US draft bill to be introduced to congress

[Marajade]

Isn't going to happen. The military will fight a draft tooth and nail for the simple reason that conscripts suck ass.

100% volunteer force >>>> draftees. We learned that lesson well in Vietnam.

Actualy, you learned how not to fight in jungles, and that people who know the terrain 1000x better than you are gonna beat you.

 

[Celvantes]

A soldier who worked his butt off just to get in (and stay in) the military is going to be far more motivated and dedicated than someone who's simply counting down the days until he can go. Not to say that all draftees are going to be slackers (there are some people who despite being forced will still take pride in their job/country and do their utmost), but a majority are just going to do the minimum to get by.

The only case I could see where we would *need* a draft is if we were in a major war and seriously on the ropes. This would be the kind of situation where unless we get more bodies, we may not win and the country as a whole may cease to exist. IMO, the only nation out there that could put us in that situation would be China.

 

[Torqameda]

Meh, if they do bring back the draft, all there will be are new meatshields. As said several times before, the soldiers who went through the academies and basic training did them because this is what they wanted to do. Soldiers that are drafted don't have as much of a motivation except to not die (as Celv said, this doens't apply to all draftees).

But in the situation the war is in now, and upcoming conflicts with Iran and North Korea, having the largest voluntary military isn't going to cut it. So, a draft could be helpful in a militaristic point of view. But from a personal point of view, they shouldn't have to force people to fight a war they don't exactly 100% believe in.

 

[Mattaru]

People still think the War in Iraq as anything more than a failed experiment in Neoconservative Middle East policy?

I remember specifically saying when the war started to my father that if WMD's are not found they are going to rely on liberation as a justification and they are going to fail in filling the power vacuum they create. Like word for word.

You can not fix the lack of a non-violent form of action by social groups in Iraq by throwing troops at it. The whole point is that YOU can not fix that only the groups there are able to take the initiative to make it work and YOUR role is to provide them the resources to do so.

 

[Skaw]

Hey, the US does provide the resources. Don't want to cooperate putting your shambled country back on track, and car bomb people not part of your particular social network of Islam? We donate you a few bullets and tank shells. How is that not providing resources?

 

[Reauland]

Actually, you learned how not to fight in jungles, and that people who know the terrain 1000x better than you are gonna beat you.

Forgive me for saying so, but unless I'm mistaken, Viet Cong casualties were far, far greater than U.S. casualties throughout the Viet Nam War.

If there were any unlearned lessons in Viet Nam, they were these:

1) Don't let politicians decide how the military branch conducts a military campaign.

2) Don't let your enemy use the media and those opposed to the war to cloud the general public's perception on why you're there and what a favorable outcome is.

Those are two great ways to win every battle and still lose a war.

Hell, even the Tet Offensive was a tactical failure, unless there's someone out there willing to make the argument that losing more than three of your guys to every one of the other side's sounds like a recipe for victory. Sure, you can argue that it was a psychological victory for the North Vietnamese all you want, but at the end of the day, The United States didn't lose that war in the jungles. We lost it at home.

I want you to remember that no one ever won a war by dying for his country. You win it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country.

 

[RoM]

Forgive me for saying so, but unless I'm mistaken, Viet Cong casualties were far, far greater than U.S. casualties throughout the Viet Nam War.

If there were any unlearned lessons in Viet Nam, they were these:

1) Don't let politicians decide how the military branch conducts a military campaign.

2) Don't let your enemy use the media and those opposed to the war to cloud the general public's perception on why you're there and what a favorable outcome is.

Those are two great ways to win every battle and still lose a war.

Hell, even the Tet Offensive was a tactical failure, unless there's someone out there willing to make the argument that losing more than three of your guys to every one of the other side's sounds like a recipe for victory. Sure, you can argue that it was a psychological victory for the North Vietnamese all you want, but at the end of the day, The United States didn't lose that war in the jungles. We lost it at home.

When they keep crawling out of the jungle/desert it's a pretty sure sign you're not going to win. To our credit i'm relatively sure we still have an embassy in iraq. It really doesn't matter what the ratio of deaths is compared to who controls what strategically in a war. Death has little to do with it from a win/lose standpoint whereas iraq/vietnam are concerned. Communism/islamofacism aren't going anywhere, wars on ideals fail, period.

While i do agree on both occasions the ball was dropped at home i've also got to say when policiticians go about waging pre-emptive ideological wars patriotism tends to take a backseat to logic in the minds of most of the people, as polls both then and now show quite well.

 

[Torqameda]

The United States didn't lose that war in the jungles. We lost it at home.

A.k.a Hippies.

Vietnam was just a mistake in its own way. At the time, we wanted to cease the spread of Communism, and had an interest in Asia, and knew if Vietnam went Red, that'd greatly hinder the resources and imports from Asia, seeing as how all but one of the communist nations were Asian... unless Russia was considered to be Asian back then.

The other fact is that the reason we are going in there with the ideology of "Liberating the Iraqi People of Tyranny" is just a cover-up for the other real reasons the United States are shooting for. Yes, maybe removing idiots like Hussein is in our nation's interest, but it isn't the only thing. Goes with the phrase "national interest".

1. Defense- We were attacked. We responded with Afghanistan. We felt threatened by Iraq with supposed Weapons of Mass Destrcution. We responded. We were mistaken.

2. Economics- Oil, oil, oil, and more fucking oil biotch! You have the biggest oil reserve in the world sitting there in the Middle East. Of course the U.S has an interest in the oil over there. We aren't getting any from Venezuela(sp.?) and a few other Middle Eastern countries. Taking Iraq out of Hussein's control opens up a few economical oppurtunities if the operations over there are sucessful.

3. Ideology- Every war in the Post World War II era that the U.S has been involved in was to 'spread' the oppurtunity of democracy to other countries, and fight off the Facists, Nazis, and Communists who were inevitably were going to cause major problems. So when the U.S says they are doing this to help liberate Iraq and create a new democratic Iraq, it keeps the consistency of the U.S's ideology.

 

[Reauland]

Since, the overwhelming majority of folks reading this thread seem mature and perfectly capable of healthy discussion/debate, here's a "what if" I'd like to hear batted about:

What if the deepest(and most highly classified) reason for invading Afghanistan and Iraq was in response to good, reliable intel on the burgeoning nuclear capabilities of Iran?

Now don't get me wrong. I'm very much opposed to Machiavellian policies either at home or abroad, but what if all the WMD talk was more or less a cut-and-paste job where Iraq=Iran?

I can even think of a very good reason for our continued occupation in Iraq that goes beyond the much-desired byproduct that a stable, democratic Iraq would be. It is this:

Back when Iran and Iraq went to war, if memory serves, we provided Iraq with arms, training, etc., but the war nonetheless came out as a virtual stalemate, largely due to Iran's use of human wave attacks comprised of their Basij forces. Isn't it just within the realms of possibility that the "insurgents" our forces are skirmishing with on a daily basis are comprised at least in part of insurrectionists funneled in from both Syria and Iran? Is this maybe an unstated tactic for depleting Iran's "human wave" resources piecemeal and avoiding the head-on confrontation that our all-volunteer military would have a much harder time dealing with?

If that were the case, then our continued presence in Afghanistan and Iraq could very well be indicative of a larger, and, to me at least, more sensible agenda - dealing with arguably the most volatile of all the newcomers to the nuclear arms race.

 

[Marajade]

What if the deepest(and most highly classified) reason for invading Afghanistan and Iraq was in response to good, reliable intel on the burgeoning nuclear capabilities of Iran?

Now don't get me wrong. I'm very much opposed to Machiavellian policies either at home or abroad, but what if all the WMD talk was more or less a cut-and-paste job where Iraq=Iran?

Afghanistan was't about nuclear weapons, they never tried to say it was.
You went into Afghanistan for same reasons you're still there, which is at least marginaly acceptable.

Iraq, you did go in with all this reliable intel about nuclear weapons, saying; he has weapons, they're here, here, and here. He has These projects in motion to develope these types of weapons.
But, you get there and they dont exist. You roam the entire countryside looking for these weapons, and they dont exist, and by all appearances, they never did.

 

[Reauland]

I think you may have missed where I'm headed with this hypothetical.

What I'm saying is what if all of this, or at least the majority of it, was all a smokescreen, a smokescreen intended to disguise a deeper reason for wanting a U.S. military presence in close proximity to Iran?

What if the intel we gathered pointed in the direction of Iran as the real threat, but going on record with it would compromise some intel-gathering tool which we'd rather not see become common knowledge?

What if the assessments said that, in essence, to get a handle on Iran, we'd first need to establish inroads? After all, the two countries where our presence is most visible just so happen to border Iran.

In short, what I'm getting at is - do you think it might be possible that the events of 9/11 acted as a convenient rallying cry for military operations that were already on the books? What if it had already been the intentions of the U.S. government to topple the regimes in Iraq and Afghanistan in order to provide more logistically feasible launching points for military action against Iran?

To me, that makes better sense than attempting to wage war against an ideology.

 

[RoM]

I think you may have missed where I'm headed with this hypothetical.

What I'm saying is what if all of this, or at least the majority of it, was all a smokescreen, a smokescreen intended to disguise a deeper reason for wanting a U.S. military presence in close proximity to Iran?

What if the intel we gathered pointed in the direction of Iran as the real threat, but going on record with it would compromise some intel-gathering tool which we'd rather not see become common knowledge?

What if the assessments said that, in essence, to get a handle on Iran, we'd first need to establish inroads? After all, the two countries where our presence is most visible just so happen to border Iran.

In short, what I'm getting at is - do you think it might be possible that the events of 9/11 acted as a convenient rallying cry for military operations that were already on the books? What if it had already been the intentions of the U.S. government to topple the regimes in Iraq and Afghanistan in order to provide more logistically feasible launching points for military action against Iran?

To me, that makes better sense than attempting to wage war against an ideology.

Personally i'm of the belief 9/11 was american international affairs policy biting us in the ass half a century after we first started to grab a foothold in the middle east. To oversimplify; a catalyst, if you will, that forced a hard examination of what our contributions have _actually_ done for the region and why it behooves us to handle it now with force as opposed to propping up one corrupt american backed leader after another who's just going to attack us years later.

But what you say does make alot of sense. It's certainly plausable. The last thing i'd assume we do is prop up dictators without a backup plan in case the go fundamentalist jihad on us.

 

[Torqameda]

Iran has always been an issue. They have always funded various terrorist and radical islamic organizations, and do nothing to deny it. Apparently, there have been many attempts to assassinate Iranian leaders, but have ultimately failed.

And Afghanistan didn't have a regime, per say. They didn't have an insane dictator killing off the majority branched Muslims in Afghanistan.

But, I suppose it's possible. The United States has always gone out on a limb to help 'solve' the world's problems, and is just overwhelmed and stretch to thin. So it is possible that in the bigger scheme, Iraq was a way to get closer to Iran, who was, and is, a problem... child thing.

Afghanistan, though, was done because of 9/11. They attacked us, the majority of them were in Afghanistan, we went over there, bombed their caves, and guess what? Bin Laden got away. I don't think Iraq had anything to do with 9/11 in the least bit. It was because both Interpol (or whatever the name of the British inteligence organization is) and U.S inteligence believed that they had evidence of WMDs in Iraq oil fields.

Hell, Iraq could have easily had WMDs. If Cuba had missle silos under soccer fields (which kinda stood out since Cuba played more baseball than it did soccer), then Iraq could have been hiding something.

We went in there, found no WMDs. Just finally found the evidence needed to get Hussein the hanging he so richly deserves.

 

[Mattaru]

By the way, The United States has shown interest in getting help from Syria and Iran to help with the Iraq situation. Can't remember exactly where I heard this but I think it was on Meet The Press.

Iraq was a strategic target yes, in order to have another pro-west nation in the Middle East to buffer Israel, but that fucking failed and isn't even a legitimate cause to go to war (once again see failed neocon foreign policy).