want the countries IN the UN helping us out, but you'll never get help from France because we fucked them out of a lot of money. You won't get help from Germany cuz they're afraid of reliving their past, so they try to stay out of military affairs (they also wanna separate themselves from the US finally, and helping us out isn't doing that). I mean, who else are you gonna go to? Russia? They're pissed, too, cuz we fucked THEM out of money. China? Not likely.
I'll tell you what will happen with Iraq. We'll be there for awhile still.. then in about 8 months we'll start a horribly premature pull-out of all but a small amount of our forces, and this will inevitably end up in leaving Iraq to fend for itself. Hopefully it won't result in civil war, but even if it doesn't, you're just going to stir up some leader that can unite the country under a common idea, like, hatred of America.
All I know is that this is war is a an utter fuck up and our options are limited, if not non-existant. Imperialism has a high price and either we going to fight this war with the proper amount of manpower and equipment, or we need make plans to pull out. Any other suggestions are just daydreams and possibly denial.
Geopolitics, Strategy and Military Recruitment: The American Dilemma
June 14, 2005 1950 GMT
By George Friedman
The United States Army has failed once again to reach its recruitment goals.
The media, which have noted the problem in maintaining force levels in a
desultory fashion over the past few years, have now rotated the story of this
month's shortfall into a major story. In other words, the problem has now
been noticed, and it is now important. Of course, the problem has been
important for quite some time, as Stratfor noted in late December.
There are, therefore, several dimensions to this problem: One is military,
the other is political. But the most important is geopolitical and strategic,
having to do with the manner in which the United States fights wars and the
way in which the U.S. military is organized. The issue is not recruitment.
The issue is the incongruence between U.S. geopolitics, strategy and the
force.
The United States dominates North America militarily against all but two
threats. First, it cannot defend the homeland against nuclear attacks
launched by missile. Second, it cannot defend the United States against
special operations teams carrying out attacks such as those of Sept. 11,
2001. The American solution in both of these cases has been offensive. In the
case of nuclear missiles, the counter has always been either the pre-emptive
strike or the devastating counter-strike, coupled with political arrangements
designed to reduce the threat. The counter to special-operations strikes has
been covert and overt attacks against nation-states that launch or facilitate
these attacks, or harbor the attackers. Contrary to popular opinion,
launching small teams into the United States without detection is not easy
and requires sophisticated support, normally traceable in some way to
nation-states. The U.S. strategy has been to focus on putting those
nation-states at risk, directly or indirectly, if attacks take place.
Apart from these two types of attack, the United States is fairly
invulnerable to military action. The foundation of this invulnerability falls
into three parts:
1. The United States is overwhelmingly powerful in North America, and
Latin America is divided, inward-looking, and poor. A land invasion of the
United States from the south would be impossible.
2. The United States controls the oceans absolutely. It is militarily
impossible that an Eastern Hemispheric power could mount a sustained threat
to sea lanes, let alone mount an amphibious operation against the United
States.
3. The primary U.S. interest is in maintaining a multi-level balance of
power in Eurasia, so that no single power can dominate Eurasia and utilize
its resources.
In terms of preventing nuclear strikes and special operations against the
United States and in terms of managing the geopolitical system in Eurasia,
the United States has a tremendous strategic advantage that grows out of its
geopolitical position -- U.S. wars, regardless of level, are fought on the
territory of other countries. With the crucial exception of Sept. 11, foreign
attacks on U.S. soil do not happen. When they do happen, the United States
responds by redefining the war into a battle for other homelands.
This spares the American population from the rigors of war while imposing
wars on foreign countries. But for the American civilian population to escape
war, the U.S. armed forces must be prepared to go to war on a global basis.
Herein begins the dilemma. The American strategic goal is to spare the
general population from war. This is done by creating a small class of
military who must bear the burden. It also is accomplished through a
volunteer force -- men and women choose to bear the burden. During extended
war, as the experiences of the civilian population and the military
population diverge dramatically, the inevitable tendency is for the military
to abandon the rigors of war and join the protected majority. In a strategy
that tries to impose no cost on civilians while increasing the cost on the
military, the inevitable outcome is that growing numbers of the military
class will become civilians.
This is the heart of the problem, but it is not all of the problem. The
American strategy in Eurasia is to maintain a balance of power. The basic
role of the United States is as blocker -- blocking Eurasian powers from
adding to their power, and increasing insecurity among major powers so as to
curb their ambitions.
Thus, a strategic dilemma for the United States is born. On a grand strategic
scale, the United States controls the international system -- but at the
strategic level, it does not choose the time or place of its own military
interventions. Put very simply, the United States controls the global system,
but its enemies determine when it goes to war and where, and the nature of
these wars tends to put U.S. forces on the tactical defensive.
During the 1990s, for example, the United States was constantly responding to
actions by others that passed a threshold, beyond which ignoring the action
was impossible. From 1989 onward, the United States intervened in Panama,
Kuwait, Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia and Kosovo, not counting lesser interventions
in places like Liberia or Colombia. Nor does it count the interventions and
deployments throughout the Muslim world and contiguous areas since 2001.
The grand strategic configuration means that the United States does not hold
the strategic initiative. The time and place of U.S. intervention is very
much in the hands of regional forces. In some cases, the intervention is the
result of miscalculation on the side of regional forces. In other cases, U.S.
intervention is shaped by some regional player. For example, Iraq did not
expect a U.S. response to its invasion of Kuwait in 1990; Saddam Hussein
miscalculated. In the case of Kosovo, a regional actor, Albania, shaped U.S.
intervention. In both events, however, given the operating principles of
grand strategy, American military involvement is overwhelmingly responsive
and therefore, from the U.S. point of view, unpredictable.
Though others determine the general time and place of U.S. intervention, the
operational level remains in the hands of the United States. But here too,
there are severe constraints. U.S. interventions suffer from a core paradox:
The political cycle of an intervention frequently runs in days or weeks, but
the time it takes to bring major force to bear is measured in months. That
means that the United States must always bring insufficient force to bear in
the relevant time period -- in a kind of holding action -- and contain the
situation until sufficient force for a resolution becomes available. Thus,
U.S. interventions begin with CIA paramilitaries and U.S. Special Operations
Command. At times, these forces can complete the mission. But sometimes, all
they can do is prepare the ground and hold until relieved by major force.
Very rapidly, the United States finds itself on the tactical defensive --
lacking decisive force, at a massive demographic disadvantage, and frequently
suffering from an intelligence deficit. Even after the main force arrives,
the United States can remain in a defensive tactical situation for an
extended period. This places U.S. troops in a difficult position.
The entire structure creates another strategic problem. The United States
does not control its interventions. It is constantly at risk of being
overwhelmed by multiple theaters of operation that outstrip the size of its
military force or of its logistical base. Between the tactical defensive and
the strategic defensive, U.S. forces must scale themselves to events that are
beyond their control or prediction.
The unexpected is built into U.S. grand strategy, which dictates that the
U.S. armed forces will not know their next mission. U.S. strategy is
reflexive. U.S. operational principles do provide an advantage, but that can
bleed off at the tactical level. In the end, the U.S. force is, almost by
definition, stretched beyond what it can reasonably be expected to do. This
situation is hardwired into the U.S. geopolitical system.
The U.S. force was never configured for this reality. It was designed first
to cope with a general war with the Soviet Union, focused on central Europe.
After the collapse of the Soviets, the technological base remained relatively
stable: It remained a combined arms force including armor, carrier battle
groups and fighter planes. All of these take a long time to get to the
theater, are excellent at destroying conventional forces, and are weak at
pacification.
Donald Rumsfeld has identified the problem: The force is too slow to get to
the theater in a politically consequential period of time. Getting there too
late, it immediately finds itself on the defensive, while the brunt of the
early battle focuses on Special Operations forces and air power. The problem
that Rumsfeld has not effectively addressed is that occupation warfare --
which is what we have seen in Iraq for the past few years -- requires a
multi-level approach, ranging from special operations to very large
occupation forces.
Put this differently: The U.S. invasion of Iraq required everything from an
armored thrust to strategic bombing to special operations to civil affairs.
It required every type of warfare imaginable. That is indeed the reality of
American strategy. Not only is the time and place of military intervention
unpredictable, but so is the force structure. Any attempt to predict the
nature of the next war is doomed to fail. The United States does not control
the time or place of the next war; it has no idea what that war will look
like or where it will be.
The United States has always built its force around expectations of both
where the next war would be fought and how it would be fought. From "Air-Land
Battle" to "Military operations other than war," U.S. military doctrine has
always been marked by two things: Military planners were always certain they
had a handle on what the next war would be like, and they were always dead
wrong.
The military structure that was squeezed out of the Cold War force after 1989
assumed that wars would be infrequent, that they would be short, that they
would be manageable. Building on these assumptions, U.S. military planners
loaded key capabilities into reserve and National Guard units, cut back on
forces that didn't fit into this paradigm and then -- even when reality
showed they were wrong -- they tried to compensate with technology rather
than with restructuring the force.
Wars have been more frequent since the fall of the Soviet Union than they
were before. They occur in less predictable places. They tend not to be
brief, but to be of long duration and to pile up on each other -- and they
frequently are unmanageable for an extended period of time. The United States
does not have tactical advantages with the forces provided.
As a result, the force is deployed far more than planned, troops are forced
to rotate too rapidly through assignments in combat zones, and they operate
in environments where operational requirements force them too often into
tactically defensive situations. That all of this is managed with a force
that is drawn heavily from reserves is simply the icing on the cake. The
force does not match the reality.
We began by pointing out the goal is -- and should be -- to protect the
American public from war, with volunteers placing themselves between home and
war's desolation. This strategic goal, while appropriate, creates a class of
warriors and a broader class of indifferent civilians. Given the situation,
it will follow that sensible warriors, having done their duty in their own
minds, will choose to join the ranks of civilians, while civilians will avoid
service.
There has been talk of a draft. That is a bad idea for technical reasons: It
takes too long to train a soldier for a draft to solve the problems, and
today's soldiers need to be too skilled and motivated for a reluctant
civilian to master their craft. Moreover, this is not a force that would
benefit from the service of 19-year-olds. Many of the jobs in the military
could be done by people in their 40s and 50s, who would bring useful skills
into the military. We would support a draft only if it included all ages of
men and women who had not previously served. There is no reason that an
accountant in civilian life could not provide valuable military service in
Afghanistan, maintaining logistics inventory. The United States does not need
to draft children.
Since that isn't going to happen, and since the United States does not have
the option of abandoning its strategy, the United States must reshape the
force to meet the single most important reality: The United States will be at
war a lot of the time, and no one really knows where or when it will go to
war. The challenges in military retention or inability to meet recruiting
goals mean that the United States continues to recruit children, as if this
were the 19th century.
June 14, 2005 1950 GMT
By George Friedman
The United States Army has failed once again to reach its recruitment goals.
The media, which have noted the problem in maintaining force levels in a
desultory fashion over the past few years, have now rotated the story of this
month's shortfall into a major story. In other words, the problem has now
been noticed, and it is now important. Of course, the problem has been
important for quite some time, as Stratfor noted in late December.
There are, therefore, several dimensions to this problem: One is military,
the other is political. But the most important is geopolitical and strategic,
having to do with the manner in which the United States fights wars and the
way in which the U.S. military is organized. The issue is not recruitment.
The issue is the incongruence between U.S. geopolitics, strategy and the
force.
The United States dominates North America militarily against all but two
threats. First, it cannot defend the homeland against nuclear attacks
launched by missile. Second, it cannot defend the United States against
special operations teams carrying out attacks such as those of Sept. 11,
2001. The American solution in both of these cases has been offensive. In the
case of nuclear missiles, the counter has always been either the pre-emptive
strike or the devastating counter-strike, coupled with political arrangements
designed to reduce the threat. The counter to special-operations strikes has
been covert and overt attacks against nation-states that launch or facilitate
these attacks, or harbor the attackers. Contrary to popular opinion,
launching small teams into the United States without detection is not easy
and requires sophisticated support, normally traceable in some way to
nation-states. The U.S. strategy has been to focus on putting those
nation-states at risk, directly or indirectly, if attacks take place.
Apart from these two types of attack, the United States is fairly
invulnerable to military action. The foundation of this invulnerability falls
into three parts:
1. The United States is overwhelmingly powerful in North America, and
Latin America is divided, inward-looking, and poor. A land invasion of the
United States from the south would be impossible.
2. The United States controls the oceans absolutely. It is militarily
impossible that an Eastern Hemispheric power could mount a sustained threat
to sea lanes, let alone mount an amphibious operation against the United
States.
3. The primary U.S. interest is in maintaining a multi-level balance of
power in Eurasia, so that no single power can dominate Eurasia and utilize
its resources.
In terms of preventing nuclear strikes and special operations against the
United States and in terms of managing the geopolitical system in Eurasia,
the United States has a tremendous strategic advantage that grows out of its
geopolitical position -- U.S. wars, regardless of level, are fought on the
territory of other countries. With the crucial exception of Sept. 11, foreign
attacks on U.S. soil do not happen. When they do happen, the United States
responds by redefining the war into a battle for other homelands.
This spares the American population from the rigors of war while imposing
wars on foreign countries. But for the American civilian population to escape
war, the U.S. armed forces must be prepared to go to war on a global basis.
Herein begins the dilemma. The American strategic goal is to spare the
general population from war. This is done by creating a small class of
military who must bear the burden. It also is accomplished through a
volunteer force -- men and women choose to bear the burden. During extended
war, as the experiences of the civilian population and the military
population diverge dramatically, the inevitable tendency is for the military
to abandon the rigors of war and join the protected majority. In a strategy
that tries to impose no cost on civilians while increasing the cost on the
military, the inevitable outcome is that growing numbers of the military
class will become civilians.
This is the heart of the problem, but it is not all of the problem. The
American strategy in Eurasia is to maintain a balance of power. The basic
role of the United States is as blocker -- blocking Eurasian powers from
adding to their power, and increasing insecurity among major powers so as to
curb their ambitions.
Thus, a strategic dilemma for the United States is born. On a grand strategic
scale, the United States controls the international system -- but at the
strategic level, it does not choose the time or place of its own military
interventions. Put very simply, the United States controls the global system,
but its enemies determine when it goes to war and where, and the nature of
these wars tends to put U.S. forces on the tactical defensive.
During the 1990s, for example, the United States was constantly responding to
actions by others that passed a threshold, beyond which ignoring the action
was impossible. From 1989 onward, the United States intervened in Panama,
Kuwait, Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia and Kosovo, not counting lesser interventions
in places like Liberia or Colombia. Nor does it count the interventions and
deployments throughout the Muslim world and contiguous areas since 2001.
The grand strategic configuration means that the United States does not hold
the strategic initiative. The time and place of U.S. intervention is very
much in the hands of regional forces. In some cases, the intervention is the
result of miscalculation on the side of regional forces. In other cases, U.S.
intervention is shaped by some regional player. For example, Iraq did not
expect a U.S. response to its invasion of Kuwait in 1990; Saddam Hussein
miscalculated. In the case of Kosovo, a regional actor, Albania, shaped U.S.
intervention. In both events, however, given the operating principles of
grand strategy, American military involvement is overwhelmingly responsive
and therefore, from the U.S. point of view, unpredictable.
Though others determine the general time and place of U.S. intervention, the
operational level remains in the hands of the United States. But here too,
there are severe constraints. U.S. interventions suffer from a core paradox:
The political cycle of an intervention frequently runs in days or weeks, but
the time it takes to bring major force to bear is measured in months. That
means that the United States must always bring insufficient force to bear in
the relevant time period -- in a kind of holding action -- and contain the
situation until sufficient force for a resolution becomes available. Thus,
U.S. interventions begin with CIA paramilitaries and U.S. Special Operations
Command. At times, these forces can complete the mission. But sometimes, all
they can do is prepare the ground and hold until relieved by major force.
Very rapidly, the United States finds itself on the tactical defensive --
lacking decisive force, at a massive demographic disadvantage, and frequently
suffering from an intelligence deficit. Even after the main force arrives,
the United States can remain in a defensive tactical situation for an
extended period. This places U.S. troops in a difficult position.
The entire structure creates another strategic problem. The United States
does not control its interventions. It is constantly at risk of being
overwhelmed by multiple theaters of operation that outstrip the size of its
military force or of its logistical base. Between the tactical defensive and
the strategic defensive, U.S. forces must scale themselves to events that are
beyond their control or prediction.
The unexpected is built into U.S. grand strategy, which dictates that the
U.S. armed forces will not know their next mission. U.S. strategy is
reflexive. U.S. operational principles do provide an advantage, but that can
bleed off at the tactical level. In the end, the U.S. force is, almost by
definition, stretched beyond what it can reasonably be expected to do. This
situation is hardwired into the U.S. geopolitical system.
The U.S. force was never configured for this reality. It was designed first
to cope with a general war with the Soviet Union, focused on central Europe.
After the collapse of the Soviets, the technological base remained relatively
stable: It remained a combined arms force including armor, carrier battle
groups and fighter planes. All of these take a long time to get to the
theater, are excellent at destroying conventional forces, and are weak at
pacification.
Donald Rumsfeld has identified the problem: The force is too slow to get to
the theater in a politically consequential period of time. Getting there too
late, it immediately finds itself on the defensive, while the brunt of the
early battle focuses on Special Operations forces and air power. The problem
that Rumsfeld has not effectively addressed is that occupation warfare --
which is what we have seen in Iraq for the past few years -- requires a
multi-level approach, ranging from special operations to very large
occupation forces.
Put this differently: The U.S. invasion of Iraq required everything from an
armored thrust to strategic bombing to special operations to civil affairs.
It required every type of warfare imaginable. That is indeed the reality of
American strategy. Not only is the time and place of military intervention
unpredictable, but so is the force structure. Any attempt to predict the
nature of the next war is doomed to fail. The United States does not control
the time or place of the next war; it has no idea what that war will look
like or where it will be.
The United States has always built its force around expectations of both
where the next war would be fought and how it would be fought. From "Air-Land
Battle" to "Military operations other than war," U.S. military doctrine has
always been marked by two things: Military planners were always certain they
had a handle on what the next war would be like, and they were always dead
wrong.
The military structure that was squeezed out of the Cold War force after 1989
assumed that wars would be infrequent, that they would be short, that they
would be manageable. Building on these assumptions, U.S. military planners
loaded key capabilities into reserve and National Guard units, cut back on
forces that didn't fit into this paradigm and then -- even when reality
showed they were wrong -- they tried to compensate with technology rather
than with restructuring the force.
Wars have been more frequent since the fall of the Soviet Union than they
were before. They occur in less predictable places. They tend not to be
brief, but to be of long duration and to pile up on each other -- and they
frequently are unmanageable for an extended period of time. The United States
does not have tactical advantages with the forces provided.
As a result, the force is deployed far more than planned, troops are forced
to rotate too rapidly through assignments in combat zones, and they operate
in environments where operational requirements force them too often into
tactically defensive situations. That all of this is managed with a force
that is drawn heavily from reserves is simply the icing on the cake. The
force does not match the reality.
We began by pointing out the goal is -- and should be -- to protect the
American public from war, with volunteers placing themselves between home and
war's desolation. This strategic goal, while appropriate, creates a class of
warriors and a broader class of indifferent civilians. Given the situation,
it will follow that sensible warriors, having done their duty in their own
minds, will choose to join the ranks of civilians, while civilians will avoid
service.
There has been talk of a draft. That is a bad idea for technical reasons: It
takes too long to train a soldier for a draft to solve the problems, and
today's soldiers need to be too skilled and motivated for a reluctant
civilian to master their craft. Moreover, this is not a force that would
benefit from the service of 19-year-olds. Many of the jobs in the military
could be done by people in their 40s and 50s, who would bring useful skills
into the military. We would support a draft only if it included all ages of
men and women who had not previously served. There is no reason that an
accountant in civilian life could not provide valuable military service in
Afghanistan, maintaining logistics inventory. The United States does not need
to draft children.
Since that isn't going to happen, and since the United States does not have
the option of abandoning its strategy, the United States must reshape the
force to meet the single most important reality: The United States will be at
war a lot of the time, and no one really knows where or when it will go to
war. The challenges in military retention or inability to meet recruiting
goals mean that the United States continues to recruit children, as if this
were the 19th century.
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