Well, it seems obvious to me that kicking out 5,000 people from the military, which contains about 2 million people, does NOT in fact affect National Security. If you think it does, prove it. Last time this topic came up, it got moved to the Pit where you weren’t required to prove anything. Now it’s still in Great Debates, so prove it, beyond “I say it harms National Security”
Should be easy for you, if it’s so obvious.
And again, all I’m saying is use other, better arguments than “Harms National Security”. Nothing more than that. Strange that you are so hung up on it.
No thanks, this is just basic math and logic (2 million - 5000 is less than 2 million, for example), and I’m not interested in such a silly conversation (how would you quantify national security? This discussion is clearly entirely in the realm of opinion). You’re free to disagree – that’s okay. You’re still a fine person and a fine poster, even if you’re arguing against something so blatantly obvious.
The “bad teeth” thing actually isn’t true per se, I think there is something in the regulations about not being able to join if your teeth are so bad you can’t eat or something like that. I was in basic and AIT with a guy who clearly had “meth mouth” when he joined, idk maybe he really liked Mountain Dew. His teeth were literally black and rotting out of his head. He was a good soldier, and he did what he was told and tried his best. By the time we graduated AIT he must have had $20,000 to $30,000 worth of dental work performed on him, maybe more and it was a long process.
You’re really not. And is that standard you offer in your second sentence one you hold yourself to? You’ve never speculated on this board what you think a particular course of action might lead to?
During Obama’s second term, the Army was shrunk by several tens of thousands of soldiers - somewhere in the neighborhood of 70,000 soldiers. Even though that was a lot of soldiers to let go, I can’t really make a serious argument that our national security was harmed by it. Yes, it made life harder for all the remaining soldiers who had to pick up more slack for the units that were missing people… but I just can’t conclude that Americans were quantifiably less safer.
So if several thousand transgender troops were kicked out of the service tomorrow, I just can’t get on board with one-tenth of the Obama-era troop cuts making us less safe.
What I would say, though, is that it would make us a more prejudiced and bigoted nation.
Those folks weren’t removed regardless of skills, experience, etc. And I’m not saying that suddenly we’re at risk of invasion. I’m saying this is an own goal, and own goals should be avoided, even if we’re leading 20 to 1.
Actually the Chief of Staff of the Army at the time complained that good soldiers were being let go:
“Unfortunately some people now are being let go that have done a very good job. … But with the downsizing we no longer can keep them.” Odierno said.”
Not bad teeth yet, but when I was in they would extract (angled at least) impacted wisdom teeth for those likely to be in submarines, because we don’t want to interrupt underwater deployments.
The US Military does let you in with bad teeth. If they didn’t, there’s whole socioeconomic swaths they wouldn’t be able to recruit from. I had a student, a US Army Lieutenant, who was one of the local ROTC teachers. He was the scion of two rich families: one Spanish, one American. Artsy, bohemian parents. He’d grown up between his parents’ 6B in Spain and his grandmother’s summer house in Cape Cod. How do you rebel against such a family? Join the miltary as an enlisted.
And that’s where, after a lifetime of despising his Spanish classmates for their crooked teeth (he’d visited the dentist every six months, of course, and worn braces, of course) he found himself looking at visible caries and missing pieces. He was assigned an MOS of Dentist Assistant and saw 18yo mouths that would have been considered bad in a Spanish 81yo. He went to OCS when offered and was trying to become a dentist, with the intent to stay in the military so long as they would have him, to be able to serve those men and women who hadn’t even visited a dentist until the military paid for it.
There’s a lot of medical conditions that you can have; the military doesn’t require perfect specimens. There are also many conditions which are not acceptable when you sign up but which will not get you automatically discharged if acquired while in service. That doesn’t indicate what to do about transgenderism, but “the military only accepts super-perfect folk” is not an argument for not accepting transgender soldiers (either those who already know it when they sign up, or those who figure it out later).
Either keeping trans people out of the military or keeping non-trans people out of the military is fine with me. Whatever the military wants to do to limit the damage it can do is a good policy, even if it is mean-spirited.
Did you feel the same way when Truman integrated the military? And as women were allowed to serve in combat positions? If there is any damage being done to our military (and I don’t think there is any), we can address the problem and move past it, like we’ve done several times in the past.
That’s great, but in no way addresses the OP’s needs. Anyway, the military were fine with keeping them in, it was the president who wanted them out. Where does that leave you?
Whatever reason the military has for keeping people out is fine with me. Their reasoning could be mean-spirited, compassionate, tactical, whatever. I’m not up in arms about a policy to allow more people in, nor am I up in arms about letting them in. I would prefer they keep as many people out as possible. The less military personnel, the better.
