Comparable statement from Scotland.[1]
Kids need riskier play, so that the military can get more recruits. Only about 23% of American kids qualify for the US military.[2] With a war with either Russia or China coming up, we'll need more fresh meat for the grinder.
[1] https://www.playscotland.org/resources/print/Risky-Play-Leaf...
[2] https://docs.house.gov/meetings/PW/PW07/20230511/115823/HHRG...
> The powerful effect of incentive plans (independent of quotas) was documented in an older study of Army guidance counselors.22 A key responsibility of guidance counselors is to channel applicants into the Army’s priority occupations. During the period under study, guidance counselors were under an incentive plan that offered counselors additional points for selling a high-priority occupation. The study found that simply offering five more incentive plan points for selling a particular occupation was more than twice as effective as offering an enlistment bonus to a recruit. That is, it was more effective to give the seller (the guidance counselor) an incentive to “sell” the occupation than it was to give the buyer (the recruit) an incentive to “buy” the occupation.
Nice to know that government funded studies show tricking people is more effective than convincing or bargaining with them in good faith
Research has indicated that Americans are progressively becoming more risk adverse, obese, and more injury prone over time. If only 23% of Americans qualify for military service now that number will become much smaller in the future. The potential rarity of viable recruits could become a new unexpected driver of personal wealth as military service becomes a new form wealthy exceptionalism available only to those gifted few.
There is no way this incentive structure leads to honesty for recruiter or upward mobility for the recruit
Huh? Don't they say that those bonuses work really well? So that's a lot of reason to use them, ain't it?
To me, it seems more like the obvious-with-hindsight observation that when you delegate your side of the negotiations to someone else (the guidance counselor) it's not enough to offer a good deal to the counterparty, you also need to motivate your own negotiator.
E.g. one possible explanation for the observed effect is that the guidance counselors without incentive plan points simply failed to mention the enlistment bonus, rendering it ineffective.
Some cursory research says that soldiers might be safer than average citizens. https://www.army.mil/article/260633/soldiers_are_safer_than_... (No clue whether that source is any good.)
So it doesn't look like soldier is a particularly 'life and death' profession in the US compared to the rest of the country; even though the stereotype of soldiering being dangerous exists.
"Second, the services should offer more people enlistment bonuses and increase the dollar amounts of those bonuses. Research shows that enlistment bonuses expand the supply of recruits overall and have an especially large effect when targeted to recruits who choose to train in critical specialties"
And the paragraph immediately preceding that one:
"An important aspect of recruiter management is an incentive system that provides recruiters with incentives to be productive. Research shows that these incentive systems affect recruiter productivity in terms of the quality, number, and timing of enlistments.20 Recruiters are incentivized to increase effort when these plans are designed properly, but the plans can have perverse unintended effects if not designed well. For example, one study found that Army recruit screening was poorer at the end of the recruiting month, when recruiters are incentivized to meet their monthly recruiting missions."
Now whether they did so or not I don’t know. I hope not because it is the sort of thing that works in the short term and drastically undermines trust in the long term.
[1] https://recruiting.army.mil/Portals/15/Documents/Forms%20and...
The links you provide, as far as I can skim, don't weigh in on the tradeoff.
Is this still the protocol among anglophone children, or has it changed during the intervening decades?
Don't worry, all the damage is mental and won't manifest itself until I'm middle aged.
Wholeheartedly agree with the sentiment and far too many kids these days are growing up raised entirely by electronics.
I recall my parents shutting off the electronics and forcing us outside, which was a huge boon. My dad was also always down to go on adventures and get dirty.
Climbing a climbing frame? Surely fine. A ladder? Most likely. Climbing a tree? Probably fine, though also depends. Climbing onto a steep roof? Uh oh. Soloing El Cap? I'll leave that to grown ups.
I think the paper addressed this but what we consider risky play now is so sanitized. I am pretty sure climbing a tree is more than fine even 30 years ago.
Kids breaking their legs all the time falling off of things has never been a problem at any point in history. This suggests that no effort is needed to ensure that it isn't a problem in the future. You don't need protections against things that don't ever happen.
So while I agree with what you are arguing for, I don't think your argument is valid by itself.
I broke my leg once in my youth, it wasn't that bad. Edit: I should remark though, that this was a very clean break, some it might not be representative of the average broken bone.
Dan John, in Intervention, talks about how a lot of movement patterning is developed during youth, and thus encourages a broad range of activities. This includes learning to tumble.
If there were ever to be any kind of “meat grinding” war, it would be escalated to aircraft, drones, and long range missiles pretty quickly I think, with a relatively small number of infantry losses through active combat.
There are also a significant number of people who believe that risky play (or the lack of it) is resulting in mental health issues in today’s young adults, who are finding themselves inexperienced in dealing with feelings of fear, unfamiliar with perseverance and delayed gratification, and are also as you have noted, physically out of shape.
Just because “teenagers being fitter” would benefit the military does not mean that’s the purpose of encouraging riskier play.
We have an order of magnitude more combat aircraft of all classes than both of these nations combined. We have more AH-64s that are allocated just to training than both of these nations have helicopters in active service combined.
Ukraine is already giving Russia's AD systems a run for their money using our hand-me-downs from 30 or more years ago. Their aircraft have no stealth technology, ancient avionics, ancient targeting systems, last-generation anti-radiation missiles.
Russian AD systems stand zero chance against modern SEAD doctrine: we can see this in effect every time Ukraine uses decoy-based saturation attacks combined with cruise missiles. They simply do not have enough capable batteries to sustain a meaningful air defense when faced with a financially-superior adversary. We have tens of thousands of AGM-88 HARMs in stock: Russia has less than 2000 estimated S-300/S-400 acquisition radars.
Nuclear weapons are Russia's only real military trump card; Russia would cease to exist if confined to conventional munitions in a "peer" conflict. There exists exactly zero chance we end up in a Ukraine style meat grinder, we're deploying nuclear weapons long before that happens.
Also: Ukraine isn't engaged in total war and has no ability to wage it. The United States would (and has in past conflicts) engage in strategic bombing campaigns on absolutely every single manufacturing facility, every supply chain, in every complicit nation. In a US-Russia or US-China conflict, Iran doesn't get to sell drones or any other munitions without receiving 40 tons of JDAMs on their manufacturing facilities.
It depends on which country it is and how many of them there are. China and the Soviet Union were both helping Vietnam, for example.
TL;DR 40 tons of JDAMs are not enough to achieve anything lasting.
I can still remember watching original video of a laser guided bomb/missle hitting the exact right spot to get to the depths of the target to later cause massive damage.
How many days on station do you think an Aircraft carrier would make it in the baltic before it's torpedoed to the bottom of the sea?
Haven't you heard? Ukraine needs 500.000 more units of meat for the grinder. Russia are likewise looking for some huge number.
What good do MBTs do in isolation against attack helicopters with 15km-range ATGMs?
MBTs do not have sufficient AA or ECM capability ever. Either a specialty formation is required or something carrier sized to have a chance.
Their existence is the old strategy of demolition and suppression of infantry. (At the last of which they do not quite succeed.)
That's not an escalation, it's a cooling off.
First, these kinds of remote attacks don't take territory and therefore have sharply limited impact on the conflict. The ceiling on what they can accomplish is very low.
Second, they are cheaper and lower-risk for the attacking party, representing a lower level of commitment to the conflict. The potential for loss to the attacker is also very low.
Moving from a high-investment, high-risk, high-reward strategy to a low-investment, low-risk, low-reward strategy is hard to describe as an "escalation".
> Naively it seems to me that aircraft, drones, and long range missiles could do more harm to non military parts of a country compared to a foot army.
You're not alone. I have read that many people in the West were genuinely confused as to how the Tutsi genocide could have been accomplished with machetes. But foot armies are more than capable of inflicting whatever level of destruction you have in mind.
What happens on the playground has way more steps separating it from enlistment criteria then any of those. It would be like counting on 5th order effects working just right.
Your country's war machine, right?
I believe my country is most often the aggressor in the wars it has participated in. Without a big enough stick, aggression for material gain is a worse gamble.
I'm not saying no military is needed, but it has become the proverbial hammer.