We need a military. All states do -- its part of their duty to their citizenry.
The problem in the US is that our hippy-run academia are driving the smart people out of jobs in the military (and police force for that matter), and it's putting us in a terrible position.
The only way to fix it is for smart people to start joining the military again.
Academia doesn't drive anyone out of the military. It may dissuade some people from joining.
US military culture drives people out.
Either by being surrounded by lazy or coasting individuals who think of the military as just a job (discouraging to more ideologically minded people).
Or by being hammered by the ugly, jingoistic rhetoric and motivations of some peers and leadership.
Or by being too smart and standing too tall, upsetting the boat. The US military, large portions at least, strongly discourage some aspects of intellectualism and, certainly, individualism. Smart people suffer in this environment if they're not power-motivated, and the good ones usually aren't.
Oh that is why ROTC is such a big issue and many elite universities do not have it in their campuses.
Intellectualism is absent in military? Some of the best lectures I watched are from Naval War College. TOR comes from that part of the woods.
You do not have individualism in any armed forces, this is absolutely lunatic. Its like preaching individualism in Basketball team and telling Allen Iverson he is oh so special and do it all ( which he did and spectacularly failed). US Military just like other military is Socialist both in its creed and organization. That is no surprise and PG actually credit to Post-War equality in America to be by-product of Military service and GI bill.
Re ROTC: Which elite universities are you speaking of and why don't they have ROTC detachments? It appears, from a cursory glance, that MIT and Harvard don't have ROTC detachments, then those cadets would go to a detachment at a nearby university. This is typical for smaller schools that neighbor other universities (see universities and colleges in Atlanta, GA for this as well, several of them send or sent their cadets to GA Tech's detachments rather than hosting their own for a smaller cadet corps).
Re Individualism: You're taking the extreme position of individualism which is not what I intended. I meant those people who generally don't suffer from groupthink.
An example of groupthink, second-hand tale: During the second Iraq War, my father was responsible for a lot of CSAR mission planning for the USAF. He would not send helicopters into bad weather conditions (primarily sandstorms) that he knew (after 20+ years of experience) they couldn't handle. The Army CSAR guys would send in their own birds and crews. The USAF CSAR crews would then have two rescue missions once the weather cleared. There was a pressure to ignore reality and press forward despite the odds and regardless of the cost that put more personnel and materiel at risk than necessary. In some sense it's honorable, in another it's just stupid. A degree of individuality, the ability and willingness to risk saying "no" when everyone else is hell bent on something, is the sort of individualism that's needed.
Sometimes in combat situations like the above, but the majority of the time not. See the drone programs, surveillance programs, acquisitions programs, that are either unethical, ill-conceived, or just wasteful. Groupthink allows them to persist. Generals who let it slide because they know they're getting promoted in 18-24 months and it'll be someone else's problem allow them to persist.
Some degree of individualism is necessary in both the officer and enlisted corps to step in and alter the culture.
A squad of all individuals unable to act as a team, yeah, that'd be fucking stupid. Obviously that's not what I was talking about. If you thought it was, you took the worst possible interpretation of my words and ran with it. Great.
But an officer corps of all yes-men drones is useless, too. They need people that can break out of the mold at every rank, not just the top.
EDIT: And because it's not clear. Sometimes, the willingness to say "yes" when everyone else is saying no is also useful. The story above was about being more risk-averse than the group, and it being the better option. But sometimes the group is too risk-averse and someone willing to step in and risk failure is what's needed - see the example of the generals who let shit stand instead of changing them. The real leaders will step in and risk their career when something is broken but unchanging because of fear or cargo cult behavior or whatever else.
We, if you mean the U.S., once considered a large standing army a hallmark of tyranny: e.g. http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/a1_8_12s6.... is George Washington needing to argue "yet a few Troops, under certain circumstances, are not only safe, but indispensably necessary".
How we got from there to over a third of the total world military spending, well, it's a long story, and I don't know what to do, but I don't think encouraging more smart people to join up will help the most.
>In time of actual war, great discretionary powers are constantly given to the Executive Magistrate. Constant apprehension of War, has the same tendency to render the head too large for the body. A standing military force, with an overgrown Executive will not long be safe companions to liberty. The means of defence against foreign danger have been always the instruments of tyranny at home. Among the Romans it was a standing maxim to excite a war, whenever a revolt was apprehended. Throughout all Europe, the armies kept up under the pretext of defending, have enslaved the people.
that is the kind of talk that left US exposed in 1812 War and the West Point, Naval academy were a product of realities post-1812 war. You can quote all Madison you want, but the need for professional army was evident through out the world and worked like a charm in 1845 When US wrested massive land from Mexico.
I don't mean to argue against the logic behind the negative-feedback cycle of the security dilemma.
The Madison quote was meant to indicate the historic precedent for over extending oneself on the war front and the ways it has left the civil front critically vulnerable.
However, today, in the electric age, there is no distinction between civil and military fronts.
This is absolute bullshit. The problem is that we need a military that is actually going to man the fuck up when an O-5+ decides to push some unconstitutional program on the people.
What has happened isnt that hippy academia is jacking up the military, but rather that the military has been kicking out the kind of people who arent afraid to tell truth to power, and are increasingly making choices and then only hiring people who tell them those choices are good and what they want to hear.
I have spent the majority of my free time since I got out trying to understand what the fuck is going on here, and the reality is that our generals failed our military by allowing the neocons to push us into wars for dubious reasons. Thats even counting the real reasons no one talks about, such as upcoming resource wars and a return to a tripolar world.
No, the real problem is that we have barely had a real president since the new world order bunch assassinated JFK (and RFK), because that was a very clear message to any POTUS willing to actually stand up. (Dont get me wrong, JFK was far from perfect...)
We now have institutional corruption from the top down in every single branch of government, including the famed fourth estate which has been turned into stenographers weekly. Corruption and incompetence are running rampant, and are acting as a cover for the malicious string pullers (Hanlons razor is a logical fallacy!)
So no, its not that the goddamn hippies have fucked up the military, its much closer to the military and its propoganda programs have so far infiltrated academia that its a lifeless shell of what it could and should be in this internet age.
Keep in mind though, its the military who has pushed this though. While the three letters have carried out operations similar to mockingbird (thank you church comittee), its the globalist new world order group who have pushed it on their controlled government puppets. (Read up on what Norman Dodd found during the Reese Committee for more info)
Yes, you are correct we need a smarter military, but just having "smart people" join up wont do it. You need change from the POTUS down, because beleive you me, we have turned mental deconstruction and reconstruction into an art form.
New world order? The Democrat establishment is doing everything it can to keep the primary from being taken from their anointed disciple. And the Republican primary barely even contains an establishment runner. The GOP power brokers can't decide if they should spend more effort attacking Trump or Cruz, but their man Rubio is trailing a distant third, and their real choice, Bush, is lost in the noise.
If there is a world order, it was never very powerful or orderly.
Don't be fooled by the circus. The string pullers have had a plan the whole time. While Trump and Sanders have slightly thrown a wrench in my predictions, they still factor in to the plan.
First, you have to look at who the original runners were: Jeb and Hillary. Jeb is connected to the action arm of the dark arts, through his father, brother, and his time in Florida, and Hillary is connected to the Rhodesian group for Anglo-Saxon dominance through her Oxford husband.
My prediction was that they would drop the dirt on Hillary mid-late cycle, while dropping the GOP forerunner (right now Trump) and suddenly shifting his votes into Bush. Suddenly we have a potential Bush vs Sanders/Hillary election, and the reason the world order group are fighting so hard to get Hillary the nomination is because Sanders is a wildcard in their plans. If they keep Hillary in, it's a globalist in office either way.
Incompetence is rampant, it's true, but don't let it smokescreen the hidden machinations, or else you will never be able to grasp the bigger geopolitical picture.
allowing the neocons to push us into wars for dubious reasons
It seems to me that it was some group other than neocons that got us inveigled in war in Libya and Syria - thereby creating the fertile spawning ground for ISIS.
Not sure what you're getting at, but ISIS command consists mostly of former Iraqi officials that were sidelined after Saddam Hussein was ousted. The soil was initially fertilized by burning down Iraq.
The "fertile ground" that allows moderates to become radicalized eventually boils down to polarization. It doesn't really matter whether the rhetoric is coming from Somalia, Nigeria, Mali, Turkey, Indonesia, Libya, Israel, Europe or the US; as long as the discourse goes in terms of "us vs them", many people will identify (and act) as victims.
I was careful in my wording. I do grant that the initial war in Iraq catalyzed the creation of ISIS. What I was saying here is that the power vacuum we caused in Syria and especially Libya created a place where that seed could grow and thrive.
But anyway, that wasn't the main point. The real point was to show that it wasn't a neocon that started our wars in Libya and Syria - it was today's iconic Progressive who did that, and without any sort of Congressional approval at all. Those wars can't be attributed to neocons, they are the Progressives' to own.
> It seems to me that it was some group other than neocons that got us inveigled in war in Libya and Syria - thereby creating the fertile spawning ground for ISIS.
The group now calling itself "the Islamic State" was a comparatively minor Islamist group in Saddam's Iraq that hit the big time with the US invasion of Iraq and subsequent occupation, when it leveraged the disruption of that invasion and the currency of the al-Qaeda brand to rebrand itself as "al-Qaeda in Iraq" -- it was so successful -- seizing weapons and territory and becoming a substantial force that, particularly with the rest of the global al-Qaeda brand in decline, that it found it best to rebrand itself subsequently as "the Islamic State in Iraq".
Sure, when the Syrian Civil War escalated, it sent fighters there, who eventually remerged with ISI leading to its next rebrand as what is usually translated by official sources "the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant" (but(alternatively translated as "the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria", which is where the "ISIS" label comes from), and the group later rebranded to simply "the Islamic State".
But it was the invasion of Iraq -- not the conflict in Syria -- that formed the "fertile spawning ground" which catapulted the previously-minor group to become a significant threat.
Neocons are just a front for the Leo Straussian Chicago school of globalism, with players like Kissinger and Brezenski.
note: too late to edit original comment, but I meant to say "it's not the military", eg the military is being played in this global chessboard by other entities.
I understand this response but I think it is the wrong one. Yes, there are many crazy and outlandish conspiracy theories out there that make it easy for the intellectually lazy to dismiss all theories out of hand, but the globalist conspiracy is one that is less and less hidden to the point that you aren't really paying attention if you don't see it. Now, thats not to say there is a single, grand, overarching conspiracy (a common fallacy in the realm), but rather there are many different parties all with their own self interests, sometimes aligned, sometimes not.
The conspiratorial view of the world is the correct one. Your attitude is one of sticking ones head in the sand and pretending these things don't exist.
The conspiratorial view of the world is the correct one.
Not when said conspiracies are dumped, explanation-free, into the middle of a post without any backing what so ever.
Buzzwords like "new world order" are both loaded and uninteresting, and that goes double when most people who've have examined the "evidence" have found it wanting. If globalization is meant, say "globalization".
Deapite the most strong public sentiment connotations, the phrase correctly distinguishes a sect of the globalist group, and is just used as such by me. Hence the phrase was "new world order globalists". Its a loaded term, granted and I could probably find a more descriptive way to articulate it, but focusing on that as criticism is nothing more than grammatical group think as a strawman for the much more importance issues being put forward. Its the lazy way out, eg, "that dude said "nwo", all his point are moot and hes a crazy conspiracy theorist." That essentially the position you took.
Also, are you even in the same thread as me? Theres plenty of context, within my comment and out, thats gives an indicator about why such a comment is relevant to the discussion.
What you have done is perform a knee jerk reaction and now you are backpedalling.
Use of buzz phrases is generally the mark of "crazy conspiracy theorists" (your words, not mine) or: people who generally have a tenuous grip on concepts like burden of proof and recognition of confirmation bias.
I have yet to see a single thing in this thread that suggests my initial read was incorrect, or indeed anything to indicate your rant contributed anything to the conversation. (Hence: uninteresting)
Like a single link to support your assertions, for instance.
I thought the problem is that, 25 years after its only serious opponent in the world disappeared, the US spends as much on the military as the next 7 countries - five of which are US allies - combined.
Luckily through expert (sarcasm) US negotiations and a 3d chess policy, Russia just declared a new cold war and has warned of WWIII over Sryia. Eastern European countries are begging for US soldiers to be stationed there while they ramp up their own military spending to dissuade Russian aggression. So it looks like all that military spending will be needed after all.
Correction: Costa Rica has no standing army. They have a gendarmarie and other paramilitary forces organized under the Fuerza Pública (Public Force). To say they have no military is not accurate.
There's a definition nuance I don't follow. When https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_of_Costa_Rica says "Costa Rica does not officially have a military" and "abolished the military of Costa Rica", that makes me think it has no military.
When http://www.coha.org/costa-rica-an-army-less-nation-in-a-prob... says "Without a formal military force, Costa Rica had no need to regularly invest in naval vessels, warplanes, or tanks, which typically make up the heavy equipment of any traditional armed forces." and "It is important to consider that a state that has no military is by nature nonviolent.", that makes me think it has no military.
I don't understand why I should believe it has a military. At best we have different ideas of what a "military" means.
You mention "gendarmarie and other paramilitary forces" as a type of military. SWAT team are paramilitary forces, no? Would it be fair to say that Los Angeles has its own military? What about paramilitary support for anti-poaching and other conservation efforts?
The essay at https://medium.com/war-is-boring/costa-rica-doesnt-have-a-mi... attempts to convince me that the UEI is a "small military force in all but name", and that "the distinction between police and military work in Central America is a lot fuzzier than it might seem". I am not convinced by their comparison of how the police in Costa Rica have a drug interdiction role which is done by the military in other Central American countries - after all, in the US there is both military and police involvement in the same role.
Perhaps I can resolve the topic with two questions: 1) did Costa Rica have a military in 1990 (which is before the gendarmarie and the UEI)? and 2) what would Costa Rica need to abolish in order to say it doesn't have a military? Just the 70 people in the UEI?
The problem in the US is that our hippy-run academia are driving the smart people out of jobs in the military (and police force for that matter), and it's putting us in a terrible position.
The only way to fix it is for smart people to start joining the military again.