{"id":38669,"date":"2013-11-30T06:54:16","date_gmt":"2013-11-30T11:54:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=38669"},"modified":"2013-11-30T07:42:46","modified_gmt":"2013-11-30T12:42:46","slug":"milbank-for-the-draft","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=38669","title":{"rendered":"Milbank for the draft"},"content":{"rendered":"

At the last big anti-war protest, I sat for five or ten minutes sitting on a curb in front of the White House and chatting with Dana Milbank, a columnist from the Washington Post. I found him to be an affable fellow, although I almost never agree with him. Today, he writes a column that advocates for a return to the draft; Save America: Restore the draft<\/a>. Although he makes some good points, I still can’t agree with him. Basically, he says that returning to the draft would help cure our problems in Washington;<\/p>\n

Because so few serving in politics have worn their country\u2019s uniform, they have collectively forgotten how to put country before party and self-interest. They have forgotten a \u201ccause greater than self,\u201d and they have lost the knowledge of how to make compromises for the good of the country. Without a history of sacrifice and service, they\u2019ve turned politics into war. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Well, you know, Dana, there’s already a Federal program that is supposed to train the youth of our country to be good citizens, that is the program that has failed the country – our school system. Teachers in the public school system already pass on their academic failures to the college system, where most freshman classes are enrolled in remedial English and math classes, now you expect them to pass along their failure to make good American citizens to mandatory military service?<\/p>\n

Milbanks, like Thomas Ricks, another advocate for the return of the draft, hasn’t served himself. I’m constantly amazed how all of these social engineers who want to go back to the draft, haven’t served in the military and are well-beyond the age that would require their own service. <\/p>\n

I was lucky enough to have served while their was no draft – all of my troops volunteered, and they were still hard to manage. I can’t imagine what my predecessors experienced with people who were forced to be in uniform. We have become the most lethal military force in the world with only volunteers, why does everyone want to change that – well, except for the fact that a draft force could be paid less and treated poorly.<\/p>\n

Milbanks continues;<\/p>\n

The costs would be huge. But so would the benefits: overcoming growing social inequality without redistributing wealth; making future leaders, unlike today\u2019s \u201cchicken hawks,\u201d disinclined to send troops into combat without good reason; putting young Americans to work and giving them job and technology skills; and, above all, giving these young Americans a shared sense of patriotism and service to the country.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Yeah, you’d get social equity and make future leaders if we spent more time fixing what’s wrong with our schools instead of expecting the professional military leaders to do that which they are not equipped or inclined to fix. The military is not some giant social program – it kills our enemies and breaks their stuff. The school system is a giant social program that is broken. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

At the last big anti-war protest, I sat for five or ten minutes sitting on a … Milbank for the draft<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[177],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-38669","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dumbass-bullshit"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38669","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=38669"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38669\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=38669"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=38669"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=38669"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}