This isn't a positive. It is a tragedy that these services (education, healthcare) are difficult to obtain without military service in a supposedly developed country.
The tragedy is that this is the only route available for people born in certain zipcodes. The dynamic of needing to volunteer to discernibly bump up the odds of your own gruesome death in order to get the only decent fair deal on succeeding in the civilian world is everything that is wrong with the US at the moment.
The tragedy is that it's the only option to change one's stars for a lot of folks and this dynamic is present across the entire country - poor rural south, poor urban, poor rust belt. High schools and governments, local or otherwise, are failing these kids, and the military is the only semi-competent entity available to help. That's not a dynamic we want.
My grandfather had the work ethic and intelligence in him, subsequently proven, but was born dirt poor with a snowball's chance in hell he could have afforded college without the GI Bill.
The military is an option which largely accepts you if you say "Yes" and can pass a basic intelligence test. Those are the only requirements. Not your family name. Not your family wealth. Not (now) your race or gender or sexual orientation.
And in trade for that, they open up benefits that change lives.
It certainly shouldn't be the only option, but that it is an option is better than not existing.
GI bill put him into college, and set him up with an eductation that setup my mom and her 6 siblings with a 'normal' middle class life. Not too shabby for a man that literally grew up dirt poor.
How that kid (making an adult's decision by joining) wasn't scooped up by basically anyone other than their local recruiter blew my mind. If you spend some time around the military jobs that require smarts, these stories are very common. The non-high test score jobs tend to be staffed by very solid and smart people who just didn't have many other options at the time.
Soldiers from enlisted to General can and often are idiots and by glorifying them one risks the same risk as glorifying a professional athlete or any other symbol, but in aggregate the above story is common.
Nearly 300,000 families also had their trajectories changed because their loved ones died.
The military as a class on-ramp disproportionately harms the poor, and ethically that's wrong. It's almost literally a lottery where you're gambling your life in exchange for basic needs.
What are you referring to here? 300,000 is a specific number and you qualify it with "because their loved ones died". Let's assume you're talking about active military deaths, which are less than 100,000 since 1945 [1], the vast majority of which is Vietnam and Korea.
Up until the Vietnam War, the draft was a significant factor. That's not really a factor because you have no control over it.
You'll also note that my comment was specifically about the Air Force Guard and Reserve. Your chances of getting deployed to a war zone and dying are incredibly low and so many roles aren't active combat anyway. Unlike active service you enlist ofr a particular job. If you sign up to do logistics in Ohio. your risks are pretty low.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_military_casualt...
Many years ago my uncle got in minor trouble with the law as a young man. The judge gave him a choice: join the Navy or go to jail. The Navy worked out pretty well for him, but today he probably wouldn't even have that option to get his life back on track.
It's disturbing to me that it's normal to concentrate efforts on recruiting poor teenagers to fight wars. The focus on the poor also has the effect of disproportionately impacting minorities.
Even if you survive, over the past decade hundreds of thousands of veterans have ended up with PTSD and even then they're left to fight for proper treatment under the VA. The VA has been failing veterans for decades and in some cases causes additional harm, including using experimental and ineffective treatment for covid while under their care (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7276049/).
I'd like the government to give me all sorts of stuff for free as long as someone else is paying.
Unless you're living off-grid the government already gives you mountains of "free" stuff paid for by taxes! It's an enormously long list of utilities and services that contains everything from fire departments to food safety. Mostly things that shouldn't be profit centers.
Locally evaluated, it's a rational option. But I think you're going to lose a lot of people by framing it as "good". Rational decisions are not always good ones, and vice versa.
We can sit around and say that education should be free and accessible and that would be nice but it's not the world we live in. The fact of the matter is that life isn't fair and some people get substantially better or worse starting hands.
Yet you would seemingly rather remove opportunities from those with the fewest options because of how the government chooses to use the military.
It's pretty easy to say that others with fewer options than you should make sacrifices that that are at best symbolic when it requires no such sacrifice from you.
What are you doing to effect change? I guarantee you that influencing the government that sets policy is going to be a whole lot more effective than a few disadvantaged people sitting out a Reserve program where they might otherwise just be doing admin work.
As far as I can tell, the closest we have to a white-collar jobs program is the health insurance industry and insurance-related jobs elsewhere. Keeping millions employed while being a drag on the rest of the economy.
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/08/30/the-10-most-educated-countri...
I recommend the Wikipedia articles about "Conscription in <insert country here>".
a) People conscripted to serve in the military.
b) People who choose civilian service to avoid military service.
c) Conscientious objectors who go to prison instead of serving.
d) People who could be conscripted but somehow manage to avoid serving.
From my Finnish perspective, "mandatory military service" means that the ratio (a + b + c) / d is high. Civilian service does not exist because the country wants to use slave labor instead of paid labor, but because it's socially more acceptable than imprisoning people who refuse to serve in the military.
This is factually incorrect - you literally can get $400k in education of your choosing at the tender age of 18, which is why we frequently discus articles revolving around student debt for degrees that don't pay anything. There isn't anything even remotely equivalent when it comes to money access of this sort (try getting a $400k mortgage with zero income and zero assets )
But at least you guys get some semi-decent medical insurance to live like a human being. For which we also don't need to pay (or very little bulk sum with hard ceiling). Something about basic human rights, future of our race and all.
> "we also don't need to pay"
You certainly are paying, sir.
Your healthcare isn't a human right, is is a benefit you collectively decided to pay for. Others can make different decisions.
People who can’t afford college or healthcare ain’t going into the reserves to get it.
Say we take away the military on-ramp to class mobility. What can we do for those trapped in poverty whose only ticket out was enlistment? Your answer should be focused on what we can practically do as the world stands now, not in your fictional utopia where militaries aren’t necessary and education is free. The military is offering “good” and you’re looking for “perfect.” We all know the saying.
I max out my contributions to progressives, similar PACs, and canvass door to door at every election I can for those who champion for these public goods (healthcare, education) to be universal. I'm doing my part to sway anyone I can from putting themselves through a grinder for services they should be entitled to without military service. Yes, the world sucks current state, and yes, I agree whole heartedly that complaining is not enough.
[1] https://stopsoldiersuicide.org/vet-stats ("Veterans are at 50% higher risk of suicide than their peers who have not served." ; "Depending on branch, up to 31% of service members develop PTSD after returning from combat." ; "The rate of suicide for veterans in the LGBTQ+ community is up to 7x higher than for non-LGBTQ+ veterans." ; "More than 40% of female veterans report experiencing military sexual harassment or military sexual trauma.")
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/22/us/911-suicide-rate-veter... ("Suicides among post-9/11 veterans are four times as high as combat deaths, a new study finds.")
But, most of what you point out is a veteran issue, and I 100% agree, but that's not the military's fault, its the VA and the executive/legislative branch.
Arguably no branch of the government is more invested in a strong veteran support network than the military itself, as the dynamic you point out is well known, and keeps people from service for probably good reasons.
But there’s nowhere else to go for someone stuck in the cycle of poverty. They don’t have money. They go to one of the few places that still recognizes that cash isn’t the only currency the young have to give and offer their bodies and lives. If you’re just as likely to get shot in the streets of Chicago as overseas, well you might as well get your tuition paid for.
The groups you support (progressives, similar PACs, politicians) have recently started telling the world about how poverty is systemic and how useless poor people’s actions are in the face of such a fucked up system, so how can you sit here and tell me that these people need to find a new way to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps while taking away their army issued boots?
Much easier to get out of poverty with universal healthcare and subsidized education versus going to the sandbox and coming back with PTSD just to get your GI Bill and Tricare. Don't tell me it isn't affordable, the productivity and wealth demonstrably exists. The system chooses cannon fodder over plowshares. It is very easy to sit here and tell you this with every other OECD country providing models to crib off of.
Isn't that the case though? Medicaid provides great healthcare for those in the lower income brackets (my family used it for the majority of my childhood years) and most colleges are basically free (community college and some state schools will actually pay you).
I don't think the ability to pay for education or healthcare is really the reason for poverty here.
You just give them the fucking food, education, and healthcare. Look at the current US military budget and tell me that's impossible.
The military is not offering "good" — it's offering the roll of a dice. Sure, one side says "good" but you've got a "death" side too. Wealthy people do not have to roll this dice at all.
The majority of our lives has featured a "war" almost entirely based on false pretenses. Thousands of soldiers died. Do you think their families were happy about having this on-ramp to class mobility?
I had recruiters coming to my house and deriding my living conditions to get me to enlist when I was 17. It's predatory, abhorrent, and not even remotely "good."
It’s impossible.
Here is some analysis:
https://hwfo.substack.com/p/peace-in-ukraine-and-universal-h...
Not to mention the bureaucratic, political, and productivity costs plus the costs to employers and what individuals pay out of pocket.
Nothing is impossible. Well, except certain classes of time travel into the past.
In many cases you get what you pay for. In my case it was approximately zero. From what I hear from new hires, the quality these days it's worse, they are mostly diploma factories.
It's a silver lining. It's shameful that the need exists at all, but it's definitely a positive for the people who are getting mostly screwed by the status quo but would otherwise be getting completely screwed.
Don't be silly. Education is not difficult to obtain without military service.
The US has a large population and is able to field a military with only volunteers (at the moment. This wasn't always the case, and the draft can be reinstated if necessary). Smaller countries would not be able to have a military at all without mandatory service. Their freedoms would be moot if they were invaded and conquered.
Demanding freedom and shirking responsibility is the act of a child.