Surely there are other ways to do this
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I'd love to hear them!
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Think superfluous military power plays a larger role in our forever wars than the inequitable burdens of service. "What's the point of having this superb military you're always talking about if we can't use it?" Failure of conscription to dampen Israeli militarism comes to mind.
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True that the case of Israel goes against my argument; question is how analogous are we to them? And what about other countries, like Germany, that until recently had mandatory military service?
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Rather than guerilla warfare in the jungles of Vietnam, deployment to the border brings to mind low-risk military operations on the edge of Gaza. Similar issue with bombers 10,000 feet above Belgrade or drones over Yemen. Overwhelming military dominance w/ no analogue in Germany.
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By contrast, high-risk occupation of Iraq, which involved house to house fighting by American ground troops, was ultimately not politically sustainable.
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About 40% of the Boomers got conscripted and they are just slightly less rabid than Silent. So, I don't know about that.
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Oh wait: ~40% of males - and not just conscription, also volunteer.
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True, but I wonder if the other 60% had had to serve in the military during Vietnam how things might be. A lot of middle- and upper-class families would've shared the risk/burden; Good chance we would have rolled back from SE Asia sooner, or never invaded to begin with.
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When the draft was eliminated, people stopped thinking about war as their responsibility. The moral & mortal stakes were bureaucratized & outsourced. Hence remarks like Ezra Klein's "America is not at war," which though blithely erroneous has a certain psychological truth to it.
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