This is more of the kind of discussion I was looking for.
I didn’t make up the term “unicorn,” but that doesn’t mean they exist.
I see bratty kids all the time too, Johnny, but data isn’t the plural of anecdote and all that. You are repeating the same basic complaint adults have had about children for the last ten thousand years, and the very likely truth is that it’s as wrong as it’s ever been. “Kids today!” is an easy trap to fall into, but if you look around it’s hard to actually jusify it with real evidence. It’s telling that you cite “sports where they don’t keep score” as evidence that there’s something wrong with kids. Yet we have 3 threads every month about how kids sports places too much emphasis on the score and winning and losing. Which is it? And where’s your evidence one or the other is better for kids?
When I think about it, there were lots of shitty kids when I was a kid, and if I actually look around most kids these days are just as well behaved as kids have always been.
Unless you can provide real, solid evidence kids are worse than they used to be, I simply don’t believe it’s true.
I’ve been around both military and civilian people my whole life. I know many, many people are are highly experienced and trained who DIDN’T serve, and I know some people with a lotof military experience who couldn’t do much of anything once they got out. We can trade anecdotes all day. Can you demonstrate that X years in the military provides more or better training for civilian life than X years in civilian employment?
I have no doubt that you can learn lots of valuable stuff in the military. Again, though, that’s only of value if it’s greater than the opportunity cost of NOT holding down a civilian job during that period of time.
I’m not saying it’s not possible, but you’re making huge, sweeping assumptions that don’t logically have to be true. It doesn’t make a lot of sense to me that 4 years of the Army would be better training for a civvy job than 4 years in that civvy job. But maybe in some way it does. Without some study into it, though, I don’t have any reason to buy it, and to sell a draft you’d have to present a lot more than unsupported, vague assertions.
I realize you aren’t personally arguing for a draft, I’m just questioning the validity of the benefits you’ve posited.
Johnny L.A., not only did you not make up the term indigo children, but I don’t think you even fully understand it.
If indigos are even a useful classification (which I’m unsure of), the lack of discipline is not the most important thing about them. (Unless, perhaps, you agree with this proposition). My cite lists heightened sensitivity, intuition, intellectual gifts, and a willingness to think outside the box and shake up paradigms. All traits that make for excellent citizens, achievers, and public minded individuals, but not necessarily good soldiers, sailors, airmen, or marines.
Seems to me that bringing these folks into the service in any great numbers would change the military more than the military would change them. Probably to the detriment of the kind of discipline the military depends on, ie: hard-ass, fear-based, gut-level obedience. They don’t respond well to it at all, and could pose a serious problem in unit morale and cohesion. Simply put, when you try to break them, they tend to snap.
Unless you have a politically repressive, culture-war sort of “discipline” in mind, it’s difficult to see how UMT would benefit this generation.
Actually, “sensitivity,” “Intellectual gifts” and “a willingness to think outside the box” describes most of the greatest soldiers of all time. (“Intuition” could mean a lot of things.) You practucally just wrote a personality description of Wellington. Or Nelson. Or Grant.
In any event, this “indigo children” thing is a ridiculous pile of crap.
Both my great-grandfather’s and my brother’s experience.
My g-gf, circa 1910. He was from Las Hurdes, probably the poorest part of Spain. According to him, the place was “potatoes for breakfast, 'tatoes for lunch and chips for dinner - no fish and the only one who got chorizo was Father.” Because he was one of the 6 tallest guys in his draft year, he got assigned to the Royal Guard. That is, he went from potatoes, 'tatoes and chips, to watching the king break his fast every morning for a year and a half. This was enough to make him decide there was no way in Hell he’d go back to his little corner of the world; he joined the Guardia Civil (a police force with a military structure, with functions similar to the US Marshals), where he eventually reached the grade of Sargento de Brigada (the highest NCO in a Brigade). If it hadn’t been for the “mili”, he would have spent his whole life thinking that the only edible item in the world was potatoes.
FFWD to my brother, circa 1995. The mili is in the process of being eliminated, but he decides to do it (there is an option to do civil service instead, which my other brother chose). By this time, anybody who hasn’t requested something else serves in his own Military Region, which in this case covers the NE of Spain - the regions of Catalonia, Navarra and Aragon. Many of the guys in his group are from around Barcelona. Within 15 days of arriving, the not-from-Barcelona guys have to stop the guys-from-Barcelona from going all together to see the Captain and telling him to “give them St John’s Eve off”; they could not comprehend that
[ul]
[li]St John’s Eve (midsummer, June 24th) is not a universal holiday,[/li][li]if 10 guys go to see the Captain and say “hey dude, we don’t wanna work today so give us the day off cos it ain’t right that we gotta work” it counts as mutiny,[/li][li]and by the way, the “mili” was 9 months and the penalty for mutiny is 2 years in a nice concrete room.[/li][/ul]
This is only one of my brother’s many “mili stories”, all of which convinced him that, even nowadays, there are still guys who NEED to be taken away from home.
I don’t like drafts and neither do any of the military types I know (from their point of view, reluctant soldiers are hell), but those two positive points are important.
Okay, I get your point, but it’s damn hard to argue whether the benifits outweight the costs if we don’t know what the benifits are.
I have been in the military (Navy, 1984-1990) and I work in a high school. Therefore, I feel like I can address Johnny’s points with some credibility.
I’ve always thought that national service would be a good idea for some people…but the people that need it the most are the most unwilling to do it.
If you could take some of “these kids” at 18 and give them some responsibility and make them accountable for their actions for a couple of years you would accomplish some good things. Someone at 20 might be able to handle college when they might not have been mature enough at 18. This is especially true for the males. They have had a chance to learn accountability, self-reliance and how to work with others.
You would have to have an alternative to the military though, because the “unwilling conscripts” problems would be numerous and real.
Absolutely not. One of the main reasons that our military is the best in the world is because it is completely and totally voluntary.
Brazil, Latin America and most europeans have mandatory military service… but to be honest and straight forward they don’t engage in wars and invasions 24/7 like the USA does. So the risk to life and limb to most subjected to mandatory service is minimal to non-americans.
Besides in most of Latin America nowdays and the US in the past its only the poor that end up recruited. I didn’t serve due to miopia… but I could have gotten rid of it should I have needed. Its a good “job” to many poorer brazilians… so they don’t complain. So even if americans did like the idea of military service… the certain injustice of it would certainly stink like it did in the past.
I don't doubt the gains of living military life... but like someone said before... its not the boy scouts. (I think its mildy brain washing ... IMO) It also delays people's lives for a year when they could be going to college or working.
So mandatory service in the US ? Highly doubtful. It do more harm than good getting in the way of what usually is a professional army.
Void when Rummy see fit to extend tours and contracts… 
With all due respect, that’s simply an anecdote, and is therefore of no value. I’ve been suggesting that what we need is real, objective evidence, e.g. data.
Yes, I know that many people have gone into the military, gotten away from home, and it was really good for them. And I know many people who went into the military and they were still idiots when they go out. You don’t have to provide me with stories about that stuff because I can provide my own.
But you know what? I know people who went away to university, too, and got away from home, and THAT was really good for them. So I propose that we make it the law that all people MUST attend post-secondary education away from their parents. Isn’t that just as good an idea as a military draft? It seems logical to me that it confers just as many benefits as forcing people to be soldiers.
I ge the sense that there is an unwillingness here to acknowledge the concept of opportunity costs. Four years in the military certainly confers some benefits - I was in the armed forces myself - but that’s four years you’re NOT doing something in the civilian world. Four years of civilian experience is damned valuable, too.
With a very simple change, we can increase the military to any size necessary, and still have an all volunteer force!
Just offer this invitation to the men of the world: If you want to volunteer, come
to America and leave your paperwork behind. And if you show up without the paperwork, we’ll know you want to volunteer.
As far as creating a more disciplined individual etc. etc etc.
One thing is true about any endeavour especially the military… You only get out of it what you put into it.
I found that most people who were squeezed out of the military and were unsuccessful on the civilian side were those who were under-achievers in the military also.
What I mean is that they weren’t promoted to higher ranks (officers and nco’s) and they didn’t bother to learn other skills so when they left the service for what ever reason they didn’t have a leg to stand on.
So I don’t think manditory service would be a bad thing. You serve your piece for 16-24 months if you like it stick with it if not… hey you’ve got some cash for college and you can move on.
But the bottom line is that you only get out of life what you put into it. And it presents and excellent opportunity especially for those who need direction.
Just as a side note I served for 8 years and I don’t work in the same field as my military occupation by a long shot, but there are some things that I learned and use everyday that are invaluable.
How much would people required to serve really get paid? Especially in opportunity costs, you’re probably costing them money. Not giving it to them.
I’ve always wondered about the utility of a layer of military service with somewhat less obligation than the National Guard.
Something more on the order of the Swiss system, where people could go for basic military training and some basic branch training, then be “on-call”, but with only occasional refresher training- like annual exercises, or something.
These reservists(or whatever they’d be called) would be similar to the NG, in the sense that they’d be State troops in peacetime, and only able to be called up in case of dire emergency- disasters, declared wars, etc…, but not in any kind of limited war such as Korea, Vietnam, etc…
This way, if the NG was off in Bosnia, Iraq or wherever, and a major disaster happened at home, the State would have its bases covered in terms of having armed NG type infantry to keep order and distribute food, etc…, and if the s**t really hit the fan, the military would have a large, ready-made and trained pool of soldiers to draw on, and wouldn’t necessarily have to resort to drafting and training untrained people right off the bat.
Plus, you could always give these guys the option to go either NG or active duty if they happened to enjoy the experience in training.
This could be voluntary too- I know LOTS of people who would do something like this, but who don’t necessarily want the level of committment that the NG requires, much less active duty.
Problem: The US type of training is designed so you are almost certain not to enjoy it. We rely on that to create obedience and unit cohesion.
Even Grant is going back a ways. And Grant was hardly a success at West Point. The modern leader reminds me more of Patton: make the other dumb bastard die for his country so you don’t have to die for yours, or maybe Ollie North: professional soldier as weapon of ideology, “defending” warrior values against civilian America. In any case, these aren’t the qualities we value in military people below flag or field grade today.
That’s as may be. But you needn’t buy into chakras or crystals or such to believe that there are people like that (not just children, either). And surely some conservative- or traditional-minded people would like to put some social mechanism in place to cut them down to size.
Can you be a little more specific about that “many”? CITE
They signed up to pay for college, huh? Well that falls under one of the following headings:
[ul][li] There ain’t such a thing as a “free lunch”[/li][li] Life isn’t fair[/li][li] TS[/ul][/li]
Besides all that there are also those like my youngest son who wanted to serve in the military, but he is deaf in one ear. That isn’t fair is it? 
Would you prefer perhaps The French Foreign Legion?
What’s he going to do, find a survey of soldiers asking them “So why are you really here?”
[quote]
They signed up to pay for college, huh? Well that falls under one of the following headings:
[ul][li] There ain’t such a thing as a “free lunch”[/li][li] Life isn’t fair[/li][li] TS[/ul][/li][/QUOTE]
Look, the military has been using offers of college payments to entice people for decades. It’s in most of the ads. People always seem to react like you do to comments like Wes’s, but it’s really not the most absurd idea in the world. Also, how does peacetime military service qualify as a “free lunch?”