Pentagon’s shameful effort to draft mentally disabled men to fight in Vietnam

If you read the detailed accounts of this program, it’s clear that it wasn’t some inclusivity exercise. They wanted cheap fodder. They really just got a lot of battlefield liability. We’re witnessing what a “soldier comes second” doctrine looks like in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Of course I’m all for better support for the less mentally capable. But let’s not pretend that fighting in a war doesn’t require intelligence.

Modern warfare, especially that since World War 1 and the rise of deaths on the battlefront on a massive scale, requires a high amount of intelligence on all levels to be executed. You need generals who can envision new strategies such as the blitzkrieg or the paradrop. You need sergeants and master sergeants to provision and allocate adequate resources for your regiments. You need privates and conscripts to figure out where enemy mines are, or to follow orders from top to execute their complex maneuvers. Of course, you could also adopt ages-old Russian-style human steamroller doctrines and send in men after men to their deaths, just like the world did in WW1. We're already seeing that in Ukraine - 3 day operation is going strong after 500+ days.

> Maybe trying more "x's Morons" ideas isn't such a bad idea?

Perhaps the US government should enlist a number of upvoters of this comment, put them on the median national wage and force them to work for days on to refurbish creaking government IT systems? Just a thought, heh.

I feel like you're misrepresenting what the article is about. I'm pretty sure it's not the people whose IQ is a bit below 91 we're really talking about here. As the article states (emphasis mine):

> These men all had IQs below 91, and nearly half had IQs below 71.

What people find inhumane about this policy isn't "the army recruited a guy with an IQ of 87 from our town", but "the army recruited a guy with an IQ of 68 who can't read or write and has never heard of Vietnam from our town".

An IQ below 71 is typically labelled as a cognitive impairment, not only now, but then as well. These are people who are often considered unable to function independently in normal civilian life. The idea that, even with modern tech, a war environment is much simpler to navigate than civilian life, seems so obviously absurd to me that I have trouble even articulating an argument against it.

> Is it more moral for the inevitable sacrifices of warfare to be solely among a society's higher IQ individuals?

I object to your use of the term "inevitable". Sacrifices are inevitable during war, but the war itself wasn't inevitable. The moral thing would have been to end the war, rather than prolong a war that leadership knew damn well they were losing at this point.

They're the ones that run the society, so I don't see why not.

I know it's trendy to perform amoral, sociopathic disregard for humanity (and geerally to post boundary-crossing provocations on the Internet). It's a very, very dangerous thing - which is probably why it's trendy; people like to play with those things, to look edgy. Our behaviors truly influence reality, as we know well now; the Internet is not a separate world, like a multi-player video game, but part of reality with direct impact. Also, not only does choosing that behavior introduce an enormous negative, but we feel the absence of the positive. If you and I don't do the latter, who will? There's no parents out there to fix what we break as we play. The world needs you.

Putting people in that extreme situation without the mental and emotional capability is a nightmare of cruelty.

Army aptitude tests do not test IQ directly. They test general knowledge (like basic math), ability to follow directions, that sort of thing. IQ is not the only mental issue that makes you unsuitable.

So kinda, reliability of those tests is not really relevant.

The press has always been, at best, a manicured presentation of events that, even at its best, is often hemmed in by external constraints. Some might say that the trashiness of today's press is a symptom of the erosion of elite control over an official narrative. Noise and sensationalism not only sell, but they can also function as distractions.

> During the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan, the abuses that were reported were ignored because no one cared. By then, no one had any trust in the US Gov.

I wouldn't say that no one cared, but do you have evidence of that explanation? I'd say the abuses were overlooked for multple reasons - people despaired, and especially the reactionary segment of society was (and is) opposed to anything put forward by 'liberals', no matter what it is.

> with the press nothing more than a rumor mill

Try the NY Times, Financial Times, etc. Their articles are very well-researched, based on going in-person to the events (including the front line of war), talking to large numbers of the actual people involved - the actual witnesses, reading confidential documents, etc. One way to think of it: If someone wrote a blog post like that, you'd be amazed.

> Project 100,000 soldiers saw combat at a rate nearly twice as high as other soldiers and were killed at a rate three times as high.

Army is able to absorb people of different races or gays and learned how to deal with gender. That does not imply it is, as an institution, capable to absorb handicapped people.