Maher: "This is like the Cleveland guy having a pizza party for those girls he had in his basement.”

[caraher]

56. I think we're a very long way from being in real peril from a slightly weaker military

What makes us less safe today is the way our wars are generating people who want to kill us. We have such near-absolute dominance in any conventional battlefield that even if our military were to lose some of its edge, it would still be completely insane for any other nation to start a conventional war with us. So I respectfully disagree that what we need "above all" is the finest military possible - we only ever need a military good enough to deter war and to win it should it come. Setting the bar at "finest possible" distorts our values as a nation, leads to inflated spending on weapons and actually makes us weaker. (For the reductio ad absurdum of "finest possible" look at North Korea, where pretty much nothing else beyond the military receives any resources, though obviously their model of military strength is based on sheer weight of numbers rather than quality.)

It's also not clear that a volunteer force is the only or best way to build an elite force; it's just the one the US has chosen. Looking at a very different example, Israel still manages to have a top-notch military despite compulsory service.

What having more people and families with "skin in the game" does do is ratchet up the political stakes dramatically for starting military adventures (see Vietnam). Perhaps Cheney could have stampeded us into war with loose talk of smoking guns in the form of mushroom clouds. But it would have been harder to ignore the mass antiwar protests that preceded the fighting. And the 2004 election may not have been close enough for them to steal in Ohio if more voters had loved ones sitting involuntarily in Iraq for the sake of what by then was clear were lies. It would have been much harder for anyone to shrug their shoulders as they did and say sure, Bush lied, but at least nobody went there who didn't volunteer.