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Palantir Wants to Reinstate the Draft

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Re: Palantir Wants to Reinstate the Draft

#161

Post by OkayPhysicist »

amysox wrote: post #41
dylan604 wrote: post #5

Opening graph: "We should, as a society, seriously consider moving away from an all-volunteer force and only fight the next war if everyone shares in the risk and the cost," says military contractor and all-around surveillance-enabler Palantir. If that's the case, then every war to be fought needs to have the say so of those that will be doing the fighting and not the solitary decision made by a delusional leader tha…

Robert Heinlein proposed something like that in his "lost" novel For Us, the Living: instead of declaring war, Congress would authorize a war referendum, in which only those eligible for military service could vote. The catch was, everyone voting "Yes" would thereby automatically sign themselves up in the military for the duration. If a further draft was needed, it would first be composed of those that didn't vote, a…

Simpler: Leaders who engage in military engagements should face a public referendum 6 months/1 year later, with exactly 1 question: "Should [Leader] die?". Presidents in the US rarely get elected with less than 40% of the popular vote, and I reckon about 30% of people wouldn't vote to kill someone pretty much no matter what they did. Half of those people are your supporters, so really it's just a matter of avoiding your popularity plummeting to sub 35% because of your warmongering. By that math. By that math, Trump, W. Bush, and Truman would have gotten the gallows. Biden, Carter, and Nixon all fell below 35%, but didn't start any foreign wars.

Re: Palantir Wants to Reinstate the Draft

#162

Post by dctoedt »

joquarky wrote: post #151
gordonhart wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the government forces you to do this, else you go to prison You'll never guess what happens if you choose not to pay taxes.

They use tax money to house and feed you?

> They use tax money to house and feed you?

Indeed — just not in the style to which you'd like to become accustomed ....

Re: Palantir Wants to Reinstate the Draft

#163

Post by _doctor_love »

whatshisface wrote: post #90
_doctor_love wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> why should they also be able to draft you for some free labor if there's no war or other emergency going on? You can only prepare for a fire before it starts.

In the conventional view, the earliest preparations for war involve building a strong industrial base, reducing corruption, and securing alliances through cooperative foreign policy. The near-term preparations for war include diverting a fraction of total resources away from compounding growth and towards non-compounding defense manufacturing. A draft is something you do after the war starts. The strategic idea is to…

> The same goes for replacing the first two years of professional school with standing around in a big shed.

This may be true in an American context (though I don't actually know) in the sense that the US military is highly specialized and matrixed. In smaller militaries soldiers tend to be more generalist, while still having specializations.

e.g., they say in the British forces, if you ask an artillery soldier what they do, it's a little bit of everything. In the US military, a soldier might say "I pull the rope!" Not a good use of talent.

Re: Palantir Wants to Reinstate the Draft

#164

Post by _doctor_love »

r0m4n0 wrote: post #153
chromacity wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Generally speaking I am a fan of the idea that everyone should be required to do some kind of community service for 2 years once they turn 18. Why? I get the warm-and-fuzzy angle of "instilling civic responsibility", but you're effectively instilling that at gunpoint: the government forces you to do this, else you go to prison. Is that really such an enlightened thing to do? It takes away two years of your life, po…

I'm not sure what I believe is right but one thing I can think of is there could be a bias for a certain type of people to join branches of the military and therefore our capabilities are held back by that bias. The same goes for companies that work with the military/defense which I think the parent article lays out as well. If you allow everyone to pick and choose what they want to do, we may actually end up (or alr…

> there could be a bias for a certain type of people to join branches of the military and therefore our capabilities are held back by that bias.

Not only is there a bias, there is one on purpose (not saying that's a good thing). For example, the Marines are known to prefer recruiting from lower-income and lower-education backgrounds. They want scrappy, tough people.

Conversely, the Air Force is the "geek" branch of the military.

There are lots of other examples. If you go on YouTube you can see funny videos of the branches poking friendly fun at each other; e.g., Marines eating crayons.

> Maybe we need to just pay folks more to make them incentivized to work in government?

In the US I think this may be the only way. Private industry pays so much it's hard to compete.

Re: Palantir Wants to Reinstate the Draft

#165

Post by _doctor_love »

dualvariable wrote: post #156
rhcom2 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you could argue the draft forced the war to be real for more families (and the expansion of TV), intensifying the resistance to it. Quick googling says almost 10% of the population served in Vietnam in some capacity. Less than 1% served in the War on Terror. This was part of Charles Rangel's (D) reasoning to propose bringing back the draft. [1] 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_National_Service_Act

> I think you could argue the draft forced the war to be real for more families (and the expansion of TV), intensifying the resistance to it. Yeah, it did, all the young men of draft age had to live knowing that they might get drafted and be forced to fight and die. Even if they were never called, or in retrospect were too old at the time. We seem to have largely forgotten that now, along with the "Vietnam Syndrome"…

> It seems like we need a horrible mess to learn all the hard lessons all over again.

Indeed. This is all of human history. No matter what the problem is we are infatuated with the idea of the ultimate solution being exterminating everyone who does not agree with our worldview.

Re: Palantir Wants to Reinstate the Draft

#166

Post by mold_aid »

Teever wrote: post #114
chromacity wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Generally speaking I am a fan of the idea that everyone should be required to do some kind of community service for 2 years once they turn 18. Why? I get the warm-and-fuzzy angle of "instilling civic responsibility", but you're effectively instilling that at gunpoint: the government forces you to do this, else you go to prison. Is that really such an enlightened thing to do? It takes away two years of your life, po…

What if it didn't delay your education? In some countries an undergrad degree is only three years. I'd take a person with 1 year of civil service + 3 years of a degree over someone with 4 years of a degree any day. Somebody who is confident enough to handle a rifle and throw a hand grenade is way more useful to me than someone who was forced to another literature or geology course. Have someone demonstrate a command…

I'd prefer someone who is confident enough to take another geology or literature course over the gun-handler. I'd make sure that person is in a supervisory position over welfare-state products of our armed forces, certainly.

Re: Palantir Wants to Reinstate the Draft

#167

Post by joquarky »

anigbrowl wrote: post #141

I'm in favor of mandatory public service (not exclusively military) but I also don't think a private company should be weighing in on such topics, since it's just a bunch of capital owners preaching about what everyone else should do.

Who will pay for it? We can't even pay for education or healthcare.

Re: Palantir Wants to Reinstate the Draft

#168

Post by _doctor_love »

nobodyandproud wrote: post #60
causal wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like the idea of civic engagement / service in theory too, but I feel like the Vietnam war was a demonstration of possible failure modes when draft is in place: a lot of poor kids died, some rich kids allegedly used parental influence to dodge the draft. No incentive for leaders to avoid war while loop holes remain for their own interests.

A formal declaration of war by Congress is the minimum. Otherwise I agree that the incentives are warped.

Now you're talking crazy talk. Congress stepping up and fulfilling its constitutional role?

Re: Palantir Wants to Reinstate the Draft

#169

Post by JuniperMesos »

Teever wrote: post #114
chromacity wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Generally speaking I am a fan of the idea that everyone should be required to do some kind of community service for 2 years once they turn 18. Why? I get the warm-and-fuzzy angle of "instilling civic responsibility", but you're effectively instilling that at gunpoint: the government forces you to do this, else you go to prison. Is that really such an enlightened thing to do? It takes away two years of your life, po…

What if it didn't delay your education? In some countries an undergrad degree is only three years. I'd take a person with 1 year of civil service + 3 years of a degree over someone with 4 years of a degree any day. Somebody who is confident enough to handle a rifle and throw a hand grenade is way more useful to me than someone who was forced to another literature or geology course. Have someone demonstrate a command…

> What if it didn't delay your education? In some countries an undergrad degree is only three years. I'd take a person with 1 year of civil service + 3 years of a degree over someone with 4 years of a degree any day.

In a world where 1 year of civil service was normal for most people, I'm skeptical that this is the choice the labor market would consistently make. Remember, if pretty much everyone in society is doing the same national service, then that means the military had to find jobs for everyone to do, including people with mediocre general competence or who are in fact bad at following written instructions in English. "I completed my mandatory national service, just like pretty much everyone else" is not that strong of a signal.

In the Soviet Union, smart math and science students often competed hard for academic and technical positions that would let them fulfill their military obligation by doing some kind of math or science for the Soviet state, instead of being a conscript foot-soldier for a few years like was normal for Soviet males (boot camp sucks for everyone, but it really sucks for most smart nerds). If the US had a system like this, there would definitely be industries where it was normal for everyone working in them to have avoided the worst of actual combat training somehow or another - or for actually having done normal soldiering to be a culturally-unusual thing to do. Just like how in our actual society it's unusual for someone who works at a silicon valley tech company to have actually volunteered to serve in the US military earlier in life.

Re: Palantir Wants to Reinstate the Draft

#170

Post by _doctor_love »

stronglikedan wrote: post #158
_doctor_love wrote: post #20

Other countries have compulsory military service, for example Finland. Generally speaking I am a fan of the idea that everyone should be required to do some kind of community service for 2 years once they turn 18. Military service would just be one option, could be other kinds of civic engagement. This can really help people feel connected to their society and understand that there is something to show up for. BUT -…

> what are American soldiers dying for? The American way of life, which is still the most preferred way of life, as evidenced by (a) people wanting to emigrate here more than any other country in the world and (b) more people immigrating here than any other country.

> The American way of life

It's your argument that our current and recent engagements in Venezuela, Iran, and soon Cuba, are to defend the American way of life?

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