How the Pentagon Turns Working-Class Men into the Deadliest Killers on the Planet

[MountainLaurel]

Excerpt from a new book from David Swanson. This breaks my heart, because so many of these "volunteers" came from high schools and towns like mine, where your best chance for a job beyond Wal-Mart is to move to the nearest city to do construction.

Since the Vietnam War, the United States has dropped all pretense of a military draft equally applied to all. Instead we spend billions of dollars on recruitment, increase military pay, and offer signing bonuses until enough people "voluntarily" join by signing contracts that allow the military to change the terms at will. If more troops are needed, just extend the contracts of the ones you've got. Need more still? Federalize the National Guard and send kids off to war who signed up thinking they'd be helping hurricane victims. Still not enough? Hire contractors for transportation, cooking, cleaning, and construction. Let the soldiers be pure soldiers whose only job is to kill, just like the knights of old. Boom, you've instantly doubled the size of your force, and nobody's noticed except the profiteers.

Still need more killers? Hire mercenaries. Hire foreign mercenaries. Not enough? Spend trillions of dollars on technology to maximize the power of each person. Use unmanned aircraft so nobody gets hurt. Promise immigrants they'll be citizens if they join. Change the standards for enlistment: take 'em older, fatter, in worse health, with less education, with criminal records. Make high schools give recruiters aptitude test results and students' contact information, and promise students they can pursue their chosen field within the wonderful world of death, and that you'll send them to college if they live ? hey, just promising it costs you nothing. If they're resistant, you started too late. Put military video games in shopping malls. Send uniformed generals into kindergartens to warm the children up to the idea of truly and properly swearing allegiance to that flag. Spend 10 times the money on recruiting each new soldier as we spend educating each child. Do anything, anything, anything other than starting a draft.

But there's a name for this practice of avoiding a traditional draft. It's called a poverty draft. Because people tend not to want to participate in wars, those who have other career options tend to choose those other options. Those who see the military as one of their only choices, their only shot at a college education, or their only way to escape their troubled lives are more likely to enlist. According to the Not Your Soldier Project:

"The majority of military recruits come from below-median income neighborhoods.

http://www.alternet.org/books/149165/how_the_pentagon_turns_working-class_men_into_the_deadliest_killers_on_the_planet/

[msongs]

1. plus gangbangers who want to learn new tactics to use at home when they get out nt

[patrice]

2. Our educational systems do not offer what people need to develop what potentials they have

for other ways to make their way in the world and even if it did, there's no market for what they would have to offer, because we do not protect American trades and crafts from foreign entrepreneurs.

Not just in enlistments, but also in war contractors, weapons production and in so many other ways, War is rooted America's jobs-base. It's how a significant portion of Americans pay their mortgages and put food on the table, ergo its support amongst the voting public.

[thunder rising]

3. I'm an RA vet from '74 ... guess why I "joined" Fuckit, I lived.