The Glade 4.0

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"Dress cops up as soldiers, give them military equipment, train them in military tactics, tell them they’re fighting a ‘war,’ and the consequences are predictable." —Radley Balko

Hallelujah. A good thIng was done this day.

I would hope that those military personnel who oppose this change would be given the opportunity to be honorably discharged, if they desired it.

That's just silly, of course they won't ...

Yeah, right. I think some are still being affected by stop-loss.

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"...the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?" -Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Well, it may take a year to implement, they say, so maybe at least a good number of them will be able to get out. I'm going to wait awhile before I decide if it's a good thing or not.

This is a great thing. A rare victory for liberty.

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Ezekiel 23:19-20 

I have mixed views about homosexuality, but I don't think my mixed views are cause to deny them equal protection under the law. I think most peoples concerns about homosexuals in the military can be handled with proper planning and enforcement of UCMJ.

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I prefer to think of them as "Fighting evil in another dimension"

Finally, thumbs up for this change.

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The U. S. Constitution doesn't guarantee happiness, only the pursuit of it. You have to catch up with it yourself. B. Franklin

"A mind needs books like a sword needs a whetstone." -- Tyrion Lannister, A Game of Thrones

The Spartans had mandatory gayness, and they were pretty bad-ass for a while. (Ignoring the 300 fantasy)

Honestly, if serving with gay people is too much and it overrides why you were serving, good riddance. (Cause you know, everyone in the military joined because of love of country and not college benefits or other mercenary recruiting tactics.)

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"...the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?" -Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

While the movie was absurd, the real battle at Thermopylae was still spectacular. Leonidas of Sparta, with 1700 greek soldiers (300 of which were Spartans, hence the misnomer of the movie) held out against 2 million Persian troops for 3 days, killing about 20,000 of them in the process. The only reason the Persians ended up defeating them was that the Greeks were betrayed.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

That's not really what I meant. There's a lot of fantasy in that movie. I'm pretty sure the Persians weren't horrible monsters. And all that talk about freedom... The Spartans made slaves out of one group of Greeks. It wasn't all that historically accurate in many areas, but it was good fun.

Either way, they loved the cock. Historians make the Spartan women sound pretty hot though. They didn't play with dolls, but played more physical games. I like em feisty and tough.

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"...the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?" -Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

I am sure now Berkly, Yale, and other Liberal colleges and universities will stop blocking ROTC recruiters.....

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"Life isn't divided into genres. It's a horrifying, romantic, tragic, comical, science-fiction cowboy detective novel. You know, with a bit of pornography if you're lucky."
— Alan Moore

I doubt it. Although, if you went to Berkly or Yale, I don't know why you'd go join the military... We send our poor to war, not people that can afford to go to Yale.

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"...the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?" -Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

As I said, the movie was absurd.



Yes, Spartan soldiers were encouraged to form romantic bonds within the unit as a matter of policy.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

Good stuff. Now let them marry.

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ROTC is not quite the same as joining the military. Remember, throughout the 1800s and early 1900s, officer positions were given out to members of rich families. We send our poor to war under the command of people that can afford to go to Yale. That way the people who go to Yale can claim to have served their country. For all we like to rag on George W. Bush for his national guard service record, that's really nothing new. Dozens of beloved political figures before him, both liberal and conservatives, have touted military service that never would have placed them on the front lines. If you can say you were in the military, it lets you pretend that you're a paragon of patriotism and machismo like George Washington or Teddy Roosevelt. For every rich kid who has his family pull strings to get him into the military and then ends up dragging his wounded comrades to shore with his teeth, there's a hundred more who sign up for fast tracks to officer positions because it looks good on a resume and have their families ensure they end up stationed in the middle of Kansas where enemy fire can't reach them.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

We don't "send our poor people to war" at all. We have an all volunteer military, and poor people are more likely to volunteer for the military because A) there are more of them and B) its a method of gaining social and economic advancement when you haven't got many other options.

Families pulling strings to get anyone much of anything is a pre-Viet Nam era phenomenon at most. There are fast-track officer positions, sure: it's called Direct Comission and its used to fill shortages in certain officer branches due to needs with current deployments. Direct comission was exceedingly rare before the current wars started and generally went to people who were already enlisted anyhow.

As for ROTC, the Service Academies, they all have plenty of prior enlisted in them, and OCS is entirely prior enlisted. In any of those cases you still have to actually complete a college degree and pass quite a bit of other evaluations before you get comissioned - and no, the need for a degree is not a barrier to the poor with the availability of scholarships, loans, and the various ways you can get assistance in paying back what loans you might incur.

As for the middle of Kansas, Coro, you're presumeably referring to Fort Riley. Fort Riley is home to the 1st Infantry Division of Normandy fame, and as far as I can tell hosts at least 3 of the division's Brigade Combat Teams plus a sustainment brigade. These are all very much deployable formations, and have certainly been deployed to Iraq and possibly Afghanistan over the course of this war, most likely 2 or 3 times or more. There are doubtless jobs on Fort Riley that have a very low likelyhood of deployment, but the ratio is nowhere near the 100:1 you cite. If you really think that officers who serve in actual combat positions are that rare, either you have no clue how the military is currently organized, or you are unaware that you don't necessarily have to be a combat arms officer to either deploy or to see actual fighting, especially in the current wars.

Furthermore, all those noncombat jobs have to be done. Someone has to fill them. The unfairness to George Bush (and by extension the rest of the National Guard) in denigrating his service lies not in the fact that he was hardly the only one (although in his personal cas that's part of it) but in the fact that someone had to be in the Air National Guard. People like to think that those jobs are just cushy "never gonna see combat" jobs, but this was the middle of the Cold War, and I'm fairly sure that it crossed GWB's mind at some point that he might have to scramble before a Soviet RV detonated on the runway he was trying to use.

Now, as to the comment from Farther that people out to be allowed to leave the military if the disagree with DADT, I see no good reason for that. They can leave at the end of their current tour if they wish (and no, stop-loss is not that all-pervasive and has been steadily being eliminated for some time, thankfully). The bottom line, however, is that it is not the job of the military to agree or disagree with policies made by elected civilians. Generals and Admirals should make it quite clear that this is the directive from civilian leadership, and troops should carry it out as they would any other lawful order.

It also is not a victory for liberty in any way. This is merely a change in policy governing the military. No right or freedom of any person was in any way affected.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

No, I'm referring to a general distance from combat. Kansas is roughly the geographic center of the country, and not being invaded by Communist forces.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

I think you're missing the fact that major military installations are spread all over the country, not concentrated in areas likely to be invaded by commies, nazis, or whoever.

Even during the Cold War, the bulk of the Army's heavy forces were not in Europe or South Korea. A certain portion were, but the majority were here in the U.S. so they could be railheaded to ports and then shipped to the appropriate theater. IIRC the general plan was 3 weeks to complete REFORGER and put 3 additional heavy divisions in Europe plus an airlift of 2 Brigades from 10th Mountain to Norway, 3 more weeks to get the last 3 heavy divisions, then 3 more weeks to deploy 4 National Guard divisions - assuming the nukes weren't already flying before then.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

The service academies still generally require the nomination of a congressman to get in. That doesn't rule out the poor, but it makes it exceedingly easy for the wealthy. There's still an old boy's club at work. That said, it can be a "Free University Education" of great quality for those who would otherwise not be able to afford it (although the cost associated with it is several years of one's life afterward, so it's hardly free.)

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

Not really. The tests you have to pass in order to qualify for the Academy to even compete for the nomination are exceedingly difficult and competitive, to say nothing of the standards of academics and extracirricular activity participation. More to the point, the academies themselves are pretty **** tough your first year; you don't just coast through by any means.

I tried to get into the Naval Academy and went through the entire process.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

That doesn't really have any bearing on what I said.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

It has everything to do with what you said. It does not make it "exceedingly easy for the wealthy" at all, because the nominations by the Congressman are based on the results of various testing. Congressmen do this in order to protect themselves from accusations of exactly what you're saying.

I never saw the Congressman except at a brief talk he gave to all the candidates. The rest of it was an oral board by prominent members of the district, such as the President of the local Community College (can't remember the other 2), a physical fitness test and a number of others.

The only way family connections could help you is if you can get good letters of recommendation, but even then in order to be worthwhile they'd need to be from relatively high-ranking military personnel, and they wouldn't do you a bit of good if you couldn't perform on the tests, and even after all that, all the family connections in the world won't help you get through the first year (or the rest of it for that matter) if you can't hack it. Congressmen and Senators are generally not in the habit of nominating people who are clearly going to fail out; all that does is create a potential source of embarassment for them.

In reality, the bottom line is that there aren't very many rich people looking for a military job for prestige anymore; the kids who apply to service academies are generally top performers and very motivated because they know the competition is tough. It's not any easier for the wealthy because it doesn't matter; the wealthy candidates are generally just as qualified as the poor ones. People looking for a comission just to say they had a comission are a phenomenon of the 19th century. It's pretty hard to find people who do that anymore because there really aren't any jobs like that. Doctors or Lawyers are about it, but even they gt mobilized and deployed.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

The way I see it, those people signed a contract with the government, and now Congress has changed the terms of that contract unilaterally. IMO, those who do not want to serve under the new terms should be allowed to leave with no blemish to their record. It's just my opinion, take it for whatever that's worth.