But There's No Danger/ It's A Professional Career
David Weigel | May 8, 2007, 4:04pm
Matthew Yglesias:I see that Rudy Giuliani is joining Barack Obama, John McCain, and Hillary Clinton in calling for a larger Army. One can't help but wonder where these troops are supposed to be conjured up from.
Look, they're obviously not going to come from the ranks of the
Atlantic Monthly. But Giuliani went into this last night. His theory is that we can expand the size of the army because potential recruits are nowhere near as gloomy about the military as they were in the 1970s and 1980s, when we had a much larger army. From his speech:
The war is not controversial at West Point or the Air Force Academy or the Naval Academy. In fact, their applications are up. They told me at the Citadel that they now get a significantly higher percentage of men and women volunteering in the infantry, because they want to be where the action is. ... Even the critics of this president would have to admit that whatever the reaction to this situation is, it is not nearly at the intensity of the reaction to the Vietnam War. I hope they would say that, given the level of protests and demonstrations and we don't have soldiers coming back with the lack of morale. Even after the Vietnam War we were able to build that army of 775,000 that we had in the Reagan era. If we could do it then, we could do it now.
Spot the flaw? That's right: in the Reagan era
we weren't at war. Grunts who signed up after 1975 and before 1991 figured
knew* they would be spending their tours in relatively cushy bases in Western Europe, in Hawaii, in Japan, etc and etc. Giuliani seems to understand this, since he salutes that small population of 18-25 year olds who want to plunge into the suck. There aren't anywhere near enough people like that to build the army back up to Cold War levels.
Also, as Yglesias points out, high school graduates were confronting far darker economic times in the first seven, eight years of the period Giuliani is discussing.
*changed this word on the advice of commenters
TrickyVic | May 8, 2007, 4:57pm | #
"""Grunts who signed up after 1975 and before 1991 knew they would be spending their tours in relatively cushy bases in Western Europe, in Hawaii, in Japan, etc and etc.""""
I guess that would be correct for "wars". But what about Beruit, Somilia, and such?
"""since many people know that ANG units are frequently called up for places like Iraq."""
True, at face value. But that changes when they tell you "forget the aircraft, here's a rifle your riding shotgun in an 18 wheeler." The military is pulling a fair amount of non-combat, non-security people to do security roles. The Air Force and Navy are complaining some. My friends kid is a fire-control tech on a Sub. They are sending him to Iraq to do security. The kid is not happy and he, currently, is considering not re-upping. He said he enlisted into the Navy to do Navy work. I think that goes to mis-management.
"""to unapologetically kill Muqtada Al-Sadr and his fighters at the battle of Fallujah"""
I don't think Al-Sadr's crew was part of that. That was a battle against Sunni insurgence not Shias, and if you remember, we beat Fallujah at least twice. The problem with Falluljah was not having enough troops to hold the ground you take. When we left the fighters returned. That goes to the mis-management issue.
I would imagine that many of the fighters in baghdad left. Bush gave them about 5 months advance notice that we were coming.
Repeated deployment's wouldn't be too bad if you have enough time in between. Certainly 12 months there, 6 months here, repeated, is demoralizing. But few thing are more demoralizing than thinking your doing x amount of months and when your close to going home, you get extended another 3 months. That sucks. But they are pros, and will suck it up, and deal with it. But, too much sucking and you will not reenlist.
Bottom line, if you enlist in the military, expect to fight.
ace | May 8, 2007, 5:40pm | #
Thanks, Jennifer. Bang up job. But how do you know even that?
Predicting the motives of people from a certain time period based on information they weren't privy to at the time is one heck of a weak way to make an argument. Perhaps if he had evidence to back it up, like an exhaustive history titled: The U.S. Army in the 1970s and 80s: Better Than the Teamsters.
I would guess that the reason grunts joined the military back then didn't change much from other times: an unruly mix of immature patriotism, desire to prove oneself, a perhaps misguided sense of adventure, a desire to belong, etc.
Certainly not the expectation that there would be no conflict, because if you disregard the Cold War looming over everyone's shoulders, there were things like the Iran hostage crisis, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Grenada, Beirut, and the Gulf War--all seemed to pop up every few years--which involved at least military posturing, if not deployment to a combat zone. Maybe they thought things would be cushy if they joined the Air Force, but not the Army.
And correct me if I'm wrong, but the Army assigns soldiers to units, they don't get to choose, so I guess a grunt would be pretty dumb to think he was guaranteed a cushy desk job pushing paper, don't you think?
This is in no way disproved by the fact that some soldiers during this time period did actually have very cushy deployments, which I don't doubt for a second. But that has always been the case, even during wartime.
kevrob | May 8, 2007, 7:55pm | #
I started college just as the draft was winding down. My birth year got the last draft cards. A lottery was held, but nobody was sent a "Greetings" letter. The whole system was in stand-by mode, and registration ended the following year.
From talking to some ROTC members I was friendly with, I gleaned that the fact that the U.S.'s participation in the shooting war in Indochina was over figured into considerations of some of the students' decisions to sign up. I have brothers who graduated high school in the late 60s. Some of their friends discussed various strategies to game the draft. Enlisting in a Guard or Reserve unit unlikely to get called up, or in the Navy, Air Force or Coast Guard were ways to avoid the infantry. As we all learned from the contretemps over G.W. Bush's Vietnam-era service, getting into a slot like that wasn't always possible without some clout.
Before the draft ended, my friends and I discussed whether attending college on a military scholarship (academy or ROTC) with its concommitant 5-year commitment would be a good deal. On the one hand, once Nixon's "Vietnamization" plan was underway it was a safe bet that after four years of school tramping around a rice paddy wouldn't be your likely assignment, you would avoid taking on debt, and you'd at least have a job awaiting you after graduation. On the other hand, if you didn't want to be career military you'd be five years behind your classmates who went on to law, medical or graduate school, even officers got paid crap back then, and we were pretty sure that hot chicks didn't go for soldier boys. Pilots, aviators and astronauts made out, sure, but junior officers in unglamourous billets? Not so much. Also, just because we were finishing up in SE Asia didn't mean that we trusted our politicians not to find some other strategic hellhole that would require U.S. "advisors" to resist the inevitable spread of international socialist brotherhood. We did manage to get into some Cold War proxy-fights in southern Afica, Central America and Afghanistan, and prior to Watergate breaking I would have never predicted that the Congress would have hobbled an American president who wanted to get mixed up in those, nor that we'd have a Commander-In-Chief averse to interventionism. Even Carter was roused to do something about Afghanistan, and eventually mounted a military attempt to solve the Iranian hostage crisis.
As for being a nuclear target, I'm with Cracker's Boy. I spent most of my first two decades within commuting distance of Times Square. We always figured that, given the MAD doctrine, if a Soviet nuclear strike on New York City didn't kill us outright, the resulting firestorm and fallout would get us for sure. Actual strategic sites were located on Long Island - Brookhaven National Lab, Grumman's Bethpage facility, the joint Navy/Grumman Calveron site, and Republic Aviation at Farmingdale. There were also Nike missile sites at Lido Beach, Lloyd Harbor and Rocky Point and some transatlantic radio installations that might get taken out. So, whether the Reds wanted to take out our warfighting capabilities or just murder millions of civilians, we'd be toast either way. Serving on an overseas base or aboard a ship might have been safer when the balloon went up.
Kevin
