[geeks] Special skills draft?

[Phil Stracchino]

On Thu, Sep 23, 2004 at 09:53:47AM -0500, Mike Parson wrote:
> His reason for a draft to get rid of the volunteer military, so that
> we'd be less willing to send conscripts into combat than volunteers who
> knew what they were signing up for.

The other side of this problem is that a professional volunteer force is
generally skilled and competent because they *want* to do what they're
doing, but a force composed of draftees who don't want to be there is
gonna get handed its head with gravy and trimmings.  Look at Vietnam for
a classic example: the all-volunteer USMC was doing very nicely thank
you until Congress decided that it knew how to fight a war better than
the Pentagon did, and replaced the Marines with regular-Army draftees
whose entire prior military experience was six weeks on Parris Island,
at which point everything started going to hell in a handbasket.


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