Wars are planned by rich old men and fought by poor young men.
Why Young Men Go to War
41–50 of 223 posts
Re: Why Young Men Go to War
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think he is alluding to the military forced by the left wing to attempt to have equal number of both sexes in every part of the military, when as a result of evolution, males are physically stronger and will be more suitable for some roles in the military than females and should therefore form the majority in some roles, and in others where only the strongest are selected, all of the roles, because the strongest ma…
Do you have a link for "the left wing" demanding a 50% gender quota in the military?
I do have a link for Kara Hultgreen, the first female F-14 fighter jet pilot. She was the best possible female candidate for the role, however, due to [political incorrect sentence], she made mistakes where other male pilots would have been disqualified. Due to political pressure to include females in more military roles, the military pushed her to continue even when she didn't want to. During one flight, she made a mistake while flying the jet, and she died as a result.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kara_Hultgreen
The Center for Military Readiness (CMR) suggests that Hultgreen "may have been the victim of a flawed policy" which overlooked her mistakes in training, two of which were similar to those that caused her death.[2] The Navy conceded that the material on which the CMR based its report was "largely accurate".
An Accuracy in Media report quotes Cmdr Tom Sobiek, commanding officer of Fighter Squadron VF-124, as saying of the 4 female pilots in his squadron that "the women are going to graduate regardless of how they performed" and reports that "the Navy was in a race with the Air Force to get the first female fighter pilot".[7]
I concede there is no 50% quota and should not have written "equal number" in that sentence.
Re: Why Young Men Go to War
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
> “I have friends who are anthropologists and primatologists and evolutionary psychologists … [who are under] an enormous amount of pressure to generate data that shows that all gender differences are cultural.” You would think that, no matter what your goals for the roles of gender (or sex) in society are, you would achieve these goals best by deliberately seeking out and investigating the properties of the underlyi…
> "You would think that, no matter what your goals for the roles of gender (or sex) in society are, you would achieve these goals best by deliberately seeking out and investigating the properties of the underlying biology (and culture) with the utmost of academic and intellectual integrity, and only afterwards pushing for the policies you prefer to realize that world." That is how it is supposed to work, but reality…
ID was nuts because it tried to present itself as a description of the past.
But if you're trying to issue prescriptions for the future (i.e. what kind of world do you want to create?), there's nothing fundamentally wrong about first identifying where you want to go and then cherrypicking biological and psychological traits to manipulate in order to get there. It would be just like writing a program to get the results you want.
Re: Why Young Men Go to War
#44Having been in for 20 years now, I definitely agree with Junger, there is an innate element in young men trying to prove themselves. I think YCombinator appeals to a similar desire. I was performing an autopsy yesterday when the med student, the photographer, and the assistant started talking about guns. Their gusto was impressive. I felt no need to partake, but I think that was attributable, at least in part, to the…
Perhaps, but I really don't know if that would solve it either. I've done rather well thus far in my career, and continue to do so. Yet something feels missing, I don't know what, but I still have some recurring desire to enlist. That the whole software thing - and this is something I've been doing since a very young age - is not enough. That I should be doing something _more_.
Re: Why Young Men Go to War
#45I went in the army because at the time, I had big dreams and no clear path to them. I thought joining the army and doing a hard training would teach me something about achieving goals. I went to war because I was in the army and wondered what was the point of being in the army if you don't go to war. After doing my training, deploying in Afghanistan was the logical follow up. Why train so hard just to stay home. Afte…
Your second paragraph seems callous to me. Going to war for the sake of not wasting one's hard training, so to speak, is not moral. At least as I look at it. War is horrible and should be avoided at all costs. Sometimes it is justifiable and necessary. War should be a last resort. I wish society had alternate means of accomplishing your first paragraph without resort to the second.
I was a military wife for a lot of years. Also, my dad was career military and fought in two wars.
When you get trained to deal death, yes, you tend to become somewhat callous.
Being exposed to that culture helped me effectively combat a serious medical condition. I don't think it is somehow inherently evil.
Re: Why Young Men Go to War
#46It is funny how the whole argument of masculinity is based on the American experience. A good control study would be somewhere where male rites of passage still exist, but men also still go to war (most conservative Asian societies for example).
Perhaps that is mostly because Junger's documentaries are all around American troops. I also highly recommend Restrepo, and the follow up, Korengal.
Yeah, the whole article, subject matter, and journey he explores is American. It's investigative at its best in that it explores why people make these decisions, and their decisions are strongly rooted in the ever-changing American society.
Tangentially, I might be alone in this, but I consider great journalism to be like great science - it's able to discern the fundamental mechanics of an issue, but they're also notoriously terrible at applying those mechanics in a constructive way. As a result, when a journalist shares their perspective, I put a lot of weight on their analysis and little weight on their solutions.
Re: Why Young Men Go to War
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
>is because of old men. This is a typical modernist redaction of the will to violence that is common to young men. Past societies found ways to incorporate, normalize, redirect, celebrate that will - now we pathologize it. This is because we think we can mutate the human condition into something better.
Past societies found ways to incorporate, normalize, redirect, celebrate that will - now we pathologize it. Any examples? Blood sport and dueling comes to mind, though I am skeptical of their desirability. Perhaps the latter might be reinstated as a voluntary contract for consenting adults, but it's treading a fine line.
Consider the cultural norms of old European sword nobility. Soldiers, particularly those that saw combat, aren't treated at all in the same way today as they were 100, 500, 1000 years ago. Pre-axial religions were more to my point than axial-age, universalizing faiths like Christianity, Buddhism, Islam. For example, human and animal sacrifice.
A different example not centered on violence: carnival.
>though I am skeptical of their desirability. Perhaps the latter might be reinstated as a voluntary contract for consenting adults, but it's treading a fine line.
That's fine, but you need to realize that this viewpoint is about an ideal societal arrangement and doesn't accord with the entire range of human desire.
Re: Why Young Men Go to War
#48I went in the army because at the time, I had big dreams and no clear path to them. I thought joining the army and doing a hard training would teach me something about achieving goals. I went to war because I was in the army and wondered what was the point of being in the army if you don't go to war. After doing my training, deploying in Afghanistan was the logical follow up. Why train so hard just to stay home. Afte…
Your second paragraph seems callous to me. Going to war for the sake of not wasting one's hard training, so to speak, is not moral. At least as I look at it. War is horrible and should be avoided at all costs. Sometimes it is justifiable and necessary. War should be a last resort. I wish society had alternate means of accomplishing your first paragraph without resort to the second.
Society does have alternate means of accomplishing the first without the second - there's the Peace Corps/Americorp, getting a job, starting a business, volunteerism, doing a Ph.D.
Not all paths are appropriate for all people, though.
Re: Why Young Men Go to War
#49I went in the army because at the time, I had big dreams and no clear path to them. I thought joining the army and doing a hard training would teach me something about achieving goals. I went to war because I was in the army and wondered what was the point of being in the army if you don't go to war. After doing my training, deploying in Afghanistan was the logical follow up. Why train so hard just to stay home. Afte…
Your second paragraph seems callous to me. Going to war for the sake of not wasting one's hard training, so to speak, is not moral. At least as I look at it. War is horrible and should be avoided at all costs. Sometimes it is justifiable and necessary. War should be a last resort. I wish society had alternate means of accomplishing your first paragraph without resort to the second.
Why is it callous? Why get in the army in the first place, if not to do the work of the army? I'd be hypocritical to join the army with the desire to then avoid operations.
I can understand that people be against war. I don't like violence. I don't encourage violence and certainly do not enjoy wars. But wars exist and as a citizen, you can decide to wish that war magically weren't a thing, or do something about their existence. I did not encourage the concept of war by taking part in it, no more than I encourage system outages when I take part in building or fixing them.
War is not just war. It's not "just going somewhere to kill people". I didn't decide "Oh all that sweat wasted, better kill foreigners to make up for it". I volunteered because I thought I could make a positive influence, if any, by being a reasonable person doing their job in the most humane way I could. Not every soldier is an angry, bloodthirsty, moronic killer. Most of them aren't.
I don't wish to kill an innocent person anymore than you do. I don't wish to kill a guilty person either. But sometimes, participating in a war, or killing a person, is the only way to make the war less harmful, or prevent that person from killing many more.
Avoiding wars at all cost is not a magic bullet against wars. That's my take on it, I might be wrong.
Re: Why Young Men Go to War
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think that's accurate, if we're discussing what actually motivates military deployments. There are exceptions, but in most wars the enlisted men themselves have not been the ones chomping at the bit to be sent to war. Rather, they were sent by older men serving in government, who did not themselves participate in the fighting, often over considerable dissent from the rank and file. In some cases, such as the…
I don't think that's an entirely accurate depiction, given the article. I believe this is strictly in a modern context, and given that every soldier, sailor, Marine, and airman is a volunteer, it misses the point. We can point at Cheney and Rumsfeld and Halliburton, but as the article states, this robs every service member of his or her agency. The reason every one of my friends from high school went to war is becaus…
If someone joins during a war, I agree, they are usually doing that of their own accord, modulo a few people who maybe felt they had no other economic/etc. choice. But that's not that many people, which is why the U.S. military started having recruiting problems after they launched the Iraq and Afghanistan wars: many people who had previously signed up now regretted it, and the supply of new volunteers dwindled.
My own experience with classmates is quite different, but it sounds like it's a few years prior, so it might already be out of date. Around when my friends and I graduated high school (~1999-2000) the military was seen as a reasonable career path with a primarily deterrent and strategic role, and a fairly low chance of offensive deployment. And the reserves were seen as a last-ditch force that would effectively only be called up if the U.S. or a NATO ally were invaded. Many of my classmates who entered around then signed on for this mission, and didn't agree with subsequent decisions made by the political branches to change their role. The "stop-loss orders" of 2002–03, in which they were not allowed to discharge at their originally agreed discharge date, and the calling up of the reserves for something that did not really fit the prior understanding of how reserves would be used (both done as desperate measures to make up for volunteer numbers absolutely tanking), were particularly unpopular, and at that point many no longer felt like they were still volunteers. I feel myself like I dodged a bullet by not going that path (I had talked to a recruiter in 1999, who painted a fairly appealing story about technical careers in the military).