This. At least for our school. Seniors get a day of Career Planning while the underclasspeople take the PSAT and/or ASVAB. The latter may have been designed with the military in mind but it is also a fairly well developed diagnostic test in general.
I don’t follow. The problem with the purchasing of commissions wasn’t that - pardon the pun - it promoted those lacking bravery, it was that it allowed the promotion of incompetence. The upper classes still performing as junior officers in WW1 after the elimination of purchased commissions clearly didn’t lack for bravery as their casualty rates clearly show, and purchased commissions were themselves a disincentive to cowardice; the commission was a cash bond to the crown:
Formally, the purchase price of a commission was a cash bond for good behaviour, liable to be forfeited to the Army’s cashiers (accountants) if found guilty of cowardice, desertion, or gross misconduct.
A major factor in the decision to eliminate purchased commissions was the kind of foolhardy incompetence exemplified in the Charge of the Light Brigade in the Crimean War:
The malpractices associated with the purchase of commissions reached their height in the long peace between the Napoleonic Wars and the Crimean War, when James Brudenell, Lord Cardigan paid £35,000 (equivalent to £3,460,000 in 2021) for the Colonelcy of the stylish 11th Hussars.[6] It became obvious in the Crimea that the system of purchase often resulted in incompetence, such as that which resulted in the Charge of the Light Brigade. An inquiry (the Commission on Purchase) was established in 1855, and commented unfavourably on the institution. The practice of purchase of commissions was finally abolished as part of the 1871 Cardwell reforms which made many changes to the structure and procedures of the Army.
That was my dad. He was extremely near-sighted – blind as a bat without his glasses. He was sent to the Middle East. He mentioned Basra and Khoramshar (sp?), so I knew he was in both Iraq and Iran. He taught us how to count to ten in Arabic. I also still have his army Farsi translation book. I took it to work once and just reading the phonetic entries, my Persian friends could understand what I was saying. Really valuable things like asking what color were the uniforms or how many tanks were there. Valuable to the army, not so valuable in late 20th c. California.
When he died we found some of his old paperwork my mom had filed away and found out he had been in a joint Russian/American force. I think it was protecting the oil fields? But I have an old karakul hat from my dad that he said he’d swapped his hat for with a Russian soldier as they were on a train going home at the end of the war. I wondered if was fudging that account because they were actually friendly. He told me the story when I was kid at the height of the Cold War, when the evil Russkies were are sworn enemies. In any case, it’s a very cool hat with a large enameled red star with an embedded hammer and sickle. Occastionally, I check online to see if I can find anything similar, and I never see any as nice as the one I got from my dad.
The difference in expense between now and then is really, really dramatic.
The example I like to pull out is this; right now Canada is planning to purchase new fighter jets. A fleet of 85-90 will be bought, which is barely enough but is essentially all Canada can afford. The estimated price tag will be maybe $15 billion. Actually there are a lot of estimates but that seems a fair midrange guess.
In World War II, Canada had an air force of thousands of aircraft. All of them COMBINED did not cost $15 billion in 2022 dollars - yeah, I’m adjusting for inflation. Literally the entire, gigantic RCAF fleet of aircraft employed to fight Hitler wasn’t that expensive.
Isn’t that a bit much?
Red Green: Well, I’m not gonna be calling the U.S. Air Force, Harold. What do I say? We’ve got a missile? They take that as a threat, we’re in real trouble.
Harold Green: Well, then, contact the Canadian Air Force.
Red Green: Harold, it’s after six; he’s gone home.
We were amazingly productive in those days. My grandfather worked in truck production in Oshawa: Canada built 800,000 heavy trucks for Canadian and allied military during the war.
We started the war with a navy that had only 15 ships and 1,800 officers. We ended the war with the third largest navy in the world with 471 ships and 95,000 personnel. Most of those ships were built in Canada during the war, along with 400 more merchant ships.
Our air force had only 275 planes in 1939, of which 19 were modern types. We had 235 pilots. By the end of the war the RCAF had 86 squadrons, and Canada produced 16,000 aircraft during the war.
At the end of WWII, Canada was one of the world’s most advanced aerospace countries. AVRO aircraft, de Havilland, Curtiss, Canadair, Fleet…
At the start of WW2 the US Army had a big psychological screening program to try to reduce the crackup rate experienced in WW1 by filtering out men supposedly unsuited to combat. Afterwards, it turned out that the crackup rate did not differ significantly from the last time.
We still are; it’s just that weapons are necessarily incredibly harder to produce. You cannot mass produce F-35s the way they mass produced Spitfires. If you do build F-35s, they are armed with missiles that are themselves amazingly expensive; Spitfires were armed with ordinary ammunition, .303 and 20mm rounds that had to be made anyway.
Canadian tanks are Leopard II. A Leopard II, conservatively, or the sort we use, costs eight million dollars, and you haven’t crewed it yet or bought the shells. That is about ten times the cost of a WWII tank - again, I’m already adjusting for inflation.
Even the USA could never, ever build an armed forces as large as it once was. The USA in WWII build over 300,000 military aircraft. Ten thousand of those were P-38 Lightnings, and that wasn’t even the most prolifically produced American fighter (the Thunderbolt was.) If they tried to build ten thousand F-35s Lightning IIs it’d cost more than the entire military budget for a year. It’s impossible.
To get back on track, that just completely changes the recruitment process. In WWII they needed hundreds of thousands of aircrew and millions more supporting them. Just the number of people the Allies had serving in, or serving as support to, the M4 Shermans they used - just that kind of vehicle - would have been larger than most countries’ whole armies today. No one has that many tanks now; the U.S. MBT arsenal right now is about 6000 tanks. So you just don’t need as many people. You can be pickier.
Something that always pops into my mind when the topic of modern vs. WW2 production comes up is a comment from Gwynn Dyer’s documentary War, it’s at the 33:00 mark in the video here.
About the same amount of factory space is given over to the production of military aircraft in the United States now as was devoted to the same purpose in Germany in WW2. But in 1944 Germany was building 3,000 planes a month and losing them at about the same rate. Current American production is about 40 per month.
And he was talking about 1983, with the then state of the art F-15s taking about 18 months to produce.
– Harold Dodds, President, Princeton University, 1951
If anyone wants to know more, you can check out:
Student Deferment and the Selective Service College Qualification Test, 1951-1967
I have a question about peacetime deferment. If it was my son, and if we were in-between Korea and Vietnam, I likely would have urged him to get his service over with before college, thinking – to myself – that there was a risk of his being deferred into a war. Was this a common way of thinking, or did most college men seek a peacetime deferment?
Late '90s, same here. My sister got 99th percentile, and me 96th, I think - or at least that’s what they told us. High, anyway. She said only the reservist lady was pushy. One recruiter called, asked her her ACT score, and on answer said “you’re not interested, are you?” and she wasn’t. Neither was I.
I was surprised to have scored that high (some of the subject material wasn’t that familiar), but then I found out several students in my class did poorly on purpose and wonder if that was common among high school students. At least one classmate who deliberately did poorly asked to retake it when they decided the military might be a good career option after all.
I too was an EE major in the mid-1980s, and I remember those recruiter calls, for the Nuclear Propulsion Officer Corps (NUPOC). I wasn’t really interested in a military career, but I heard them out. The navy vets in my class said it was really demanding, unpleasant duty, which explained how hard they were recruiting.
I took the ASVAB in high school because we got out of class to take it.
My high school also also tried to make it mandatory for all juniors. I refused to take and had my mother write me a note. AFAIK I was the only one in my class that didn’t take it (the guidance counselor seemed very surprised when I handed her the note and Iendedup the only student in most of my classesthat day); alot of my friends just filled out answers at random. This was after 9/11 and I had zero interest in serving in the military or staying in the closet after graduation. In retrospect if I had come out it probably would’ve shut up the recruiters faster.
My uncle would go for hours telling stories about how Vietnam was an occasional party with long stretches of boredom. He had time to read all those classic novels they tried to get him to read in high school, and found out he enjoyed them. Otherwise, he spent as much time getting stoned as he possibly could.
Only once did he mention having been in a firefight and having to shoot enemy personnel.
A few folks indicated that some people knew in advance that they were getting drafted. How did that work? Specifically Vietnam era.
Probably due to the draft lottery; the order in which people were to be drafted was based on their birth dates.
I’m a proponent of a draft for just that reason - it’s real easy to ‘rah-rah’ for a war when it’s not your kid going into harms way. And, to my three sons dismay, I was talking about this when they were prime draft age.
My quarter-assed plan is that some significant % is draftees (20%? 30%?), and there are no deferrals. In fact, I like ‘negative deferrals’, where the sins/successes of the parents are inflicted on their offspring. Everyone has one ticket automatically. Top 25% income, +1. Top 10%, +1 again. Top 1%, +1 again. Dad’s a Senator? +1 again. Mom’s a governor? +1 again. Dad’s Q-score (I think that is the term for “people know who you are”?) is some level? +1 again. Your Q-score is some level (the Elvis tax)? +1 again.
Completely unworkable, of course, but I look at it like the progressive income tax - those who profit the most from living here need to pay the most to maintain it.
The rules for the VFW have always been quite clear: you had to have served in a theater-of-war, or awarded a campaign or expeditionary badge.
Surprised he made it in. Nowadays, you need to provide documentation, such as a DD-214 to become a member.
This argument is a wish that a draft be arranged such that the children of the wealthy and powerful would be at the same risk as those of the poor and disadvantages. Would you like a pony with that?