Being motivated about a job whether miltary /civilian should be about what you can do not if its corrupt /inefficient /incompetent almost any large institutuion usually is
Usually why people care about that is in-job competition and status hierarchies and ego.
But the role of those psychological/biological mechanisms(for ex. the serotonin system), in apes, for example, is to drive you to compete on mates and food. To get access to real, valuable resources.
Modern organizations are using those mechanisms to motivate you, without giving you any access to real resources. Another form of exploitation.
Some chose not to play that game.
Today we have access to insane resources that our early humans couldn’t have even dreamt about, even for the relatively poor people today.
The machine provides a massive supply chain of a variety of food and medicine that was unheard of for ~all of human history. Flipping burgers for an hour makes you ~$10, with which you can buy food for two people for a whole day (or more). That’s less work for more reward than ever before in history.
So the reward system does work — you’re still competing, and the rewards are massive, relative to apes and early humans.
There’s no such thing as job security without a form of a contract.
Also, you should look up the minimum wage in the 60’s and 70’s and adjust it for inflation. They were getting paid $40USD+ per hour in today’s dollars. So, no $10 is not a lot.
// Being the best burger flipper gives you job security.
Burger flippers earn close to the minimum wage. They always have decent job security, it's easy to find a similar job(not necessarily as a burger flipper).
This is absolutely, myopic, demonstrably wrong at so many levels, from the fact that minimum wage has been stagnant for decades to eising cost of living
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/02/24/this-char...
Is bringing peace, civil rights, and good governance to a corrupt, poor, and violent country useless? (Obviously, we ended up failing in large part.)
Dropping bombs on a country rarely makes it less prone to conflict unless you intend to occupy it, it just gives more recruiting material to the "violent" radicals.
If "our" means the US and it's people as a collective, then it really seems clear that it wasn't in our collective economic interests either. If our means military contractors, then yes they made out very well.
But yes, "our" in this case was perhaps a poor choice of words to refer to the interests of, for lack of a better term, the ruling class, whose interests do not align with the vast majority of the country.
“God has promised us victory, and Bush has promised us defeat. We’ll see which promise is more truthful,”
- Mullah Omar.
Afghanistan isn't a nation. And you can't externally force people to believe they're part of a nation.
Either they do, in which case they're willing to accept sacrifices for the greater good of their fellow citizens, or they aren't.
It's a bit like dieting. You take someone who has been chubby their entire life, put them through a bootcamp, and then look at their weight 5 years later. The stats are not looking good in those cases, and I think they largely reflect our efforts in up-leveling the political landscape in historically corrupt countries.
I am not saying that we shouldn't keep trying. But I think we should internalize that the chances of success are slim, and then make that a part of our upfront decisioning process on budget, casualties, political cost, etc.