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U.S. army drops requirement for high school diploma (2022)

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Re: U.S. army drops requirement for high school diploma (2022)

#221

Post by sitkack »

curiousgal wrote: post #164
Gud wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A friend of mine I met while serving in Afghanistan, He was working for the Department of Agriculture, trying to get the Afghan farmers to grow saffron instead of poppy. He was a professor in agronomy and would help his students back home in the US with their assignments. He had signed up for the US army and ended up serving in the Special Forces in Vietnam for 2 years. He dropped out of school when he was 13. In my…

> the military should be a second chance for a country’s citizens, who have for some reason slipped through the cracks. Of course the military is the answer /s

The cracks are on purpose.

Re: U.S. army drops requirement for high school diploma (2022)

#222

Post by mlrtime »

riffraff wrote: post #78
atmavatar wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a little worried that if we implement the "service guarantees citizenship" scheme you allude to, we'll be forced to fight a war against an interstellar insect race soon after.

I giggled at this, but in starship troopers you'd not inherit citizenship. OP's proposal seem more like what the Roman empire did granting citizenship to conscripted barbarians, which worked or not depending on your perspective.

Don't have to go that far back. The union did this during the Civil War.

A boat comes in from EU with immigrants, men get off the boat, are handled a Union uniform and are put right back on another boat down south to the war.

Re: U.S. army drops requirement for high school diploma (2022)

#223

Post by [deleted] »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #191

How many young men do you know without facial hair, without a tattoo and that have never tried marijuana? The army's eligible pool is very small. If they were really serious they'd relax those requirements. And young women are kept out by the massive sexual harassment problem they haven't yet acknowledged.

[deleted]

Re: U.S. army drops requirement for high school diploma (2022)

#224

Post by mlrtime »

ben_w wrote: post #175
b4ke wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I keep hearing about it being military-aged men whom are illegally emigrating to the u.s., and low recruiting would seem like a low-hanging fruit in the form of conscription for immigrants. I mean it also would afford their actual stations more contract labor in non-military support roles at their posts for their spouses. Also would reduce recruitment costs as you wouldn’t need so many incentives to get em through th…

For the most part, my views on migration are "why do we even have borders?" (And then I look at humans choosing to be all Machiavellian to each other and am sad for a bit). Given we live in a world with borders where nations try to subvert each other to their own interests, I think training migrants to use weapons you give them is going to be a great way for, say, America to give Mexico a military for free. (As a Eur…

> why do we even have borders?

Do you mean like right now? You would propose removing world wide borders and citizenship requirements?

Or do you mean in a utopian future? If the former, is there any real programmatic intelligent analysis of how this would actually happen and what the negatives would be?

Re: U.S. army drops requirement for high school diploma (2022)

#225

Post by meroes »

paganel wrote: post #155
MangoCoffee wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

human wave is not the game. The Ukraine-Russia war has shown us how important the technology is. The whole war is fighting with drones to detect and kill enemies.

> The whole war is fighting with drones to detect and kill enemies. This is a very wrong take. A big continental war like this one in Ukraine is fought with artillery and with enough men capable of holding the territory (already under control or conquered), i.e. the story of WW1 and the WW2 (when it came to the Eastern Front). You don't have that, you lose. Trouble for Ukraine (and for the West supporting Ukraine) is…

A “continental” war without air superiority. You think Russia against Greece or Turkey who just got multi dozen gen 5 and 4.5 aircraft (not sure when delivery is) would be the same? No. It’s not even continental. It’s a proxy war.

Re: U.S. army drops requirement for high school diploma (2022)

#228

Post by lupusreal »

mcmcmc wrote: post #170
Magridal wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are making an assumption that a person dropping out of school at 13 in the ~1960s would have the same education level as someone dropping out of school at 13 today, let alone that the conditions and circumstances one would find themselves in having dropped out are equivalent to the 1960s. Frankly, especially with the crumbling and cracking discipline, order, and hierarchy in the U.S. military now, you are also ma…

Whatever you think might be going on with the overall discipline of the US military today, it has nothing on how bad things were in the Vietnam era. Enlisted men slipping grenades into their officers’ tents after getting high as a kite in a combat zone was a regular occurrence. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fragging This comment just shows you to be ignorant and contrarian.

Fragging was more often a rational act of self preservation than drug-induced madness. It was mostly soldiers getting rid of officers who were likely to get them killed. Heroin and weed don't just turn otherwise good men into murderers.

Re: U.S. army drops requirement for high school diploma (2022)

#229

Post by mlrtime »

hayst4ck wrote: post #60

I am a well educated individual. I did not have to work very hard at all for a well paying job after college from a respected company. I have skill sets that are absolutely in demand, particularly in areas the military would like. When China re-colonized Hong Kong I gave strong thought to joining the military. When Russia invaded Ukraine, I similarly felt called to join the military, if not to fight for Ukraine, to p…

>I gave strong thought to joining the military.

Right, just like a lot of people give strong thoughts to a lot of things that are difficult but in reality will never happen. They convince themselves that they could do it if it weren't for this ONE thing. The one thing is always conveniently there.

Instead of action we get a rant of hot topic soup like yours. But as long as "I thought about it" is prefaced, then it's all good. This is the definition of a keyboard warrior.

Re: U.S. army drops requirement for high school diploma (2022)

#230

Post by ben_w »

mlrtime wrote: post #224
ben_w wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the most part, my views on migration are "why do we even have borders?" (And then I look at humans choosing to be all Machiavellian to each other and am sad for a bit). Given we live in a world with borders where nations try to subvert each other to their own interests, I think training migrants to use weapons you give them is going to be a great way for, say, America to give Mexico a military for free. (As a Eur…

> why do we even have borders? Do you mean like right now? You would propose removing world wide borders and citizenship requirements? Or do you mean in a utopian future? If the former, is there any real programmatic intelligent analysis of how this would actually happen and what the negatives would be?

> You would propose removing world wide borders and citizenship requirements?

From the point of view of citizens or economies rather than nations, their removal would apparently be a good thing, free movement boosting trade and the economy: https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2018/08/06/open-borders-econ... (Michael Clemens also quoted in other papers, I don't think I've heard of wbur.org before).

But it's the same problem as anarchy: to focus on only some aspect of freedom is to ignore harms prevented by the absence of, or limits to, that freedom.

> If the former, is there any real programmatic intelligent analysis of how this would actually happen and what the negatives would be?

I lack the necessary foundation to distinguish between such an analysis and a think-piece in a newspaper (or, these days, the output of a LLM, or a YouTuber in a suit and tie). Link I gave above? I can Google Michael Clemens, but even seeing a list of accolades whose standards I don't know either, means I can't tell how he and his views are rated by other economists. And worse, when I do look up a list of works by Michael Clemens, one of the results tells me:

"Michael A. Clemens [\n] Not to be confused with: Michael Peter Clements" - https://ideas.repec.org/e/pcl20.html

(And I'm only 80% sure the one quoted in the paper was A. not P.)

And even if he's great, Gell-Mann Amnesia effect says I can't just assume that he'd necessarily agree with how his views were presented by the press.

Treat my position as vibes, not a policy proposal.

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