There's a school of thought that believes all of America's future wars can be won with remote-control drones piloted by teen gamers sitting in air-conditioned offices in the Nevada desert.
That school of thought is laboring under a misconception. Drone strikes are not winning wars. Instead, they are making enemies. Every time you take out a bunch of school kids gathering firewood in Pakistan (hey, what the hell, looked like a Taliban meeting on that 21 inch screen in Nevada) you've got a couple dozen survivors and relatives sworn to revenge.
Wars will never be won without boots on the ground, and lots of them.
The miracle of the "volunteer army" is that it limits membership to those who see enlisting as their best possible option. Who might that be?
Well, it's not a cross-section of America, that's for sure. But it is a cross-section of America's disenfranchised and marginalized.
If America is to continue its course of war without end, maybe it's time to spread the costs a little more evenly. Give Americans of all backgrounds an equal opportunity to be heroic patriots.
And cut out those bullshit college exemptions that gave the middle class a free pass back in the Viet Nam era. Let every American family taste the consequences of the empire's foreign policy. Why limit opportunities for heroic patriotism to white trailer trash and ghetto blacks and illegal immigrants?
My guess is that American foreign policy would make a sharp U-turn withing six months of an all-inclusive draft.
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