This is an interesting topic but reporting on what some random people typed or clicked on social media is such a shallow basis for news. It's a subjective narrative of a subjective trend.
you could try customer support, that chat bot will happily loop you with some more non answers, but try to make you feel good about those non answers :)
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.
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]
> 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" that the US military "suffered" through until we were successful in applying military force in 1991 with the Gulf War.
I almost hope they're successful in doing this. We've also lost the focus on clearly defined objectives for war.
It seems like we need a horrible mess to learn all the hard lessons all over again.
> We've also lost the focus on clearly defined objectives for war.
Are you saying we had this in Vietnam?
And I don't think the evidence is strong that these "hard lessons" did anything to keep that same generation from supporting the pointless wars that followed.
> 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.
Drafts, and by extension wars, should be unpopular. War should be the last resort that no one wants to take. No one should be cheering for a war they won't have to participate in.
War has become too remote and comfortable for most Americans.
A major reason why the draft was stopped is that because when you take a disunified and unwilling populace and start giving them weapons, their target may not be the enemy.
The word allegedly should be dropped many ie.. Taco got out of it, however much better men John McCain, John Kerry, and Robert Mueller did not. Serving is okay if everyone serves no exceptions.
For others' sake, I double-checked: 2.59 million served, of which 648,500 were draftees. Right at 25%
Is there a study of soldiers who enlisted but only because their draft number was low? There were substantial benefits to enlisting, because you could choose your branch of service.
Should break that down by people who had enlisted before hostilities began. Material difference enlisting during peace time vs when there is an active theater of war.
It would be more interesting to see those numbers broken down by frontline service. What percentage of the guys actually dying in the jungle were drafted?
A relative of mine who was of draft age during the Vietnam war, deliberately enlisted in the US army because he thought that this would reduce his chances of being sent to fight in Vietnam And it worked, he spent his time overseas in the military in Japan in a non-combat role. I'm sure many males of draft age made similar choices.
I am planning to cancel my Claude sub after I've used up remaining tokens this weekend. Model is fine but the harness and reliability have absolutely nosedived. Just unacceptable for the high price.
Will give it a try but my experience with Claude and browser use so far is that it’s extremely lazy: it rarely notices or cares when something doesn’t look right, it needs lots of pointing out “hey you ignored that broken render” etc
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