{"id":57154,"date":"2014-12-17T08:00:13","date_gmt":"2014-12-17T13:00:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=57154"},"modified":"2014-12-16T12:55:28","modified_gmt":"2014-12-16T17:55:28","slug":"karl-eikenberry-on-the-draft","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=57154","title":{"rendered":"Karl Eikenberry on the draft"},"content":{"rendered":"

Some of you know that former Lieutenant General and Ambassdor to Afghanistan Karl Eickenberry was my first platoon leader a lifetime ago. I didn’t like him very much and I’ve made that fact known. Well, he was interviewed in the National Journal<\/a> recently in regards to the reinstating the draft. He begins by telling about his first unit, before I knew him, when he was a platoon leader in a unit which had draftees recently returned from Vietnam. He tells how pulling staff duty officer required him to carry a loaded firearm on his rounds. I remember those stories, especially from my squad leaders who had been in the 82d Airborne Division during that era.<\/p>\n

It’s a very long article, but it’s worth reading the whole thing, if the discussion of whether we should reinstate the draft or not. Eikenberry blames the professionalism of the military on our involvement in both Iraq and Afghanistan. <\/p>\n

Lt. Col. Eikenberry, a battalion commander in the 10th Mountain Division, again had a serious morale problem on his hands. In contrast to his early days as an officer trying to quell outright rebellion in the ranks, the current headache was that the 10th Mountain had not been deployed for Operation Desert Storm, and those under his command were nearly despondent about not participating in what would prove to be one of the most lopsided military victories in the country’s history.<\/p>\n

Eikenberry’s response was to send 10th Mountain units to the Army’s high-tech, force-on-force training centers, where they substituted for units that had deployed unexpectedly to the Persian Gulf War. They responded enthusiastically, and were thus trained to a fine edge when called on to deploy to Somalia a year later. The experience drove home two important points about the military circa the 1990s: that it was one of the best forces the United States had ever fielded, and that, from a political perspective, it was tailor-made for the coming cycle of near-constant deployments.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

From a platoon leader in the post-Vietnam Era, to a battalion commander in the post-Desert Storm Era, Eikenberry had witnessed the attitude change among the troops from people who tried to avoid participation in a war to their polar opposite – because of the professional all-volunteer Army. That seems to be a problem somehow.<\/p>\n

Eikenberry stops short of advocating for reinstating the draft, but he does blame the disconnect between the folks whose families traditionally join the military and the rest who traditionally find something else to do. <\/p>\n

I blame the culture for that. At the beginning of the war against terror, President Bush told us that all we needed to do in order to win the war is continue shopping at the mall. And the slacktivists decided that sticking a yellow ribbon on their bumper fulfilled their patriotic duty to the country.<\/p>\n

Now all of the members of society who didn’t take the time out of their lives to actually kill terrorists pat themselves on the back when phonies and criminals pretend to be victims of the wars for their bad choices and the non-military folks use that as an excuse for their own choices. they teach their children to avoid being part of something bigger than themselves. <\/p>\n

But, yeah, the draft is a bad idea, at least Eikenberry and I can agree on that. It was tough enough leading volunteers into combat, future leaders don’t need a bunch of Johnny Beas in the ranks.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Some of you know that former Lieutenant General and Ambassdor to Afghanistan Karl Eickenberry was my … Karl Eikenberry on 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":[84],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-57154","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-military-issues"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57154","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=57154"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57154\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=57154"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=57154"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=57154"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}