Do you really think it's so hard to become a felon in this country??? You can't have it both ways. Talk of "social justice" and all that....
Let's not go there. While we're at it let's just execute all felons because they will never get a job anyway. It's one hell of a slippery slope. Time for a reality check hippies! What kind of people do you think YOUR enemies recruit? Mary Poppins? For the 44th time: WAKE THE FUCK UP!
I said a few months ago, when "Alice's Restaurant" came up for some reason, that at the rate things were going, the Army and Marines would be forced to start taking the mother-rapers, the father-stabbers, the father-rapers, and maybe even the litterbugs.
I thought I was joking.
Flying. H. Spaghetti. Monster.
I suspect it's already too late to save this country.
Sean, SHUT THE FUCK UP!
Wait... are a felon Sean? If so, where will you be stationed in Baghdad? Congratulations!
don't feed trolls
they are fat and stupid enough as it is
The Dirty Dozen notwithstanding, ex-felons usually make crappier soldiers.
Sean, go to the troll farm and tell Bloomie to come back. This new batch of trolls are so uninteresting.
Ex-felons usually make crappier soldiers.
Yup. The Army was correct to be choosy when it had that luxury.
Now we're stuck with thugs and mercs, because we betrayed our A-Team. And that does not come out in the wash.
I have said this before, and I'll say it again. I'm probably wasting electrons, but you had all better stop pretending the elephant isn't in the living room, take a good long look at this one, and start thinking seriously about it.
You think the wingnuts are going to?
We had better start thinking about how we are going to recruit, train, and control armed forces composed of mercs, foreign nationals earning citizenship, and ex-cons.
That's what we're stuck with for the next couple of generations.
It's that or no functional Army at all. Chalk this one up to the overhead of betrayal.
PS: Hubris Sonic, that pic was perfect.
The problem with betrayal though, is correctly identifying the people that betrayed you. The post-Vietnam debate has gone through an extreme rightwing filter and come out the other end as something completely unrecognizable.
The country that was bombed with more munitions then was used by the US in all of WWII suddenly turned into a war that the "US fought with one hand behind its back". My only guess is that since nuclear warfare with North Vietnam and/or China was off the table that the US betrayed itself of victory of the corrupt South Vietnamese dictatorship.
When the US ends the occupation of Iraq, and the long arduous rebuilding of the military begins again(with the added difficulty of still maintaining a sizable force in Afghanistan), we will likely see the same recriminations. Since the rightwing authoritarians will never learn, they must instead be marginalized. This will take a revolution to impose, with their friends in the media being laughed at instead of listened to, and their ideas being looked at like the old Soviet model appears today.
Stormcrow,
yep, an army divorced from the wider civilian population will in time feel
it wants nothing to do with the civilians since the civilians want nothing to do with them. Given a politicized officer corp (see under Petraeus), and soon enough we have a praetorian guard offering their services to the politician offering the best deal. Given a little more time, the generals become the politicians. Anyway, thats what happened to the Roman Republic and thats what could happen to us.
The problem with betrayal though, is correctly identifying the people that betrayed you.
wengler, this misses the point.
Correct identification of the betrayer isn't going to materially affect recruitment. From the standpoint of recruitment, it really doesn't matter whether the vets who come back from Iraq blame the Bush regime or Michael Moore.
The people whom they influence, which is going to be just about the entirety of the voluntary civilian recruitment pool for the next 20 to 40 years, isn't going to come within a stone's cast of an Army recruiter by choice.
So I repeat. One more time:
We had better start thinking about how we are going to recruit, train, and control armed forces composed of mercs, foreign nationals earning citizenship, and ex-cons.
That's what we're stuck with for the next couple of generations.
And just remember,the military is STILL kicking queers out for their/our identity.
Felony conviction? No problem, please joined the Army.
Civil Union? Forget about it.....
To have a military that is at increasing variance to social norms and mores is very dangerous.
Stormcrow, when I read the article I was immediately reminded of - yes, you guessed it - Imperial Rome, which also recruited criminals and foreigners into the ranks, then acted all surprised when the Army turned on the central government.
"It is the doom of men that they forget." - Merlin (Nicol Williamson), Excalibur
the dirty dozen was a movie...never happend.
while america sent some of its bad seed to devils bergaied they where paired with the canadian elite, pried and compittition pushed our boys to gell into a unit and behave, clear example of people riseing to high expectiations set by their peers (the canadiana troops). out side of devils bergaid convict troops jsut don't work...and if you hit a critical mass of malcontents in hte army you have a faild force.
stormcrow, don't worry about recruiting, the way teh ecoanmy is going we are going to give teh lower and lower midlle class in this nation a choice very soon. join the military or starve.
And just remember,the military is STILL kicking queers out for their/our identity.
Every time I think about that, I am just awestruck by the bottomless depth of the Pentagon's grasp of history. Or something.
Three words. THREE GODDAMNED WORDS.
Theban. Sacred. Band.
I can't wait until one of these gang members and felons moves back to Sean's neighborhood with all that top notch weapons and tactics training, courtesy of the US taxpayer. At that point, our myopic peasant of a troll will switch back from hating overseas brown people to his default position of hating the domestic variety.
As to the grownup discussion:
"We had better start thinking about how we are going to recruit, train, and control armed forces composed of mercs, foreign nationals earning citizenship, and ex-cons."
This is probably the (extremely flawed) model they'll try to work from, at least for the elite units. Of course, the MBA generals who set it up forget that Janissaries, when they're underpaid and undervalued (a given in the "Ownership Society") have a propensity to seek compensation in other ways, and have the training and arms to collect.
Do you really think it's so hard to become a felon in this country??? You can't have it both ways. Talk of "social justice" and all that....
Let's not go there. [etc.]
Sean, put down the crystal meth pipe and step away from it. Right now! {/shakes parental warning finger sternly}
Stormcrow, exactly! Epaminondas knew exactly what he was doing when he assembled the Sacred Band.
it wasn't just the greeks, a lot of warrior cults, both cletic and germanic had strong homoerotic tendancies. in fact a lot of the christian stance v same sex couples comes from a time when these groups where the last eouropian holdouts. (well more was added due to king james, but thats another story..the bible was written AT him not FOR him)
Two words: Dirlewanger Brigade. Gilly posted about them once. Probably the inspiration for The Dirty Dozen, but real scum. I remember Steve wrote a more general post about how widely or how well "jail or the army" worked.
Criminals made up the entirety of penal units like Dirlewanger, as opposed to them being scattered throughout the US army, but the danger is there.
I wonder if we'll get a "Comrades Of War"-like series of stories out of this bunch.
The book Thessalonica (I forget the author) devotes some pages to Janissaries terrorizing the locals and eventually being disbanded for it.
While Sean's comment was way over the top, we shouldn't lose sight of his point. Or, rather, what I think his point was - that for some populations in the USA, it's pretty easy to become a convicted felon, malicious intent or no. (Driving while black, anyone?)
I'd also be curious what percentage of the sexual offenders were arrested for pulling over to take a whiz - in a lot of states, that gets you on the Registered Sexual Offenders list for LIFE.
I've held forth on this recently myself.
Janissaries. Yes. Exactly.
I think you have a typo in the headline.
It should say "Administration" instead of "Army".
The 861 sounds about right.
Actually, I think it was Pelopidas, The Wanderer.
Which I didn't know myself until I did some more homework a few months ago. :P
But it was Epaminondas who knew how to use them. At precisely the same time he demonstrated to one and all that "straight up the middle" could fail you very, very badly sometimes. So you'ld better not make it cultural, the way the Spartans did.
And the way we've done.
If it's cultural, then it's your default solution every time you get in the shit deeper than you can foresee.
That's when the guys on the other side, who've had their thinking caps on all the while, do it to you.
Stormcrow:
"We had better start thinking about how we are going to recruit, train, and control armed forces composed of mercs, foreign nationals earning citizenship, and ex-cons."
Can't disagree.
But... seems to me this describes almost exactly the French Foreign Legion, and that outfit seems to have worked pretty well for France for quite a long time.
From Wikipedia:
The purpose of the Legion was to remove disruptive elements from society and put them to use fighting the enemies of France. Recruits included failed revolutionaries from the rest of Europe, soldiers from the disbanded foreign regiments, and troublemakers in general, both foreign and French.
Just add mercs and voila, a made-in-America solution. The AFL - American Freedom Legion.
Not that I'm advocating this or anything like it, just saying that the Janissary or Dirlewanger Brigade aren't the only possible models.
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