

The Tragedy of the American Military - smacktoward
http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/12/the-tragedy-of-the-american-military/383516/?single_page=true

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tokenadult
Wow. This is a great article. James Fallows has been writing about these
issues since the 1980s and knows them well.

I was astonished by this paragraph in the article, having many relatives who
are farmers, and knowing in a general sense how rare farming is as an
occupation in the United States: "Now the American military is exotic
territory to most of the American public. As a comparison: A handful of
Americans live on farms, but there are many more of them than serve in all
branches of the military. (Well over 4 million people live on the country’s
2.1 million farms. The U.S. military has about 1.4 million people on active
duty and another 850,000 in the reserves.) The other 310 million–plus
Americans 'honor' their stalwart farmers, but generally don’t know them. So
too with the military. Many more young Americans will study abroad this year
than will enlist in the military—nearly 300,000 students overseas, versus well
under 200,000 new recruits. As a country, America has been at war nonstop for
the past 13 years. As a public, it has not. A total of about 2.5 million
Americans, roughly three-quarters of 1 percent, served in Iraq or Afghanistan
at any point in the post-9/11 years, many of them more than once." I know some
veterans of the recent long-term war too, but indeed the United States doesn't
feel at all like a country in which the public is preoccupied with the ongoing
war. I have been an American who studied abroad for three years. I had no idea
that that is now more commonplace than enlisting in the United States armed
forces.

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cafard
Under the Bush Administration, at least, the Department of Defense was putting
downward pressure on the number of personnel, and any noises about expansion,
draft, etc., were coming from Congress, often the Democratic side of the
aisle.

There is fundamentally no way that a draft the size of the WW II draft would
now work--and remember that now we would probably need to draft women, too. We
can't use and probably can't pay that size of a military.

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tacon
It's a long piece, and I think this summarizes it well:

"The vast majority of Americans outside the military can be triply cynical in
their attitude toward it. Triply? One: “honoring” the troops but not thinking
about them. Two: “caring” about defense spending but really viewing it as a
bipartisan stimulus program. Three: supporting a “strong” defense but assuming
that the United States is so much stronger than any rival that it’s pointless
to worry whether strategy, weaponry, and leadership are right."

