tom ricks – Moe Lane

(H/T: Hot Air Headlines) Or nephews. Nieces. Second cousins. Doesn’t matter, really: surely there’s a small child or two in Ricks’ life that he’d hate to see turned into an infantryman… what’s that? Yes, “infantryman:” because Ricks’ attempt to gussy up a moral-equivalent-of-war-forced-government-expansion in the form of a ‘draft’ WILL NOT FLY. If we bring back the draft – and may we never do – it will be a draft without deferments, without college exemptions, without National Guard sanctuaries… everybody goes, everybody fights. And if you have a true moral objection to war, well, the front lines can always use more stretcher details.

Sorry, but I have two kids. If they want to serve their country, I will be proud of them. But forcing them to spend three or four years enabling Thomas E. Ricks’ institutionalized need to pretend that expanding the role of government is morally equivalent to combat duty is not serving the country. Particularly since I’m not entirely certain that Ricks is entirely down with the idea that wars, once entered, need to be won… whether or not you agreed with the war in the first place*.

Moe Lane Continue reading Better idea, Thomas E Ricks: let’s draft YOUR kids.

(Via Hot Air Headlines) The hysterical part of all of this is that when I saw the title of this WaPo article – “Toss out the all-volunteer military” – I immediately said to myself …because this suckweasel thinks that the problem with our military is that it is far too good at killing people and breaking stuff. And, lo!

Since the end of the military draft in 1973, every person joining the U.S. armed forces has done so because he or she asked to be there. Over the past decade, this all-volunteer force has been put to the test and has succeeded, fighting two sustained foreign wars with troops standing up to multiple combat deployments and extreme stress.

This is precisely the reason it is time to get rid of the all-volunteer force. It has been too successful. Our relatively small and highly adept military has made it all too easy for our nation to go to war — and to ignore the consequences.

“Ignoring the consequences,” by the way, is Center for a New American Security suckweasel-speak for “doesn’t fight wars according to the diktats of the Center for a New American Security.” Its author (Tom Ricks) is also probably smarting just a touch from a certain embarrassment: which is to say, he had the misfortune to write a book published in 2006 called Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq just before the Surge came along and un-Fiascoed everything. Doubling down with his 2009 work The Gamble: General David Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2006-2008 probably didn’t help his digestion, either, given that (according to Wikipedia, at least*) Ricks apparently doubled down on the gloom and doom. Weird how the WaPo didn’t mention that in his bio… oh, I just slay me, sometimes. Continue reading #rsrh Time for another ‘Bring back the draft! Who cares if more of them die!’ article.