Bgates — thanks for providing relevant data. Although in some of your arguments you assumed that I said such and such — which I didn’t. But other than that, it’s fair exchange. In the end, we are pretty much where we started. Now I know why politics is to be avoided. This is so time consuming for me that I’ll just stop posting. (I changed my password to something random, so for sure I won’t remember it, and I changed to an old email account for which I no longer remember the password – I think that I’m pretty safe from posting again once I log out!)
Since it’s my last post, I might as well add why I think that draft is necessary — because we don’t have enough as it is! If there are lines outside of the army recruiting office, and if army doesn’t need to relax its standards so much that marginal people get to serve and commit crimes overseas, if… So Bgates — when you made your argument about me “suggesting” hiring random people for a business, you really just created an argument against what you intepretated as what I said. (I spot similar pseudo arguments in other such arguments, but am too tired to go through them all). So the real issue is – is there a viable way to enhance the military without draft? If our political leaders set examples by encouraging their kids/nephews/nieces to enlist, maybe enlistment will go up. So the argument here is not whether volunteer is better than draft, it is — now that we really need more manpower to execute the war better than in the past ’cause it was so screwed up, and we don’t have enough volunteers, and we force many of volunteers to serve over and over again (isn’t that a backdoor draft? It’s abuse by our political leaders in my mind), what do we do?
Also, your “random hiring” argument ignores the fact that if people drafted pass the normal checks that military has, they are no worse than the volunteers once they’re trained.
As part of my habit of scanning news on various national papers online, I found the following, which are quite relevant to what we just discussed.
Families bear catastrophic war wounds http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-09-24-families-war-wounds_x.htm?csp=N009
(I didn’t do a search, this just happens to be in today’s USAtoday. But I read almost every article regarding wounded soliders everytime I saw one, and I do a lot of reading. The cost doesn’t end once they’re in the hospital or exit the hospital. Infact, I don’t know if the extra medical costs are part of the war budget).
