I believe that the more valuable part of such training, more so than skills training, would be the brainwashing aspect, to make these children believe that their country’s cause is always right, they should sacrifice themselves for the good of their country, etc. You can take an adult and train them in just about everything but loyalty. It is no secret that if you get 'em while they’re young you’ll have them forever.
People are really missing the point with the whole comparison to “child soldiers” thing. “Child soldiers” as currently used are not soldiers at all; they have no real training; they don’t know what they’re doing at all. Even looking at pictures of them, they don’t even know how to hold their rifles properly (neither do most of the adult soldiers in these African civil wars.) We’re talking about a totally disorganized, backwater, rinky-dink collection of incompetents. There is no comparison between these so-called “soldiers” and a society with actual strict, regimented, highly-supervised training like what we have in the U.S. military academies.
Nitpick: you’re not – what’s the technical word? – right.
March 02, 1991 Baltimore Sun article –Iraqi soldiers surrender to AAI’s drones
Yes they did. The drones were not armed. They were waving white flags at the gunfire observation drone of a US battleship (the Iowa?) and possibly others. Ah, here’s a cite.
Its from a song “19” from the 1980’s, and i’ve always doubted it. I think someone is comparing 2 sets of statistics. I think it’s more likely that the figure of “26” in WW2 was the average age of all draftees into the U.S army. Many were drafted up to their late 30’s and I think were eligible up to age 42 at the time. There was a huge administative and logistical tail in the WW2 army that would have raised the average age.
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Moved to IMHO.
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I was a “Young Pioneer”. There was very little military training. Maybe a day or so (“Zarnitsa” camp-outs) in 5 years.
We already try to train all kids in teamwork and physical fitness, and many kids also end up getting training in survival, weapons, and military history.
“from birth?” Like toilet-training a toddler, and if he has an accident he gets beat up by a French Foreign Legion chef-caporel?
(wait - that’s not too different from what happens to a lot of kids already)
Have you seen the movie Soldier with Kurt Russell? In that movie, Major Todd (Russell) was a product of something called the Adam Project. Pretty nightmarish stuff. Speaks to a society for whom war is not just a way of life but a reason for life.
It’s not worth the investment unless you can give them a mutant healing factor.
Well, we do have private military academies below the university level some of which do take early adolescents (I have heard of at least one that takes 12 year olds). Has there ever been a study comparing their graduates vs. graduates of regular public schools as cadets in any of the service academies?
It sounds like **grude **is referencing the film Blade Runner. Supposedly Soldier takes place in the same universe.
I’ve read somewhere that to join the upper ranks of the military, one typically has to graduate from one of the main military acadamies (West Point, Annapolis, etc). But that is probably due as much to institutional bias as actual performance.
One question is what would be the advantage of such a soldier, trained from birth? We already train our soliders from a young age. As soon as they are old enough to buy an XBox360 or Playstation. We don’t need freakin Spartans anymore.
“The wars of the future will not be fought on the battlefield or at sea. They will be fought in space, or possibly on top of a very tall mountain. In either case, most of the actual fighting will be done by small robots. And as you go forth today remember always your duty is clear: To build and maintain those robots.”
-Rommelwood Acadamy commencement speech, The Simpsons
I’m pretty sure it’s possible to train elite soldiers without taking away their humanity and making them brutes. I am not convinced that an intensive military training program beginning at early childhood would result in people with sociopathic, brutal, or otherwise undesirable personalities. Nor would these trainees need to be completely kept apart from typical kids their age; they would have plenty of socialization with non-trained kids.
Excuse me, but isn’t the taking-away of humanity the *real *goal of military training in general? To turn young people into merciless robots? The fact that combat veterans come home with crippling PTSD speaks to the fact that they are, in fact, still human, and that the military failed to take away their humanity completely.
A lot of what soldiers do doesn’t involve fighting the way we did 400 years ago with barbaric hand to hand fighting. So I don’t know how it would really matter.
I don’t know a lot about the military, but an ability to follow orders and work with machinery and technology seems a lot more important than being physically elite or barbaric.
Unless you end up training the super soldiers to basically have the level of fitness and training seen in commando units. If you had thousands of thousands of them, them maybe. But you can’t run a military just on them.
If anything the gov would be more willing to risk their lives since there is no political capital lost in dead soldiers.
I think the advantages of training children to be soldiers from birth would be primarily in the areas of discipline, teamwork, conviction and esprit de corps.
Think about the things your parents taught you that are a part of your very being; in many cases this is religion, ethical considerations, a tradition of charity, bad eating habits, etc… For most of us, these habits and teachings are VERY deeply ingrained and extraordinarily hard to shake or change.
Now imagine soldiers who have been taught from birth to be loyal to their comrades, to follow orders, and to put the mission ahead of themselves.
They’d be VERY hard to beat, assuming they got the proper training as children, and as adolescents/adults. It’s disicipline and morale that wins wars, not technology, and soldiers trained from an early age would have a distinct leg up.
That’s why the Spartans, Mamluks, Janissaries, and other historical examples were so effective and feared.
Well, we can look to the statistics of Ganglife or Thuglife in the U.S and worldwide as an equivalent binary to the modern equivlent of the militarization of youth and bringing them up in those structures. It’s quite an effective, directed, disciplined, culturized, and mobilized force of violence, to put it in sterilized terms.
Anyone remember the Jules Feiffer cartoon, Munro, who was drafted at a very young age?
“I’m only four!”
“I’M ONLY FOUR!”
“It is the official policy of army not to draft draft men of four, ergo, you cannot be four, you only think you’re four. Go on sick call.”
I hope I put this post in the right thread this time.
That movie actually wasn’t as horrible as I thought it would be.