Thoughts? Feelings? Discuss.
And yes, it's a political stunt. It was voted down by an overwhelming majority last time, and it will be this time, too.
Chuck Rangel is a deranged little goblin of a man who despises his constituency and believes government should be as a manipulative aristocracy.
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Maradon! thought about the meaning of life:
This is the second time the democrats have done this, by the way.
Oh, really? Because I don't think anyone even mentioned it last time.
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x--KermitovO-('-'Q) :
Oh, really? Because I don't think anyone even mentioned it last time.
Yeah, it happened about six months ago. All the news headlines read "Republican majority to reinstate the draft!" when in fact it was proposed by a democrat senator, Joe Biden if I recall.
It was voted down by some absurd majority and it will be again this time, because like last time this is just a political stunt to get people to think the war in Iraq isn't going well and our troops aren't re-enlisting in droves.
"I don't know that atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots. This is one nation under God."
-- George Herbert Walker Bush
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When the babel fish was in place, it was apparent Maradon! said:
It was voted down by some absurd majority and it will be again this time, because like last time this is just a political stunt to get people to think the war in Iraq isn't going well and our troops aren't re-enlisting in droves.
The move was a stupid political stunt then and the move is a stupid political stunt now. Re-enlistment rates are good, but they certainly aren't re-enlisting in droves and the rates can be partially attributed to increased bonuses for re-enlisting and stop loss orders. Recruitment rates remain shitty though. Talonus fucked around with this message on 11-20-2006 at 12:20 PM.
So, just so you guys realize, this guy is not even maintaining the pretense of a pro-military motivation for this bill, he is openly and unashamedly a blindly anti-war zealot.
Seems win/win Almond fucked around with this message on 11-20-2006 at 04:10 PM.
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Almond had this to say about Knight Rider:
Pardon my ignorance, but what is wrong with a draft? Why not have a near mandatory two year stint in the military/public service with a collage education as the pay off at end? The result would be people with social/mental disorders being identified and funneled to the proper therapy/help. The general populace learning skills and getting an education.Seems win/win
Hi Somthor.
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Over the mountain, in between the ups and downs, I ran into Almond who doth quote:
Pardon my ignorance, but what is wrong with a draft? Why not have a near mandatory two year stint in the military/public service with a collage education as the pay off at end? The result would be people with social/mental disorders being identified and funneled to the proper therapy/help. The general populace learning skills and getting an education.Seems win/win
Military service IS a good idea, but just like any good idea, when you point a gun at somebody and force it on them, it becomes a BAD idea.
I'd rather have a small army of volunteers than a big army of unwilling conscripts.
Furthermore, we are not lacking in military might, we're lacking in the will to use the force required to bring about decisive victory. We have twelve aircraft carriers, and each of those carriers is home to an airforce that individually is larger than that of most civilized nations.
We are using none of this air power.
If anything could be said to be wrong with our war strategy, it's that we are fighting too soft for fear of involving civilian casualties, and in doing so we are prolonging the violence and causing MORE civilian casualties than if we'd just carpet bombed the place. Maradon! fucked around with this message on 11-20-2006 at 04:32 PM.
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Maradon! had this to say about Jimmy Carter:
If anything could be said to be wrong with our war strategy, it's that we are fighting too soft for fear of involving civilian casualties, and in doing so we are prolonging the violence and causing MORE civilian casualties than if we'd just carpet bombed the place.
'Operation Iraqi Destruction' just doesn't have the same ring to it.
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Maradon! spewed forth this undeniable truth:
We are using none of this air power.
Air power alone cannot win this war. If anything, we have relied on air power too much and not put enough boots on the ground. Carpet bombing the place, which isn't feasible anyway, would do nothing more than furthering general discontent concerning the war.
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From the book of Reynar, chapter 3, verse 16:
'Operation Iraqi Destruction' just doesn't have the same ring to it.
Bullshit. We need a codename that has some PUNCH to it.
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Talonusing:
Air power alone cannot win this war. If anything, we have relied on air power too much and not put enough boots on the ground. Carpet bombing the place, which isn't feasible anyway, would do nothing more than furthering general discontent concerning the war.
No, but non-stop, overwhelming use of force can, and in short order.
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Talonus's unholy Backstreet Boys obsession manifested in:
Air power alone cannot win this war. If anything, we have relied on air power too much and not put enough boots on the ground. Carpet bombing the place, which isn't feasible anyway, would do nothing more than furthering general discontent concerning the war.
The problem is we're rigged for fighting old large-scale wars. The only major powers with an air force set to even remotely take on our's no longer really have any interest. The Russians have their own problems and China would rather buy us than ruin this wonderful market for their products. If we were the sort of country that had to carpet bomb huge swaths of land, we could. Hell we can even strike with (relatively) surgical accuracy.
When we got rid of the draft, the United States populace made a deal: To win a non-nuclear world war scenario we'd need incredibly high tech to make the type of strikes you need to make. That's what we paid for and that's what we got. For the role we prepared for, the United States has an insanely good army.
Then a few years ago we realized we were going to have to re-tool things for the sort of wars you get today. Not so much monstrous world wars, but these little "kick over and anthill and have a running gun battle in civvie-populated areas" type deals. And we had started to prepare for that. But we'd only just started. Prior to 9/11 I remember hearing (albeit in popular media like Popular Science, Popular Mechanics, etc) the target to have most of the work done was like...2011 or something. That's getting the hardware sorted out, getting the infrastructure worked up, getting personnel retrained and retasked, etc. That's a big enough job without being engaged actively in an ongoing war. Rumsfeld (for all his bad management) had the right idea in pushing for this military retooling to get done post-haste.
They got the Striker (Stryker? Dunno) APC's out, and those were to bridge the gap between Humvee and Tank, but a lot of the other cool stuff that's in the pipeline and meant to be part of a unified system will probably end up being brought online piecemeal, which turns it into a bandaid on a problem.
But the goal is STILL to have an all-volunteer army. There were, according to the news today, essentially three plans for Iraq:
1. Go large
This one would essentially pacify Iraq by an overwhelming number of forces. Potentially doubling or more the number of soldiers currently there. It's brute force, and to cover the sort of numbers some people were tossing around without short-handing our other efforts, you'd have to do something like reinstate the draft. Needless to say, no one is real keen on this one.
2. Go home
Contrary to what some people think, this is probably a bad idea. You HAVE to have an exit strategy, and a list of contingencies, and a list of "if forced, we do this" and "Hang in there, keep doing what we're doing now" isn't good enough. But pulling out entirely isn't a great idea. It destabilizes too much, and we come off being worse villains politically than we're already being portrayed as.
3. Go to School
This one essentially puts us in a support role in Iraq, training and backing them up only, and would by necessity have us forcing the Iraqis to get their shit in order. The upside is it's everything we want, but the downside is that it only works if you have a definite deadline for departure, even if it's a situation rather than an actual date.
It LOOKS like the administration's interested in some hybrid of 1 and 3. Go bigger (slightly) for a while, but do it with assistance from countries we don't otherwise much like (Syria and Iran). If Syria and Iran don't uphold their ends, at least we can point out the damage their inaction is causing. And they could potentially do a LOT of good, even if it's just Syria. An unstable Iraq doesn't help Iran, though. They have a large Kurd population they wouldn't like getting uppity in a "monkey see monkey do" sort of thing if Iraq were allowed to disintegrate wholesale.
Some democrats have tried to spin dumbass's comments about bringing back the draft (which is apparently like a pet project of his) as pointing out that the "Go Big" option would only work if you brought back the draft (to try and insinuate the President really wants to Go Big). But no one's buying it and most Dems are rolling their eyes. Seems like some moron is constantly bringing up the draft lately.
sigpic courtesy of This Guy, original modified by me
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Maradon! was naked while typing this:
No, but non-stop, overwhelming use of force can, and in short order.
Which requires ground troops more than air force. Air power is nice and all, but it doesn't help much for nation building.
We can't really do that though anyway, because it's a step backwards from the Rumsfeld Doctrine and would essentially require the entire military to take a step backwards.
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Ja'Deth Issar Ka'bael's unholy Backstreet Boys obsession manifested in:
Deth stuff
We basically had this discussion a couple weeks back in the Rumsfeld thread. Army moving from the old "overwhelming force" method that we used a long time to the current Rumsfeld Doctrine method that focuses on higher tech with fewer troops.
The main problem is that we aren't particularly ready for the new method and we've screwed a bunch of stuff up in the Iraq war, so to end the war definitively we may need to take the overwhelming force approach.
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Over the mountain, in between the ups and downs, I ran into Talonus who doth quote:
Which requires ground troops more than air force.
No it doesn't. What the hell are you even talking about?
The war in Iraq has been working the precise opposite of what you're saying here. We've only used a fraction of our air power and we've relied almost exclusively on ground troops.
Force is applied from the air, where massive devestation can be applied from beyond the reach of IED's and AK47's.
The things you're saying here are a diametrically opposed to reality.
Maradon! fucked around with this message on 11-20-2006 at 07:44 PM.
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Maradon! was listening to Cher while typing:
No it doesn't. What the hell are you even talking about?The war in Iraq has been working the precise opposite of what you're saying here. We've only used a fraction of our air power and we've relied almost exclusively on ground troops.
Force is applied from the air, where massive devestation can be applied from beyond the reach of IED's and AK47's.
The things you're saying here are a diametrically opposed to reality.
Surgical strikes still have collateral damage we don't like.
sigpic courtesy of This Guy, original modified by me
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Peanut butter ass Shaq Ja'Deth Issar Ka'bael booooze lime pole over bench lick:
Surgical strikes still have collateral damage we don't like.
A thousand innocents dying in bombings over the course of a month is better than twenty thousand dying to guerrilla and suicide attacks over the course of a decade.
The inhumane course of action is to allow violence to continue to claim lives when decisive force could end violence and save them, not vice-versa. Maradon! fucked around with this message on 11-20-2006 at 08:12 PM.
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Maradon! had this to say about (_|_):
No it doesn't. What the hell are you even talking about?The war in Iraq has been working the precise opposite of what you're saying here. We've only used a fraction of our air power and we've relied almost exclusively on ground troops.
Force is applied from the air, where massive devestation can be applied from beyond the reach of IED's and AK47's.
The things you're saying here are a diametrically opposed to reality.
I think you've got it backwards. The Powell Doctrine calls for overwhelming forces at the start of a war, both in air and on the ground. Very simply put, zerg the enemy. That's not what we've been doing.
The war in Iraq is following the Rumsfeld doctrine, which is the exact opposite of this. Fewer troops with higher tech. We've sent in troops in phases and have been using technology, like air power, to offset the fewer troops.
In either case, air power doesn't win a war. You need ground troops, period. There's no way around this, especially when you're doing nation building like we are now. Talonus fucked around with this message on 11-20-2006 at 09:11 PM.
* Not really. and lol turn it all to glass
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Greenlit stumbled drunkenly to the keyboard and typed:
and lol turn it all to glass
Azizza, is that you?!
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Skaw had this to say about Jimmy Carter:
Azizza, is that you?!
oh man you don't even know
Operation Downfall (shitty name) was the combined Allied plan to invade Japan in late 1945, early '46.
The initial invasion force, which was to be the largest armada ever assembled, would have been comprised of over 40 aircraft carries, 20 battleships, and 400 destroyers/escorts running interference. With all these men and ordnance, it was still only an estimated three to one advantage of manpower in Allied favor. Against an entrenched enemy, three to one is lol 
.
Further fucking this all up were the Japanese plans for defense; in July of 1945, Japan had over 10,000 aircraft split between their army and navy. Japan expected for one in four (with the more favorable homeland circumstances) of their attempted kamikazes to hit, as opposed to the one in nine of previous battles. They expected to sink over 400 invading ships through kamikaze attacks, and were training to target troop transports. The US Navy later concluded that the Japanese could have wiped out a third to one half of the entire US invading force before it ever reached dry land.
Japan didn't have much of a navy left by this point; a dozen large ships that couldn't be properly fueled given their faltering war effort, but hundreds of smaller ones. Including almost a thousand Shinyo suicide boats, of course. Little one-man patrol boats that would practically hug larger ships before dropping their explosive payload and trying to run the fuck away.
Thankfully, none of this ever got used. Japan employed their new turtle strategy at the Battles of Peleliu, Iwo Jima and Okinawa. Iwo Jima is notable in particular for being the only battle in the whole damned war where the Marines suffered more losses than their enemies.
Thus, we gave up on these horrible odds and immense civilian casualties (150,000. One hundred and fifty fucking thousand at Okinawa alone.) to drop some bombs and help end the whole thing the best way we could.
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Maradon! had this to say about Captain Planet:
Yeah, it happened about six months ago. All the news headlines read "Republican majority to reinstate the draft!" when in fact it was proposed by a democrat senator, Joe Biden if I recall.It was voted down by some absurd majority and it will be again this time, because like last time this is just a political stunt to get people to think the war in Iraq isn't going well and our troops aren't re-enlisting in droves.
I was being sarcastic... you said by the way like none of us had any idea this had happened before.
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Taeldian had this to say about Jimmy Carter:
Hi Somthor.
Way to contribute. :thumbsup:
So it's not really about the draft at all. It's all about Charlie Rangel's over-inflated sense of importance and self-aggrandizement. And possibly him getting some jabs at the administration to boot. But a member of Congress would never do that, right? Naaaaa.
