Volunteering for military service

Originally Posted by spot

Every word's accurate.

[gaiusjulii]

Spot am i correct in thinking that you think western armies should pack up all there equipment and just leave all nations around the world? regardless of what they happen to be doing.

Would you consider a soldier that joined up during the Balkans conflict to stop genocide, but are still in the military and are now following orders fighting in Afghanistan/Iraq morally corrupt or paid killers?

Also many of the soldiers who are fighting did join up during peace time which was only 8 years ago... lets not forget you join up for ten to fifteen years many soldiers who may not agree with the war are held in by contract as they do have enough cash to buy themselves out. I myself was one of those who wanted to join up for a career, I remember saying to my friend it would be great to earn money and travel the world I naively thought the most fighting I would do was on the streets of northern ireland with the odd check point scrap. My feeling is you should not just see the uniform as that of a killers and tar them all with the same brush. I would no more do this with the police officers at the G20 march and call them all protest beating thugs than I would call all soldiers paid killers.

[oscar]

Originally Posted by gaiusjulii

Spot am i correct in thinking that you think western armies should pack up all there equipment and just leave all nations around the world? regardless of what they happen to be doing.

Would you consider a soldier that joined up during the Balkans conflict to stop genocide, but are still in the military and are now following orders fighting in Afghanistan/Iraq morally corrupt or paid killers?

Also many of the soldiers who are fighting did join up during peace time which was only 8 years ago... lets not forget you join up for ten to fifteen years many soldiers who may not agree with the war are held in by contract as they do have enough cash to buy themselves out. I myself was one of those who wanted to join up for a career, I remember saying to my friend it would be great to earn money and travel the world I naively thought the most fighting I would do was on the streets of northern ireland with the odd check point scrap. My feeling is you should not just see the uniform as that of a killers and tar them all with the same brush. I would no more do this with the police officers at the G20 march and call them all protest beating thugs than I would call all soldiers paid killers.

Hi there gaiusjulii..... Spot is away for a short while so don't think he's being rude if he does not reply straight away to your post.

[Lon]

First, let me say that I agree with Spot's comparison of today's conflict in Afghanistan and the Russian's earlier. As for volunteering for military service, there are many reasons why young men in the US would volunteer irrespective of a draft being in effect or not. For me during the Korean War it was to get benefits, college tuition for four years and two more available from the state of California. Low interest home loans for Korean Vets, 3.5 % Cal Vet Loan from the state for a home loan, a five point preference on Civil Service Exams. I was not concerned with the political aspects of that war or the justification for our involvement, I joined for selfish reasons and in that sense, one could say that I was used by the politicians. Also, there was a draft and I did not want to get drafted, but that was not my main reason for enlisting.
During the Vietnam War and today, there are bonuses that are paid and benefits to be had, and many young men will enlist for those benefits and not to serve some ideological cause, and their are some with a pathological wish to do physical harm where the same action as a civilian could put them in jail.
With the capability of the US to bomb a country back to the stone age (if they aren't already there), I have never understood our preemptive involvement in trying to foster our moral, legal and philosophical ideals on another country.
Prior to Pearl Harbor, Japanese were viewed by most English and American military as having inferior soldiers, after all, how could they see well with those damn squint eyes, and the way in which these QUAINT
little people were portrayed is laughable today. That was a long time ago, but my point is that this country of ours has never really taken the time or made the effort to know and understand other cultures, and has woefully under estimated their capabilities.

[gmc]

food for thought


Robert Fisk - The Age of the Warrior | Link TV

[spot]

It would be difficult to construct a more odd set of questions than these but I'll give it a go.

Originally Posted by gaiusjulii

Spot am i correct in thinking that you think western armies should pack up all there equipment and just leave all nations around the world? regardless of what they happen to be doing.

I've never given the question a moment's thought so strictly the answer to "am i correct in thinking that you think" can only be no but let's work on it. Firstly, why Western? Why would I distinguish Western from any other armed forces? Secondly, substituting "armed forces" for "armies", they're not autonomous. They make few decisions regarding strategic deployment, they have political masters. So I'm left with "should armed forces be deployed outside their own national territory and if they're abroad should they be ordered to drop everything and return home immediately" - is that close enough?

There are treaty obligations. Most countries are agreed that if they internationally declare that an ongoing genocide exists, for example, then internationally they will promptly deploy their combined forces to bring it to an end, arrest all those responsible and bring them to trial. There are national treaties of defence whereby an attack, existing or immediately imminent, by another country on one member nation is treated as an an attack on all the signatories of that treaty. It involves deployment of armed forces abroad despite there being no existing or immediately imminent attack on the country deploying them. I'm fine with responding to treaty obligations at the request of the country under attack or the population against which genocide is being waged. In both cases it's equivalent to lending the party under attack additional forces with which to respond. So long as there's a just cause for the response by the party under attack then the additional forces are fine.

Would you consider a soldier that joined up during the Balkans conflict to stop genocide, but are still in the military and are now following orders fighting in Afghanistan/Iraq morally corrupt or paid killers?

Are we still talking Western armed forces here? Yes? Then do you think such a mythic creature exists? Nobody would have got through basic training in the time between the US and UK announcing it would intervene militarily in Bosnia and the complete occupation of the country by Western forces. Just as nobody would have got through basic training in time to fight in the Falklands after the Argentine invasion.

If a volunteer joins up to respond to a specific immediate concern then that's what he should sign up to. Is he given such an option? No. All he can do is sign up, he can't limit his subsequent involvement wherever his government decides to use his talents. All the volunteer can do is look at past history, as far back as is relevant, and decide whether his government is honorable in its use of the forces who have promised obedience. Does he have any good reason to think past flaws are buried and that his government is trustworthy?

You claim that "many of the soldiers who are fighting did join up during peace time which was only 8 years ago" and "lets not forget you join up for ten to fifteen years". You're discussing the UK armed forces here? Then it's quite simply untrue. From the end of World War Two until today there's never been any significant period of peacetime when there's not been significant killing of foreigners by Western armed forces. Sometimes criminal fronts like the Contras have done the filthier work but in general the statement refers to the armed forces directly.

You want to reject the description "paid killer" for these volunteers. Certainly in times of conscription it's not applicable, neither to the conscripts who have no choice nor to the volunteers who sign up alongside them to give their support to those with no choice. The question is whether members of an all-volunteer armed force with a history of foreign deployment for intended national gain rather than for any just response against a legally recognized imminent or actual attack are recklessly promising to obey orders to kill. The likelihood is that what's been done will be repeated. People who signed up after Gulf 1 had overwhelming evidence of what their armed forces were likely to be called on to do. The enforcement of sanctions between Gulf 1 and Gulf 2 was lethal in its own right.

Potential members of the armed forces would do well to look at the national neglect of veterans before promising to kill in exchange for pay, training, fun and adventure. The scrap heap is huge.