Opinion Military service should be mandatory

[Err]

No thanks. Keep it professional. No need to flood the ranks with a bunch of ungrateful malingerers, we have enough as is who join willingly.

 

[JudoThrowFiasco]

I really don't want a bunch of gen z twig boys working on infrastructure projects right out of highschool. However, I do like the idea of upping infrastructure project spending, assuming they primary go to systems the top 20% need and use

 

[surrealworlds]

No, that is by far a horrible idea. Dont burden the military with the countries stupid problems. Thdy have enough to deal with.

 

[Jack Stevonovich]

Yes it should be mandatory that the servant class is sent off to fight the servant class to appease the rich man. I like that idea.

I think the problem here is in the framing of what the military can be.

It doesn't have to be restricted to that. There are few if any other forms of organization that can accomplish what the military can due to its organization structure. It can be used for civil projects and infrastructure building.

Why have all these ngo's that use most of their resources guilt tripping people into donations to build wells in africa do that. Just send the military to do it.

It doesn't have to be all wars.

 

[TheGreatA]

only if needed

america really doesnt neither most countries in europe

in here we have it because its the best way to defend ourself if sergei gets drunk again and gets ideas

also its ingrained in our culture so no one complains about it really

Conscription armies are peaceful armies for the most part.

Harder to motivate couch potatoes to go to war for free, compared to people who get paid for it.

I prefer the system we've got. It's the "people's army", not a pack of mercenaries. However I can't exactly speak to its current effectiveness. 80 years ago, everybody was a bit of a badass, nowadays, not so much.

Part of me thinks that we should be training a proper "guerrilla army" on the side, in case the traditional army falls apart.

 

[Cole train]

also serving doesnt really make you tough

you come out with some militry skills and wilderness survival skill and thats it (atleast here, depending on focus of training)

you appreciate having a shower for first 6 months then you go back to complaining average guy again.lol

 

[Cole train]

Conscription armies are peaceful armies for the most part.

Harder to motivate couch potatoes to go to war for free, compared to people who get paid for it.

I prefer the system we've got. It's the "people's army", not a pack of mercenaries. However I can't exactly speak to its current effectiveness. 80 years ago, everybody was a bit of a badass, nowadays, not so much.

it gets the job done in the sense that it teaches everything necessary from soldier skills

being a badass is up to our people.not military and if we are not then we deserve to get run over

 

[Cole train]

Conscription armies are peaceful armies for the most part.

Harder to motivate couch potatoes to go to war for free, compared to people who get paid for it.

I prefer the system we've got. It's the "people's army", not a pack of mercenaries. However I can't exactly speak to its current effectiveness. 80 years ago, everybody was a bit of a badass, nowadays, not so much.

Part of me thinks that we should be training a proper "guerrilla army" on the side, in case the traditional army falls apart.

personally i think the system they have in russia is best

conscription military with possibility to stay as an professional guy if you liked being a soldier

like you served one year then you can sign contract up to like 3 to 5 years to be a pro guy

but this costs money

 

[TheGreatA]

also serving doesnt really make you tough

you come out with some militry skills and wilderness survival skill and thats it (atleast here, depending on focus of training)

you appreciate having a shower for first 6 months then you go back to complaining average guy again.lol

I suppose one advantage is that it's less difficult to adjust to that situation, in case you ever have to go back there again.

When I went back for retraining, it took me about 30-40 mins and I was pretty much as comfortable as I was at the "peak" of my military training (if you can really call it a peak).

it gets the job done in the sense that it teaches everything necessary from soldier skills

being a badass is up to our people.not military and if we are not then we deserve to get run over

Basically, yeah.

Just saying that 10,000 trained commandos might run over 500,000 scrubs who aren't willing to fight. Whereas in previous times, we legitimately had hundreds of thousands of really tough guys, who all knew how to fight, shoot, and survive. That's why our army could match even the Red Army at its greatest, because we had numbers and quality. Now we still have numbers, but we can't really speak to the quality, until put to the test.

 

[Cole train]

I suppose one advantage is that it's less difficult to adjust to that situation, in case you ever have to go back there again.

When I went back for retraining, it took me about 30-40 mins and I was pretty much as comfortable as I was at the "peak" of my military training (if you can really call it a peak).



Basically, yeah.

Just saying that 10,000 trained commandos might run over 500,000 scrubs who aren't willing to fight. Whereas in previous times, we legitimately had hundreds of thousands of really tough guys, who all knew how to fight, shoot, and survive. That's why our army could match even the Red Army at its greatest, because we had numbers and quality. Now we still have numbers, but we can't really speak to the quality, until put to the test.

world changes and all that

if it gives hope i can say that russians are not the same anymore either

generation thats coming up is very "westernized"

 

[TheGreatA]

world changes and all that

if it gives hope i can say that russians are not the same anymore either

generation thats coming up is very "westernized"

Thing is, everybody's bigger and stronger nowadays. There really shouldn't be any reason why we shouldn't be "tougher". The grandfathers and grand-grandfathers I had, who fought in the war, they were all about 5'5 feet tall, tiny guys who suffered from malnutrition. Simo Häyhä was like 4'11. People would laugh their asses off if they saw a guy like that nowadays. I, and basically everybody else in the current generation, towers over them.

Whether our conscription army can be effective in a fight, will come down to whether people can adjust their mentality quick enough. The weird thing is that a lot of the physically capable guys seemed the most unfit for the military environment. A bunch of them ended up dropping out.

Whether you could stand the lack of sleep was really the determining factor on whether you were going to be "good" or not, atleast in my unit.

 

[Cole train]

Thing is, everybody's bigger and stronger nowadays. There really shouldn't be any reason why we shouldn't be "tougher". The grandfathers and grand-grandfathers I had, who fought in the war, they were all about 5'5 feet tall, tiny guys who suffered from malnutrition. Simo Häyhä was like 4'11. People would laugh their asses off if they saw a guy like that nowadays. I, and basically everybody else in the current generation, towers over them.

Whether our conscription army can be effective in a fight, will come down to whether people can adjust their mentality quick enough. The weird thing is that a lot of the physically capable guys seemed the most unfit for the military environment. A bunch of them ended up dropping out.

Whether you could stand the lack of sleep was really the determining factor on whether you were going to be "good" or not, atleast in my unit.

military is all about enduring "conditions" (lack of food,sleep,water, horrible weather,overall tiredness)

i came in and was in shit shape but i had nothing in civilian world, i remember thinking holy shit we get free food, clothes and learn cool stuff this is awesome, guys who were normal had a harder time

i adapted vey well and never wanted to leave,i was in recon

 

[TheGreatA]

military is all about enduring "conditions" (lack of food,sleep,water, horrible weather)

i came in and was in shit shape but i had nothing in civilian world, i remember thinking holy shit we get free food, clothes and learn cool stuff this is awesome.

i adapted vey well and never wanted to leave

i was in recon

The funniest thing, to me, was when our unit and its captains/lieutenants nearly broke down because the forest where we held our training camp, was packed to the rafters with mosquitos. It was literally a black swarm there. Not kidding, I saw people in tears, captains cursing and just hoping that the shit would end. People with allergic reactions got blown up like the Elephant Man.

It didn't bother me because I've been to such places before, but that was certainly a prime example of a "hostile environment". At the time I remember thinking that if the flies were too tough to handle, then we wouldn't have a hope in hell against the Russians. However there were other units from Lapland and they were literally walking around shirtless, not giving a fuck.

By the end it was basically just me and a few other guys doing guard duties, a lot of people dropped out. You would have to stand around guarding a spot for 12 hours while swatting away the flies, not a good place to be if you're an ADHD type guy.

 

[Jack Stevonovich]

Maybe just create some kinda civil service corps that does infrastructure projects and domestic stuff without all the troopy death cult nonsense? We could cut the military budget and use that to pay for it.

I think a year (or two) of public service post-high school is a fine idea, but I wouldn't restrict it to the military, and I would tie it to a reward, such as 50% off of tuition to a state school.

Imagine raising children in a society whose dominant message is: give to the community and you will be rewarded... talk about a concept that is totally foreign to our current culture.

Those are good ideas too. My main idea is the idea of serving the public good as a sense of priority and something to take pride in which is in turn rewarded. That and the ability to mobilize large numbers to accomplish goals that serve the people. Where if people enter in a state of not knowing what to do with their life they have a way out and something to go back to where they feel they belong and have purpose. Rather than private companies all vying for jobs that they use foreign labor accomplish. Or NGO's who use most of the money to get more money by guilt tripping people.

 

[Cole train]

The funniest thing, to me, was when our unit and its captains/lieutenants nearly broke down because the forest where we held our training camp, was packed to the rafters with mosquitos. It was literally a black swarm there. Not kidding, I saw people in tears, captains cursing and just hoping that the shit would end. People with allergic reactions got blown up like the Elephant Man.

It didn't bother me because I've been to such places before, but that was certainly a prime example of a "hostile environment". At the time I remember thinking that if the flies were too tough to handle, then we wouldn't have a hope in hell against the Russians. However there were other units from Lapland and they were literally going around shirtless, not giving a fuck.

By the end it was basically just me and a few other guys doing guard duties, a lot of people dropped out. You would have to stand around guarding a spot for 12 hours while swatting away the flies, not a good place to be if you're an ADHD type guy.

hilarious story from my army days

i entered military to get some easy job, ended up in recon which was the hardest non special forces training here (most guys were special forces rejects due to some small thing)

i remember i was called in to captain office and he looks on my wish list where i had written cook as my first choice lol

he goes

"im not putting you in as a cook, thats a waste of soldier material, you are going into recon"

"Sir?"

"you got excellent scores on everything from shooting to land navigation"


"sir but im fat as fuck and cant run worth shit"

"dont worry recon training will fix that (gives me a sadistic smile)"

most painful time of my life, would rather get kod by mike tyson than do shit that was forced to do there

 

[Strychnine]

USAF retired veteran checking in here.

Trust me, you do NOT want people in the military who don't have a desire to be there.

Going to use an old BASIC programming term from my Commodore-64 days..

G.I.G.O.

Garbage In Garbage Out

 

[Jack Stevonovich]

Why should anybody with a C average and above be in the military?

This is the mentality I don't like.

This sense of entitlement. Maybe not the military but some form of national service.

 

[Bunk Moreland]

Pipe dream

 

[brackis1]

I think a year (or two) of public service post-high school is a fine idea, but I wouldn't restrict it to the military, and I would tie it to a reward, such as 50% off of tuition to a state school.

Imagine raising children in a society whose dominant message is: give to the community and you will be rewarded... talk about a concept that is totally foreign to our current culture.

I did AmeriCorps but it paid like fucking ass and gave me a partial grant scholarship.
If I got paid like a military member I'd have kept doing it.

 

[TheGreatA]

hilarious story from my army days

i entered military to get some easy job, ended up in recon which was the hardest non special forces training here (most guys were special forces rejects due to some small thing)

i remember i was called in to captain office and he looks on my wish list where i had written cook as my first choice lol

he goes

"im not putting you in as a cook, thats a waste of soldier material, you are going into recon"

"Sir?"

"you got excellent scores on everything from shooting to land navigation"


"sir but im fat as fuck and cant run worth shit"

"dont worry recon training will fix that (gives me a sadistic smile)"

most painful time of my life, would rather get kod by mike tyson than do shit that was forced to do there

Sounds pretty similar to how it ended up for me. I asked for the laziest, easiest stuff I could think of, and it's like they punish you for doing that.

Ended up being a guardsman serving under some try-hard military police officers and a lieutenant who claimed he was an Iraq War vet (when in reality he probably did jack-shit there, according to what I heard). The previous "class" of guys had a rejection rate of like 80%, meaning that 16 of 20 had gone home.

Probably nowhere near as physically demanding as recon, but it was torture as far as sleep deprivation. I counted that I averaged around 2 hours of sleep during camps, with 12 to 16 hours of guard duty, about 4-6 hours of random "tetsaamista" in the forest. If you fell asleep, or otherwise just acted too "lazy", during guard duty, you were punished by losing free weekends.

At the time I figured it was some sort of a "punishment" unit for people they thought weren't fit or motivated enough for the army. Bunch of guys were just totally hopeless, left after about 5 days of it.

I'm pretty sure all that contributed to my habit of staying awake 24 to 30+ hours even now.