Just been thinking, if America forced everyone into serving two years with some branch of the Military would we be better off?

Would there be less racism, less FSA, less obesity? Would it force standards into the Majority of those with no standards? Would we be a better, more balanced country of everyone spent 2 years minimum in the Military?

Haha no. The military is overrun with shitsippers as it is.

Was USSR better off?

No.

lol

No, you're going in the wrong direction.

Too much Starship Troopers. Not enough Constitution.

Service guarentees Citizenship!!!

Lol that's what got me wondering, that and the Army actually made a difference in my life.

NO!!!!!

America would benefit from parents actually raising their kids right instead of expecting an increasingly inefficient .gov bureaucracy to do the job for them when they're already adults.

So, since you like something, you feel it should be forced on everyone else too?

How would you pay for it?

No.

Volunteers are motivated.


The Revolution was won by volunteer troops, lost by conscripts.

it's almost always so.

No.

We have a professional military force right now.

We don't need the problems associated with conscripts.

Fucking nailed it.

The only thing always so, is people's uncanny ability to cite distorted history in order to justify predetermined conclusions.

The only conscript army we'd benefit from is an army of pot-hole fillers, weedwhackers, and trash crews.

Seriously, paying  people to sit on their ass for years is stupid.      We should at least get a couple days of work a week out of them.

America is supposed to be the pinnacle of freedom and nothing says freedom like mandatory service am I right? The way I see it, is if you force someone to join the military and they don't want to then you will have an unproductive worker. So no I don't believe America would benefit from a conscript military.

We already have a economic conscript army

Blah blah blah, condescension and other douchey remarks.

No. Military service does not equate anti-FSA.

Absolutely make it a component of welfare with its own special division. Everyone that signs up gets sent to Iraq for 4 years after one week of training with bayonets which would be there only weapon.
After 5 confirmed kills they get to come home Early.

^ This ^

Nailed it.

Also a standing Army is a threat to liberty.

How did you pick 2 years?  If 2 years would be good, 5 years would be better, or 10 years maybe?

+1

Just picking a number that would cycle people in a decent enough rate while still giving some training.

I keep wondering what we'd do with all the draftees, in today's forces. Replace all the civilian support jobs? It might be slightly cheaper, by some ways of running the numbers, but I don't think it would actually be any cheaper over the long haul. And, how much citizenship training are you going to get from spending a year or two doing menial labor to maintain a base somewhere? Add in the fact that as automation increases, less and less of these jobs are going to be available or even need doing.

The other problem is that I don't like what having the draft does to the military, either. It's not just the effect on the troops, it's the effect on the command and culture.

Interesting case study to be made, when you compare the experiences of the US Army in Vietnam vs. what the Rhodesians faced in their guerrilla war. Both forces had similar problems with maintaining lines of communications, in that the VC and the various anti-Rhodesian groups mined the fuck out of the roads. How did the military in each country react?

Rhodesia started down the path towards equipping themselves with the modern armored route-clearance equipment that anyone who served in Iraq or Afghanistan is familiar with. They had working samples of full-width minesweeper vehicles and MRAPs for their troops and civilians within months of the mine/IED campaign starting. I'm not bullshitting you, either--They had the prototypes built and running that quickly, even under sanctions and not having a real industrial base to work with, or a big budget. We're still living off the fat from what they developed, which led to what the South Africans refined.

Now, let's take a look at the US Army, who had to deal with a similar situation in Vietnam. What did we do? Well, gee... We did the same thing we did in WWII, which was to pile sandbags into 5-ton dumptrucks, and have a private with a mine detector walk ahead of the truck. That was it--The same basic solution we used in WWII. We were still doing that at the end of Vietnam, and that was our route clearance technique right up until the late 1990s, when someone finally forced the Engineer school to get off their dead ass and buy a set of the South African armored route clearance gear for "testing". They didn't actually buy anything for the troops to use, because "We don't want that capability, because if we have it, they'll expect us to do it...". That was literally what I was told by the staff at the Engineer School when I was agitating for this stuff in the late 1990s.

I'm convinced that the reason that they didn't develop the same sorts of solutions that the poverty-stricken Rhodesians did is because it was cheaper to use and expend the lives of draftees to perform the same mission than to spend the money and time to develop mechanical solutions. It's a hard thing to say, but I have come to believe that that was the bottom line, no matter how horrifying it sounds when you articulate it like that. The Army just didn't want any distraction from the "big one" they thought of as being their most important role, fighting the battle in Europe against the Soviet Horde (TM).

That's what a draftee army gets you, I'm afraid: A military culture that just doesn't value the lives of its soldiers. Why bother? With the draft, they're the cheapest thing going--Someone else is paying to raise and educate them, and if we kill a few dozen through a lack of imagination and thoughtfulness, what does it matter? Send out a few more draft notices next month... They're only ours for two years, anyway...

Oh fuck no.  Every senior enlisted's nightmare

Exactly.

Forcing people into indentured servitude isn't a good thing.  However, paying them to join is another thing altogether.  

Individual freedom, voluntary exchange, and their economic proxy, the free-market, tend to produce better results than collectivism, and central planning.

History has demonstrated this fact time and time again.  

Yes....but I could still imagine that Bill Clinton will get a pass.

That being said.........go in the Military and get a federally backed college loan, after you're out.  NOT.....how it's like now, where everyone (at room tempreature) gets a college (Fed backed) loan.  

Aloha, Mark

Well, OP, I just read in my Air Force Times this past week that plans are being made to destroy the military retirement system by eliminating the current pension system and replacing it with a contributory 401K type scheme in which the members would be forced to contribute to it monthly and their overall retirement plan would result in the loss of thousands of dollars of retirement money versus the current system.  

Speaking as a retired military person, this is a major fuck job for military people.  

So maybe we will end up back with a conscript system when the pension system gets raped and less people want to go career.  

I thank God every day that I had the good sense to retire right after Desert Storm and take a good job with the DOE.  

I have never looked back or missed it one single day.  

I have some good military career memories and I have some bad military career memories.  

But that's the case with any job I guess.  

But at least I got the pension I was promised and some medical care.

Only if the conscription was at the State level.

No.

lol no

Fuck no.

The types that don't contribute to society based on self preservation and economic reward won't do it if you threaten them with force either.

For most of our history, this country has had one of two kinds of army:

-A tiny army of long service professionals
-A huge army of citizen soldiers, where conscription was the law (1862, 1917, 1942).

Now we have a huge military of long service professionals, and this has been the case for over forty years.

The advantage of this, according to the generals, is that they can get motivated volunteers for a modern, highly skilled army.
The advantage, according to the politicians, is that there is less fallout with a volunteer army for questionable military ventures.

We need to remember that this Republic was not founded for the convenience of generals (like, say, Prussia), or politicians. There are disadvantages:
-The military and civilian worlds have increasingly little contact.
-The military is increasingly drawn predominantly from a limited range of demographics.
-The danger of a professional military is that they may eventually prove more loyal to their generals and paymasters than the populace (2nd century Rome, much of Chinese history). This is nowhere near the case in this country now, but what about fifty years from now?

All that being said, it is hard to see how a large conscript army would be employed. Maybe we need to go back to a tiny army of long service professionals, deployed primarily along the Mexican border, just like 1916.

The US military is in the business of killing enemies of the United States, not being a social engineering program for curing what ails American society! It's bad enough they're making recruiting commercials about being graphic designers and surveyors. Where's the recruiting posters for the people that want to go to shithole places and kill dragons and lava monsters? Those are people we need in the military and you suggest we need to bring along every other Tom, Dick, and Harry as well?

Slavery is such a panacea, isn't it?

I'd argue it was because it was not tested an evaluated in ARTEPs or at NTCs, therefore had no relevance to the skills the leadership felt were important.

There is a chicken/egg issue there to some degree, but as an institution the Army is amazing at creating rules for a "game" and raising future generations of officers to learn to excel at that "game" at the expense of the larger picture.

See also: theater ammo distribution, air defense, human terrain aspects.

Conflicts become thorns in the side of the people who excelled in the system based on games, and they can't wait to put the conflicts behind them and get back into the training world that made sense. Only the slap to the face of reality - that the conflict at hand might not be going anywhere - puts a boot in the ass of that system, and drives change.

 
There was no conscription in Starship Troopers.



OP, the answer is no.

 

No, we don't.




Also, it's 'an' not 'a'.

lol

So what should we do, devil?