U.S. army drops requirement for high school diploma (2022)
military.com
military.com
There are people that could be a great soldier/servicemember that didn’t make it through high school. Some will flourish under a military environment that failed out of high school.
I don’t really like people assuming somebody that didn’t graduate high school are somehow inferior or stupid people. The issue is complicated.
I don’t really see how they would he less trustworthy than a school board. Especially considering the stakes.
Where there is a need for personnel, there is some incentive to accept people who might not be ideal, but they are going to approach that in the most sane way possible.
It's not about whether they will be smart enough to learn; it's about the fact that they will have to be taught. There's no foundation to build on, there's no axiomatic knowledge we can rely on.
People who haven't graduated high school are inferior. They're not less human, but they are incontrovertibly less able.
Denying that might feel good, but society didn't mandate 10 years of public education for shits and giggles.
The vast majority of states require that you be at least 17, and often 18, before you can choose to stop with said education. Everyone the military is willing to accept on other fronts has the literal years spent in school that you speak of. If there is a gap, it's only on the order of a few months, if that.
Everyone I know who did not complete high School got within a year or two. Paradoxically, it was the smartest people I know who dropped out. None of our reasons were academic. A combination of social and financial
So they’re inferior because they didn’t receive some paper? What if they dropped out of last class?
Granted the Army will have to work harder on average to train these people, but some learn better outside of the traditional classroom.
Did you serve in the military? I'm wondering what axiomatic knowledge taught in 12th or 11th grade, exactly, that you think military training depends on.
Axiomatic knowledge? Perhaps in maths and science. The rest is different in various countries, so surely cannot form some universal knowledge base.
And in maths/science, a typical high school or even non-technical medium-end college graduate has ~zero skills or knowledge, so that cannot be a factor either.
A high school diploma only signifies the individual was approved by the indoctrination of public education, unless you're the handful that had private or homeschooling which still doesn't mean much academically (see below).
Incidentally, in the US we have what's called the GED[1]. The GED can be taken at any time without any requirement for prior education, and passing the GED is equivalent to graduating high school.
So no, a high school education in the US does not represent "literally years of knowledge".[2]
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Educational_Developmen...
[2]: I'm a GED graduate, and I can tell you its contents are roughly equivalent to elementary schooling in most other countries. I can also tell you that is what a high school diploma represents in the US, academic wise, because they are the same. If you can calculate 1+1=2 and speak basic English, you are an American high school graduate.
Edit: also worth noting, is that I know of people who have graduated high school who probably could not pass a GED. It is definitely possible in the right school to coast your way to graduation, even if you would not meet the normal expectations. So in those cases, a GED would be superior to a diploma. All of this I think indicates that high school diploma is becoming somewhat meaningless
The problem is, if you aren’t there on graduation day, you don’t get that proof of paper saying you know what you know. So before you go and put people down without context in their lives, you should be aware that there are dozens of reasons why someone who aced high school - didn’t get a diploma.
A flat tyre, or the flu, on graduation day doesn’t mean the last X years of your life have been wasted and you don’t get a diploma…
I didn’t graduate from high school, and I completely disagree with you.
I learned more math as a teenager than most people ever do, learned two languages to fluency in my 20s, both in very different language families from my native one, and got into a nice software career in my 30s, first in Beijing and then in SF.
Why exactly am I “inferior”? Just because I didn’t choose to pursue the piece of paper that your world view dictates?
For people that didn’t graduate high school, being a moron typically was not a causal factor. Knowing how to write and do basic algebra is sufficient to bootstrap yourself to anywhere you want to go, and many people get an adequate foundation in that before they ever get to high school, never mind graduate.
I didn't graduate from high school. I ran business groups, founded startups, exited, accumulated patents, and am usually considered articulate and capable.
Yes, the distribution of people who didn't graduate from high school are different from those who did. But you can measure the things you actually care about. High school education (or other educational attainment) is just one signal of a person's capability.
Then there are folks like me. I dropped out of kindergarten. I didn't do any structured schooling until I was 16 when I passed a GED and ACT test then went to college for Computer Science and Physics. My GPA in college was 3.89 and I've been a highly competent software engineer for ~20 years. Nothing that I missed from high school has held me back in any significant way.
It really isn't years worth of useful knowledge, the military is capable of giving recruits the knowledge they need much more quickly, especially given the much more disciplined/controlled environment involved.
In a year you can teach kids who are a little behind enough to get them up to the min high school will teach them, but certainly not the most that high school will teach them if they want it.
Of course this overlooks what the minimum bar for a college is. At my college the lowest math they offered that wasn't considered remedial was calculus. That's a far cry from many community colleges where the lowest is alegebra. You definitely should have learned alegebra in high school and not knowing it definitely extends your timeline on certain disciplines.
k12 was created by industrialists who wanted obedient workers and well behaved citizens who won’t cause crime and instability in the ruling class’ assets.
School prepares workers, not the actual people changing the world.
Most high school grads will know more about how the mitochondria is the power of the cell, more so than know about taxes and personal finance. That’s by design.
Many failing students simply got passed through grade to grade.
If a high school diploma has no value as a signal, requiring it throws out eligible people for no reason whatsoever.
Schools are doing a piss-poor job of educating people. Only 20% of schools can muster a 70% proficiency score, with the vast majority being much worse.
What this indicates is a startlingly large number of students are receiving an education that holds no value whatsoever.
Further, as already mentioned by someone else, the military will still use its own test as a means to determine where to place a recruit.
This seemed apparent to me when I was in school. I can't imagine it's changed much.
Either society isn't giving a prospective good parent the resources to achieve success. Any or many reasons exist; rent is too high, jobs got replaced by AI craze, only qualified for jobs that aren't valued at a living wage. If the parents do have the resources but still fail, society is at fault as the kids haven't been rehomed to other environments.
> it is society's fault
We can't step in and fix everything. Systems don't scale like that. There has to be individual responsibility.
> Either society isn't giving a prospective good parent the resources to achieve success
Some parents simply do not care.
> haven't been rehomed to other environments
There are already enough kids without parents. You'd be making the problem worse.
> jobs got replaced by AI craze
Hasn't even come close to happening yet.
Okay, a failing student is the fault of the parents. Now what?
Do you think parents want their children to fail? Failing children are generally associated with low socioeconomic status.
So, now, you have to fix low socioeconomic status. Now what?
etc.
You are correct that schools and teachers can only do so much. However, schools and teachers must also operate in the reality of what actually exists rather than what they would like.
A scoring system is only useful when comparing parts of the entire population. If the score is only used in the US, for example, then it's only really useful for comparing states relative to each other.
When looking at the entire population and saying US students only pass the US proficiency test 20% of the time, there's no relative comparison to look at. We could simply change the test or the scoring system if we wanted a higher or lower result in the population.
I took it the opposite way. High schools are designed to provide a bare floor of knowledge a citizen should achieve. The top side may be extremely competitive, but the bar for passing high school is meant to be low.
Someone who can't pass that and doesn't have developmental issues likely have environmental issues to address. So having someone be exploited by the government to fight instead of improve that environment feels scummy.
That's a bold claim. Can you back it up?
On the flip side, an actual path to citizenship is military service.
https://www.uscis.gov/military/naturalization-through-milita...
It's more of a spiritual gesture than some hard law. They aren't called "standardized tests" because they test for the exceptional.
I'm sure we can put the relevant education board in a room and have them argue over what should/shouldn't be on such tests, but the current result is a compromise after years of deliberation, being tweaked a little each year.
I'll be a bit more specific and say "high school testing is designed to provide a floor of knowledge a government feels its citizens should achieve" if that helps.
I agree with your general point, but I don't know about high school per se.
I quit school at age 14, got my GED, and this was one of the best decisions I had ever made. I feel like there should be more options for people to leave the system early, once they've attained that bare floor of knowledge. (Which, for a sufficiently motivated child, could in all seriousness be at age 11 or 12. The GED test was laughably easy, and it still amazes me that people sit through four years of school for that.)
FWIW, the military frowned upon GEDs, often requiring a waiver, but allowed GED holders to enlist.
>the army can provide a stable employment and a community that has its issues but is likely less abusive than whatever home environment prevented them from graduating high school.
For such a student I feel it's out of the frying pan and into the fire. Now they are bound to the government for X years for everything, from a meager pay to living quarters (you also needed to look the way they told you to look, but I think they are relaxing those hair/tattoo codes a bit). You go where they tell you to go and do what they tell you to do. And "leaving your job" if it's not for you means you can be put at trial.
It's an awful lot of a gamble being taken here for someone who likely hasn't addressed their core traumas to begin with.
Hey, did our system utterly fail you? Submit yourself to us and we'll fix the problem we continue to propogate! You don't even need to complete the educational system we outlined anymore, just be a warm body to throw at future battles for oil.
There's less incentive to provide proper housing when you can instead put your citizens in barracks.
So intelligence is important for military service but a person’s completion of high school isn’t an indication of low intelligence. They may have dropped out for any other reason. It’s entirely possible that they may flourish in the structured environment the military offers.
It’s fair to ask if the IQ test is a good measure of intelligence, or if it’s measuring something else. But in this context, it’s measuring something that is strongly correlated to success as a solider.
In your average high school class of 30 people, the 4 stupidest would be rejected by the military on these grounds (assume the bottom 1/31 have such severe developmental difficulties they can't even attend a normal high school).
Doesn't that seem like quite a high bar?
In other words, this is how we end up with Idiocracy where a low IQ person becomes the smartest person in the world right under everyone’s nose.
So an 85 IQ person today is substantially more intelligent than an 85 IQ person in the Vietnam war. That said, the modern infantry man’s job is more complex. I would postulate that the job’s complexity has grown to keep pace with the Flynn effect.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect#/media/File:Sunde...
No studies done in the US which is the cohort here.
The main reason early studies were in places like Scandinavia is that they have compulsory military enlistment alongside IQ tests, whose results are made available for research. Studies in places like the US came later, because simply getting a representative and comparable sample is non-trivial. There's also the cultural issue that studies on IQ are walking on eggshells in the US.
And it's not slight regressions. We've gone from gradually and consistently gaining IQ, to the current scenario where some studies [2] have shown declines as great as .29 standard deviation per decade. Meaning in 40 years we'd all be a whole standard deviation away from where the mean used to be. That is exceptionally disconcerting, particularly if it doesn't just flat-line at some point.
[1] - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016028962...
[2] - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01602...
About 10% of people are too cognitively challenged to positively contribute in the US Army even in the least mentally challenging roles.
At 80 - 85 IQ level person can typically read basic level. They gradate from schools and comprehend simple texts and sentences but may struggle with more complex language structures, vocabulary, and abstract concepts. People with reading disorders or other disorders should not be confused with low IQ.
He was working for the Department of Agriculture, trying to get the Afghan farmers to grow saffron instead of poppy. He was a professor in agronomy and would help his students back home in the US with their assignments.
He had signed up for the US army and ended up serving in the Special Forces in Vietnam for 2 years. He dropped out of school when he was 13.
In my opinion, the military should be a second chance for a country’s citizens, who have for some reason slipped through the cracks.
You’re saying that the US military has issues and it may well have. I’m no expert on that. But I still believe that a person who has dropped out of high school has a lot to offer society. It seems like the US military is coming around to the same line of thinking, as long as the person passes the IQ test. I think that’s a reasonable compromise.
The program might fail but if we never try then we’ll never know.
I think the original reason for requesting the high-school diploma is two fold. On one hand the person can come back and pick up where they left off, with a better chance of serving society. But maybe the more important one was that it lowered the chances of teens enlisting it the pit of desperation, seeing themselves as failures, with no other way out. Those may not be the people you really want because those may not be the people who really want you. This is the kind of deal that's hard to pull out of, and the Army would probably not want to be in the situation to have a wave of desperate teens realizing they just made a rash decision. The Army also doesn't want to be drained of new recruits, so here they are, taking what's on the table. It's a clear sign that young people are sending to the Army though.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fragging
This comment just shows you to be ignorant and contrarian.
And recent research absolutely has shown that heavy cannabis usage in adolescence and early adulthood does have a clear association with an increased risk of developing psychosis and schizophrenia. Just because the war on drugs lied about the effects of less harmful drugs like cannabis doesn’t mean they can’t be hazardous to your health like any other substance.
Regarding heroin - one may not be particularly murderous while zonked out, but addiction can make people surprisingly aggressive.
I’d also like to add that the company-grade officers stuck in the mud alongside enlisted were less at fault for the needless deaths than the incompetent general staff or the political actors who got us and kept us over there in the first place. You might enj the novel “Matterhorn” by Karl Marlantes, a Marine infantry officer who served with distinction in Vietnam. Or you might prefer “Dereliction of Duty” by Lt General H.R. McMaster, a renowned commander of the GWOT era who wrote his PhD thesis on the failures of Westmoreland and the other generals who mangled Vietnam.
Of course the military is the answer /s
The GT score is comprised of combinations of several different segments of the ASVAB of which the most important is applied arithmetic. Those are math problems in paragraph form that requires careful reading and multiple steps of very simple algebra like calculating pricing for a retail purchase and deduction of the coin denomination in return. The challenge there is just finishing the test because they, by design, do not provide enough time.
EDIT
I just want to point out that I did not become more intelligent as I got older. My ability to read and instantly formulate logic substantially improved as I got older through practice. Those, reading and logic, are skills and the performance improvement is permanent.
I’d argue that is more intelligent. People generally get smarter as they age (up to a point)
That’s why IQ is relative to your peers. A child with a high IQ may still not be as intelligent as an adult with an average IQ
The military does not only need highly functioning autonomous operators. There were many more menial positions in cleaning, catering, hauling and warm body canon fodder than there were scouts or special forces.
I guess these days many of those auxiliary functions are farmed out in very lucrative deals to select private companies.
Man, your Army Band really takes their Bach to the extreme.
With due respect for your country, which country you're talking about is highly relevant. There are <5 countries with militaries comparable in efficiency to the US military and only Israel is really soldier-per-soldier competitive. That's not a criticism of your country--your country likely spends its efforts on better things--but if we're talking about what's effective for a military, US military practices really are a reasonable gold standard.
That starts with the fact that the US doesn't do compulsory military service, because soldiers who don't want to be there aren't effective soldiers (note that Israel does do compulsory military service, which is because they have different problems than we do).
> The military does not only need highly functioning autonomous operators. There were many more menial positions in cleaning, catering, hauling and warm body canon fodder than there were scouts or special forces.
Thinking that "warm body cannon fodder" is something the military needs demonstrates a bit of a misconception on how modern militaries work.
Cleaning, catering, hauling, etc. need to be handled by high-functioning people as well, because in a warzone, attacks on things like cleanliness to reduce morale, or attacks on food and other supplies, are effective attacks.
All this is to say, that if the US military doesn't want low-IQ folks, there are good reasons for that.
While the security concerns of certain countries have motivated compelled military service, I wonder if a side-effect is less division/greater intra-country tolerance? And would the U.S. benefit from instituting compelled military service, or perhaps, compelled national service, which doesn't necessarily entail holding a weapon.
Some cursory searching turned up this study from Brookings suggesting that it would. https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/nationa...
And here's a paper - more of an opinion piece - arguing against it: https://www.cato.org/testimony/mandatory-universal-national-...
I'm definitely ethically opposed to a draft, but it's a bit naive to think that the US has ethical values or even ever has.
People who did terribly in the context of a class rooom but thrive in the military in very complicated roles.
This recent interview with the commander of Delta Force comes to mind for me but what you’re describing is not rare. It cuts both ways like any organisation, there’s plenty of people who don’t thrive there as well but I’m not upset about this change at all, I think it’s sensible overall.
https://www.youtube.com/live/d_mI3XxiNec
You can listen to that person for just 5 minutes and see exactly what I’m referring to
People here who are judging people based on their high school accomplishments must be coming from a sheltered middle class background.
Shouldn't be surprising, in any group there will be a normal distribution. A person that didn't finish high school and succeeding isn't shocking, but falls way to the right of the distribution.
Of course they exist, but until you find one yourself one would think the same.
It won't work in places like Medicine or Army, where human lives are at stake.
There is a progression your have to work through to get to serious places, else bad things can happen to both you and many people around you.
'Some' 'could' see that the ability of jumping the requirements of education is 'mostly' coincides with a certain level of mental abilities.
'Some' smart people do not participate in organized education and 'some' graduates regardless of modest abilities, but those are never arguments for the generic population and generic rules. Probably those passing a good(!) admission test 'could' understand that still...
"Some", "could", and "mostly" are words that people use when they're concerned with saying what's true, not when they have a weak argument. The facts are rarely absolutes and if you don't use qualifying words like that, what you're saying is rarely strictly true.
Yes, it can make your argument more strong, but you're lying if it doesn't cover 100% of the cases for the subject. For the lay person, this might be fine, they don't know, but for anyone who knows the subject matter in depth, chances are you sound like an idiot.
I'd argue this mentality plays a good part in making some social media so toxic. People generally aren't going to read detailed explanations on a topic, so people who would write them have less incentive, meanwhile some pop star's 10 word tweet over simplifying some complex global crisis, like you can just make it go away overnight, will get a million likes.
Another article is more explicit about exactly who isn’t joining the military anymore. https://www.military.com/daily-news/2024/01/10/army-sees-sha...
The article doesn't confirm whether the total of any other groups is dropping, but it can be inferred from the numbers given that recruiting is very low across the board. It's worth having a racial remark in the title for clicks alone.
https://www.defenseone.com/policy/2022/07/after-criticism-ar...
... after a whole article full of explanations, none of which involve surveying white men to ask them why they don't want to sign up anymore. Classic journalism.
The bigger contributing factors to declining enlistment are: general lack of support for the military among younger people (the latest round of forever wars didn't exactly help), better options in the civilian world (especially increasing benefits on student loan suppprt), and decreasing physical fitness (the increase in obesity rates directly lowers the available recruitment population).
The civilian sector has the same problem with truck drivers and maritime shipping.
> The civilian sector has the same problem with truck drivers and maritime shipping.
Hell, maritime anything. Even super local ferry work has a hard time recruiting.
There would be no need for sign-on bonus, you could add additional qualifications for g.i. benefits in the form of naturalization.
It would really be a net positive as they would be forced to assimilate into our society in a way that is a net benefit at many different layers of the civil stack. The kind of people who are willing to serve the country rather than acting as a sanctioned entitlement case would be a win/win. No?
Do you believe we are not already having an inter-domain/dimensional information war with something of a nature you describe? (Kind of kidding)
> No I didn’t say that or allude to it
Did you forget what you put in your own comment?
>>> There would be no need for sign-on bonus, you could add additional qualifications for g.i. benefits in the form of naturalization.
All of what I said requires effort, which is not guaranteed, they are options for the motivated, which is what we want those coming to this country to hold of personal value. Have a nice day though.
OP's proposal seem more like what the Roman empire did granting citizenship to conscripted barbarians, which worked or not depending on your perspective.
I also think that the much higher level of taxation inflicted on the (local) Roman population certainly didn’t help, as I feel that by the 3rd-4th century many parts of the Roman hinterland were much less populated than they should have been (had not the higher taxation hindered the Roman demographics, that is). In a way the outside-the-limes “barbarians” had the comparative advantage of not having had to pay those very high taxes, and most probably that was good for their (the “barbarians’”) demographics. And on a large enough time scale demographics is destiny.
The fall of the western empire is more accurately described as a fragmentation, after which live mostly went on like it did before. The true downfall of Roman civilization in Italy happened during the decades-long unsuccessful attempt by the Eastern Empire to recover the peninsula.
A boat comes in from EU with immigrants, men get off the boat, are handled a Union uniform and are put right back on another boat down south to the war.
We are going dark here.
If we don’t do things like this, what do we expect these people who need to care for themselves and potentially their families are going to be willing to do?
We also have to be serious in consideration of the current climate, and having recruiting down will just lead to drafts or forced conscriptions if the climate turns further.
I wish we wouldn’t have enabled the current belief in the country being an opportunity for foreign actors to come to without using the proper mechanisms. Unfortunately it has and we are now in a situation that is untenable. We can hold back in fear of the “invasion” or come up with plans to integrate and/or assimilate these individuals in their family that will be a benefit or leave them to languish to our detriment.
I mean it also would afford their actual stations more contract labor in non-military support roles at their posts for their spouses. Also would reduce recruitment costs as you wouldn’t need so many incentives to get em through the door, reduce over-crowded shelters, and the kind of people willing to serve and improve their station are the kind of immigrants we profess to want.
Given we live in a world with borders where nations try to subvert each other to their own interests, I think training migrants to use weapons you give them is going to be a great way for, say, America to give Mexico a military for free. (As a European, I think this would be hilarious… but more as a plot for a Peter Sellers film rather than as actual news to wake up to).
Do you mean like right now? You would propose removing world wide borders and citizenship requirements?
Or do you mean in a utopian future? If the former, is there any real programmatic intelligent analysis of how this would actually happen and what the negatives would be?
From the point of view of citizens or economies rather than nations, their removal would apparently be a good thing, free movement boosting trade and the economy: https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2018/08/06/open-borders-econ... (Michael Clemens also quoted in other papers, I don't think I've heard of wbur.org before).
But it's the same problem as anarchy: to focus on only some aspect of freedom is to ignore harms prevented by the absence of, or limits to, that freedom.
> If the former, is there any real programmatic intelligent analysis of how this would actually happen and what the negatives would be?
I lack the necessary foundation to distinguish between such an analysis and a think-piece in a newspaper (or, these days, the output of a LLM, or a YouTuber in a suit and tie). Link I gave above? I can Google Michael Clemens, but even seeing a list of accolades whose standards I don't know either, means I can't tell how he and his views are rated by other economists. And worse, when I do look up a list of works by Michael Clemens, one of the results tells me:
"Michael A. Clemens [\n] Not to be confused with: Michael Peter Clements" - https://ideas.repec.org/e/pcl20.html
(And I'm only 80% sure the one quoted in the paper was A. not P.)
And even if he's great, Gell-Mann Amnesia effect says I can't just assume that he'd necessarily agree with how his views were presented by the press.
Treat my position as vibes, not a policy proposal.
Conscription by definition is involuntary.
There are ways to do this. The French Foreign Legion is perhaps the most time tested, but the requirements it has also mean that the model is incompatible with US Democrat party ideology:
* Only male recruits.
* Criminal history check, including with Interpol
* Identity must be verificiable with official documents from country of origin
* Health screening including dental, psychological, and fitness. No waivers for anything.
The initial contract is for 5 years. If you make it and re-enlist for an additional contract (usually a couple of years), you can now apply for French citizenship.
Russia's human waves were just means to reduce the prison population: practical stalinism 101. They are phasing out prisoner benefits as the recruiting pool is getting smaller. Also there is an increased chance Putin might order be mass mobilization after he wins the elections in May.
Increased but still highly unlikely. The Russian military inducts ~260,000 men annually just from conscription. Now that the Ukrainians have exhausted their supplies of ammunition, manpower, and funding, it's unlikely that the AFU can sustain its ability to attrite Russian manpower faster than it can be replaced.
A surprisingly straightforward article from Xinhua correspondent Zhang Zhang:
"The central locations involved in the drill are the Baltic nations, identified by NATO as particularly vulnerable to a possible Russian assault. Other areas include Norway and Romania, situated on the outskirts of the alliance; Poland on the alliance's eastern flank; and Germany as a central hub for reinforcements."
https://english.news.cn/20240128/95fbdec4ab7b4285b8f017ffeb1...
This is a very wrong take.
A big continental war like this one in Ukraine is fought with artillery and with enough men capable of holding the territory (already under control or conquered), i.e. the story of WW1 and the WW2 (when it came to the Eastern Front). You don't have that, you lose. Trouble for Ukraine (and for the West supporting Ukraine) is that they're running out of artillery shells and they're running out of Ukrainian men.
I guess the Germans or the Brits didn’t get the memo that the Greek aviation would be enough of an opposing force.
Why there’s not more Western defense of Ukraine I can’t explain except for present greed over future problem solving, but nothing is that surprising.
Similarly so much of Russia's current war propaganda is repurposed anti-war themes from Iraq and Afghanistan. The US has screwed around aggressively intervening around the globe for so long, that it's all too easy to pigeonhole what actually appears to be reasonable support for a would-be ally into the same bag. And now the chief opponents of such aid are actually the same party that led us into those useless wars! "Can't get fooled again"
Those wars really were a total waste of our country's resources, international stature, and so much of our future. It was seen by so many at the time, including our allies. But the war boosters ruled the day, drunk on corporate/nationalist propaganda and those fucking yellow "support our troops" bracelets, as if the soldiers coming home wouldn't end up being some of the strongest anti-war voices. And now here we are.
This seems to imply that Soviet intervention into an American war declared over the Cuban Missile Crisis would have been fairly characterized as "reasonable support for a would-be [in this case, already formalized] ally".
It's easy to have no military, as long as you don't mind being completely controlled by a country with one.
TL;DR: Costa Rica has no threatening armies around it, so they don't need one.
There's also a bit about Panama being chill (possibly because of all the business generated by the canal), and Nicaragua basically held in place by international law.
We collectively agreed on a national jobs program (via the military), so we should consider redirecting a significant portion of those jobs to a national jobs program that actually helps with domestic infrastructure with an emphasis on learning skills that translate into private sector opportunities.
Then let those that do want to fight be the ones to sign up, and make more effective use of them. I'm still not a fan of the military industrial complex but national defense will always be necessary and should be staffed for defense rather than just keeping people off the dole.
Not being prepared to be violent makes you harmless. Having the capacity for violence and choosing not to use it makes you peaceful.
If you speak softly, but don't carry a big stick, then you are just speaking softly.
Might might not make right, but it determines who gets to make the rules.
In order to have a capable military, it needs to fight wars. Hence all the countries joining the US in Afghanistan to achieve valuable on the field training.
What use is a big stick, other than intimidation, when you just carry it around, not knowing how to actually use it?
Future recruits will also need to be good at E-sports, as they'll increasingly be in charge of drone operations.
As per North Korea, they were able to come up with 1 million artillery shells for their friends the Russians, while the West couldn't do the same for their friends the Ukrainians [1], I'd say that North Korea got the better of the West here.
[1] https://unn.ua/en/news/it-seems-that-north-korea-is-a-more-e...
At the moment it's not NKs shells that keep the war rolling but the huge Russian population which allows for a seemingly endless supply of corpses to be.
Those foreigners are negligible compared to all those actual Russians.
When people say "Russian" they have an expectation. What is the difference between these foreigners and there ethnic groups in your eyes?
>They surely have Russian documents and were allowed to vote in Russia for their president.
I'm not sure if you were trying to be funny but you are.
Their nationality, obviously.
Additionally, in this conflict, often the fact that the foreigners have a choice to join the war.
> I'm not sure if you were trying to be funny but you are.
I'm aware of the diplomatically said, "flawed democracy" which is the Russian political system, but the fact remains valid.
Depends what's the most important missing item on Ukraine's wish list; Ukraine did get rocket artillery, SAM systems, tanks, and a whole bunch of other stuff.
To me, it suggests that shells are something that NK knows it can spare (and the same for all the stuff everyone else collectively is providing Ukraine, it's stuff the donors know they can spare).
I'm not sure what you're arguing here. Are you saying that the US has historically been taking a neutral position? I suppose they haven't been prosecuting any particular vision with their pointless wars, but that seems a bit weird.
But no question not having any power to back up their whims will defang the US and make them victims of external actors. Hopefully the threat of this happening is enough to reign in the warmongers in the US government and make them negotiate towards a pro-US policy instead of the anti-random-victims strategy to date.
In a war the strongest party also usually wins, so it's totally rational to not incur the opportunity costs of risking one's life by joining a war.
Left alone, communism eventually fails in almost every case. China being the main exception but that's because we pump a half a trillion dollars into their economy every year buying cheap goods.
Before that their economy was a complete non-event. All of their rapid growth really started in the mid-90’s, and the West started paying attention even later.
Having a strong military may result in fewer deaths.
And young women are kept out by the massive sexual harassment problem they haven't yet acknowledged.
Increase the base pay, increase the long-term incentives. They're not working for tips.
A raw recruit (E1) gets $23,000 per year. Housing, food, work clothing and healthcare is paid for. After tax, it’s like ~$1,500 in completely discretionary income. This is why you get 19 year old new recruits buying new sports cars. They can afford it. The smart ones start socking away money while they are young.
A new officer (O1) gets $43,000 per year. If they are married they can live off base and get a housing allowance. If lucky enough to get stationed in SF, that’s another $4,017 per month. So just base pay and allowance is $91,000. And the housing allowance is tax free, so it’s equivalent to making more than $100,000 per year.
Then add on top sign on or enlistment bonuses especially for in demand MOSs, relocation allowances, etc.
Then you put in 20 years and you get a pension you can live on and healthcare for the rest of your life.
They aren’t making Silicon Valley money but it puts most members in firmly middle class territory.
Many of these folks have second homes, a small RE portfolio, and more!
Look at mercenaries, get paid shit tons, still always need more.
In my local school district, of students that enter high school:
- by 11th grade, ~50% meet state standards 11th grade standards for math
- by 11th grade, ~50% meet state standards 11th grade standards for English
- by 12th grade ~90% graduate
Passing rate is 99%.
Also, the article is from 2022 and the requirement was reinstated a week later, so this is moot anyway. At least as it pertains to the Army. Granted, the Navy lifted the same requirement on Friday. We shall see if they last longer than a week. There remains a strong social impetus, particularly in government, to paint a picture that you can't get a job without completing high school, even though everyone already completes it these days anyway...
If someone interprets that as the same as someone who tries to complete high school and fails they are the ones we should worry about.
If you use something that people didn't do as a signal you run into all sorts of problems.
Just the navy, who instituted a similar change on Friday. This article about the army is from 2022 and the army reverted the change a week later. High school completion is a requirement again. It remains to be seen if the navy makes it the fully week.
I'm sure the military has identified a pool of people that were excluded, but that they can use. Same with the people with tattoos
The current battlefield in Ukraine is anything but fast-paced, and this is the largest continental war we’ve had since May ‘45 (the War in Korea has some shots of having been bigger, but then only for one year or so, 1950).
https://www.businessinsider.com/gen-z-american-army-soldiers...
Edit:
https://www.businessinsider.com/us-army-invites-back-vaccine...
When China re-colonized Hong Kong I gave strong thought to joining the military. When Russia invaded Ukraine, I similarly felt called to join the military, if not to fight for Ukraine, to prepare to fight for Taiwan.
The reason I won't join the military is because America does not support Rule of Law.
We invaded a country under false pretenses and invaded another country because we could. The aftermath of Vietnam inundated popular culture and media with a clear message: America fucked up. The people I looked up to, Anthony Bourdain for example, hated people like Kissinger, and imparted that hatred to me. Bourdain showed America's military legacy in Asia. I heard about Haliburton profiteering. I heard about the military industrial complex. I heard about Lejune water, and burn pits, and trouble with Tricare. Military bases that pump cancer into the ground when there is a fire. People like Jon Stewart showed nightly how bad faith American journalism and politicians are. He interviewed the deputy secretary of defense who was aghast that someone might try to ask for accountability. Historians, like Timothy Snyder (Yale professor specializing in eastern european history) are saying that America is headed into very very dark times and writing guides on how to combat tyranny.
Even today, America is actively supporting a genocidal regime in Israel, spitting in the face of a rules based international order. Rules for your enemies, but not your friends is not Rule of Law, it is exactly the opposite.
I grew up understanding that America was evil and that the American military was a tool for evil.
So when I listen to people like Anothony Blinken get on stage and talk about Rule of Law, that's exciting. But then I see them ignore Rule of Law for our allies. When I listen to General Milley talk about Trump, and General Mattis talk about Trump, I get excited. These are clearly educated individuals who understand fascism and want to do the right thing, but then they resign rather than fight or walk to church showing support for someone evil.
I do not ever want to have to treat American Soil like a "battle space" because Americans want racial justice.
If you want professionals to join the military, you have to support Rule of Law. You have to take care of political corruption at home.
If you want professionals to join the military, you have to get rid of Stock Trading Nancy pelosi for openly supporting conflicts of interests. You have to put Trump in the slammer for literally trying to end constitutional rule, something military officers took an oath they are not living up to to do. You have to tax billionaires so the government is for the people and not for the people with billions. You have to end private funding of candidates for elections, which major American colleges (Harvard and Yale) say directly results in a government that looks more like plutocracy than democracy.
Most of all, most of all, you have to convince professionals that the military is a place they can change the world for the better, rather than a place where you kill brown people to make sure the "spice" flows and billionaires pockets are lined.
In 1997?
China used colonial policies such as forced immigration (requiring Hong Kong to accept Chinese settlers), forced public expenditure for the benefit of the colonizer (bridge), linguistic domination (via forced changes to education), political pre-selection (Chinese approval of candidates), violent put down of dissent, rewriting history in school books, etc.
Equivocation and appeals to history to justify domination of a people who do not wish to be dominated are standard tactics. "Ukraine never had a tradition of genuine statehood," "We are all kievan rus, we are one people." "Ukrainian identity is artificially created by the west."
China asserted itself as the authority in Hong Kong with force over a people who largely saw themselves as distinct from mainland China. China then used policies of oppression, assimilation, and settling in an attempt to destroy hong kong self rule and ultimately the idea of Hong Kong-ness (in favor of chinese-ness) against the wishes of indigenous residents. To me, that is colonialism.
When the US attacked Cuba for foreign encroachment and supported Israel in its revanchist genocides, what Rule of Law were they following when it supported Ukraine against Russia doing the same thing? Seems pretty blatantly hypocritical to me.
That was one of many historical opportunities for professionals to see the US' many contradictions and domestic problems and abandon the US military. By these political standards, professionals should have abandoned US military capability back in 2014 when the latest outrageous hypocrisy was laid bare so it wouldn't have the power to be used as a tool for evil in 2022 and beyond.
Well, chop chop, America, better solve this quickly.
I guess I don't really doubt that you have good or patriotic intentions, I've seen comments like this often enough that I think it's some kind of Ralph Nader-esque "if you want to effect change, attack your friends not your enemies" strategy which doesn't strike me as particularly effective when there's any real stakes involved.
Right, just like a lot of people give strong thoughts to a lot of things that are difficult but in reality will never happen. They convince themselves that they could do it if it weren't for this ONE thing. The one thing is always conveniently there.
Instead of action we get a rant of hot topic soup like yours. But as long as "I thought about it" is prefaced, then it's all good. This is the definition of a keyboard warrior.
I do look up to people such as Admiral Rickover. Jocko is the type of person that makes the military appealing. There is a legacy of quality engineering and civic contribution in the past that has been decimated by the consequences of Nixon/Reagan era policies, chiefly, selling out America to billionaires.
So "convince themselves that they could do it" is a characterization that does not make sense because I don't (and most middle class people don't) see the military as an achievement. Doctor, Lawyer, or Engineer is what the middle class sees as achievement, not military. Military is strictly viewed as an act of service and a sacrifice.
> ONE thing
It's not one thing. It is the thing. The US military is famously civilian led, and the civilian leaders are an absolutely corrupt mess in complete disarray. Characterizing that as "this ONE thing" is bad faith. Saying you don't want to join an organization because the leadership sucks isn't "ONE thing." It's not a triviality. It is core to the organizations mission and execution of that mission.
> hot topic soup
If you think I'm providing hot topic soup and not a generational liberal middle class understanding of America and our place in the world, well I wish you would be a bit more open minded. The institutions that train the people that build your tools are full of people with an understanding not too dissimilar to mine. The people who work in cybersecurity and signals frequently come from the same background as me. The government has explicitly talked about how hard it is to train for cybersecurity and how hard it is to attract cybersecurity talent. That's because cybersecurity is not about domination and hierarchy. Cybersecurity is about curiosity. A rigid hierarchy with a mission of dominance is not conducive to curiosity. Curiosity is a fundamentally liberal principle so an illiberal military is going to have a hard time attracting the curious. The act of hacking is practically an act of questioning authority.