Wheels Tupay wrote:Can someone please explain to me how we knew a terrorist attack was close to happening yet we didn't know if the attack was going to take place or Europe or North America?

Also, gotta love how it was going to be a "9/11 style attack" too.

It's like the Trout meme on BSG.

someone would've surely pressed the buttons 9 1 and 1 in succession had something happened

Army recruiting has been an extremely difficult job since 2003. The Army generally gets the leftovers, with exceptions for certain skills, from the recruiting base. The Marines are so small and the standards are so high that they pick and choose the most physically fit and mentally tough kids. It also helps that 80% of Marines leave the service after their initial enlistment, and the Marines want it that way. They want a large portion of their force to be between 18-22 due to the extreme physical requirements (3 mile run, pull ups and crunches on their PFT, by far the hardest of any service).

The Air Force and Navy are looking for kids who are technically inclined in some manner. They need mechanics, boat drivers, weapons handlers, and the like. The Navy and Air Force physical requirements are the easiest (except for the dumb 40 inch waist restriction in the Air Force), and they draw some really smart kids who want to work on jets, ships, subs, and UAVs.

The Army gets the rest. While there are some who are really smart (usually end up in Intel and Signal/Cyber), there are some dumb bastards, especially when you get into branches like Field Artillery and Transportation. I saw a graphic once where the majority of Army recruiting takes place within a 400 mile perimeter that is centered in southern Ohio. Wish I could see that again. I have no doubt there are a lot of folks from poor backgrounds, especially with the crap economy since 2008.

Officers from all services are from middle class backgrounds for the most part. The elite top 10% are generally out of sight and out of mind. This has not always been the case. The Ivy League provided a lot of excellent officers up until the Vietnam War, that obviously was the sea change that forced ROTC off many of their campuses.

Army recruiting became really brutal in 05/06 and that lasted through 10/11. The Army had to take 100,000 moral waivers - meaning they didn't meet criminal background checks, drug use, educational or medical/psychological standards. That has become a major issue within the service...at one point, not only was the Army taking people with criminal records, they were taking people who were convicted of certain felonies. Of course, we couldn't recruit "teh gayz"...I used to get in serious arguments with peers about this, I told them I would take every gay soldier they could find if they would take every felon and criminal I could find...I'd always worry about the criminals/felons and you end up spending 90% of your time unscrewing the 10% of the assholes in your unit. I could care less about sexual orientation as a soldier, just do your job well, be punctual, respectful, truthful, candid, and ask questions when you don't understanding something, and don't commit any crimes.

This is what you get with a volunteer military. I am hugely in favor of a draft, because it would give the average citizen more skin in the game with regards to military service/adventurism, it would introduce a broader set of people into the military, and it would not place the burden of national committment on a tiny percentage (.075% of the population) who serve in the Armed Forces/

Just my fourteen quatloos on the matter.

Appreciate the insight, as always, LG.

Luzinski's Gut wrote:Army recruiting has been an extremely difficult job since 2003. The Army generally gets the leftovers, with exceptions for certain skills, from the recruiting base. The Marines are so small and the standards are so high that they pick and choose the most physically fit and mentally tough kids. It also helps that 80% of Marines leave the service after their initial enlistment, and the Marines want it that way. They want a large portion of their force to be between 18-22 due to the extreme physical requirements (3 mile run, pull ups and crunches on their PFT, by far the hardest of any service).

The Air Force and Navy are looking for kids who are technically inclined in some manner. They need mechanics, boat drivers, weapons handlers, and the like. The Navy and Air Force physical requirements are the easiest (except for the dumb 40 inch waist restriction in the Air Force), and they draw some really smart kids who want to work on jets, ships, subs, and UAVs.

The Army gets the rest. While there are some who are really smart (usually end up in Intel and Signal/Cyber), there are some dumb bastards, especially when you get into branches like Field Artillery and Transportation. I saw a graphic once where the majority of Army recruiting takes place within a 400 mile perimeter that is centered in southern Ohio. Wish I could see that again. I have no doubt there are a lot of folks from poor backgrounds, especially with the crap economy since 2008.

Officers from all services are from middle class backgrounds for the most part. The elite top 10% are generally out of sight and out of mind. This has not always been the case. The Ivy League provided a lot of excellent officers up until the Vietnam War, that obviously was the sea change that forced ROTC off many of their campuses.

Army recruiting became really brutal in 05/06 and that lasted through 10/11. The Army had to take 100,000 moral waivers - meaning they didn't meet criminal background checks, drug use, educational or medical/psychological standards. That has become a major issue within the service...at one point, not only was the Army taking people with criminal records, they were taking people who were convicted of certain felonies. Of course, we couldn't recruit "teh gayz"...I used to get in serious arguments with peers about this, I told them I would take every gay soldier they could find if they would take every felon and criminal I could find...I'd always worry about the criminals/felons and you end up spending 90% of your time unscrewing the 10% of the assholes in your unit. I could care less about sexual orientation as a soldier, just do your job well, be punctual, respectful, truthful, candid, and ask questions when you don't understanding something, and don't commit any crimes.

This is what you get with a volunteer military. I am hugely in favor of a draft, because it would give the average citizen more skin in the game with regards to military service/adventurism, it would introduce a broader set of people into the military, and it would not place the burden of national committment on a tiny percentage (.075% of the population) who serve in the Armed Forces/

Just my fourteen quatloos on the matter.

That's all very nice, but respectfully, sir, what were their neighborhood income quintiles

Wheels Tupay wrote:Can someone please explain to me how we knew a terrorist attack was close to happening yet we didn't know if the attack was going to take place or Europe or North America?

Also, gotta love how it was going to be a "9/11 style attack" too.

perhaps the individuals "in play" had passports/visas providing access to either area?

Luzinski's Gut wrote:This is what you get with a volunteer military. I am hugely in favor of a draft, because it would give the average citizen more skin in the game with regards to military service/adventurism, it would introduce a broader set of people into the military, and it would not place the burden of national committment on a tiny percentage (.075% of the population) who serve in the Armed Forces

Then again you could get someone like me who would make an awful serviceman in any branch of the military.

I'd be in favor of some mandatory service, as long as you could opt into some non-violent job if you could prove ideological reasons for it. Let's see how fast we jump into another war when everyone with an 18-20 year old had some skin in the game.

Monkeyboy wrote:I'd be in favor of some mandatory service, as long as you could opt into some non-violent job if you could prove ideological reasons for it. Let's see how fast we jump into another war when everyone with an 18-20 year old had some skin in the game.

This has been pretty much my take for years now. And I think it's becoming more important, arguably getting close to urgent, to have some kind of national unifying experience.

Maybe I'm wildly off base here (and I trust you all will tell me if so), but I keep thinking about how media/cultural factors helped enact and then began to undermine "the American Century" (or American hegemony, if you prefer). Until 1900 or so, maybe a little later, my sense is that what Americans knew and thought about and cared about was overwhelmingly local. The Civil War probably did more to create a "national character" than anything else, and it moved lots of people around through the various theaters of combat, and those soldiers came home and talked about what they'd seen and thought and felt. But that wasn't the norm.

Then about a generation later, you had all these technologies arise that made people more mobile (the automobile, then flight) and more aware of what their countrymen who weren't geographically proximate were up to (radio, movies, later TV). But there weren't a ton of options, so everyone was hearing and seeing more or less the same stuff. I think it's probably fair to say that Americans were more alike, culturally, between about 1920 and 1960 than at any other time. Add in the truly national experiences of the Depression and WWII and there was also probably less sectional distinction than at any earlier or later point. And look at what we did in those years.

Since then it's all started to fragment. Obviously there's been a lot of good to come out of that--we're a more tolerant and diverse society, by far. But as technology has kept advancing and people became not just consumers, but producers of cultural material (again, a good thing!), and then wealth inequality really got extreme, I think we've lost a lot of the commonality that supposedly makes us Americans. At some point the legitimacy of the system--not just the state of our politics but the whole basic idea--comes into question. Some kind of mandatory national service could ease that, in addition to having a bunch of other good effects (like raising the standard for deciding to use military force).

Again, maybe I'm nuts here.

dajafi wrote: I think it's probably fair to say that Americans were more alike, culturally, between about 1920 and 1960 than at any other time. Add in the truly national experiences of the Depression and WWII and there was also probably less sectional distinction than at any earlier or later point.

I'd enthusiastically 2nd your observation if narrowed to the range of differences of opinion, coast-to-coast, about the merits of national unity.

My feeling is that, paradoxically, there was more, rather than less, cultural diversity in general during that period than there is now (thanks, radio/movies/TV/internet/etc).

But as far as our "USA! USA! USA!"-ness? Definitely feels like it was higher 1920-60 than now

I await someone sharing polling results that prove me completely wrong with high hopes

The ISIS guy in the beheading videos is British rapper L. Jinny...



(language NSFW)

fuck him and his shitty music

Holder is leaving once a replacement is found. Had a long run, some good, some bad.

dajafi wrote:[
Then about a generation later, you had all these technologies arise that made people more mobile (the automobile, then flight) and more aware of what their countrymen who weren't geographically proximate were up to (radio, movies, later TV). But there weren't a ton of options, so everyone was hearing and seeing more or less the same stuff. I think it's probably fair to say that Americans were more alike, culturally, between about 1920 and 1960 than at any other time. Add in the truly national experiences of the Depression and WWII and there was also probably less sectional distinction than at any earlier or later point. And look at what we did in those years.
.

I read an article a few years ago about what happened with music during this time. I'm not sure if it's relevant here, but there was an explosion of diversity and creativity in music owed in large part to radio, the interstate highway system, and WWI. People were suddenly exposed to music they had never heard before and it led to various influences that never would have occurred without this contact with other parts of the country. Instead of pockets of different types of music, music became more of a national experience. Paradoxically, this actual led to a greater diversity of music -- for example, whites started listening to black social and improvisational styles and used it to augment their own styles. The highways and radios were the early 20th century version of the internet, bringing people together, but also creating diversity through the sharing of ideas. It was probably a cool time to be alive -- well, except for the polio and stuff.

pacino wrote:Holder is leaving once a replacement is found. Had a long run, some good, some bad.

he fanned the flames of racism which, prior to him, was almost dead in the USA.

what i dont get is why is cheney out there talking smack about Obama leaving Iraq when Bush/Cheney is the administration that signed the SOF agreement?

Cheney is a war hero and no one should question him. He used up like 13 deferments. Probably a record. Chicken hawk. He should go,hunting again. Lol.

i love that his friend who got shot in the face is the person that apologized for the incident

Monkeyboy wrote:I'd be in favor of some mandatory service, as long as you could opt into some non-violent job if you could prove ideological reasons for it. Let's see how fast we jump into another war when everyone with an 18-20 year old had some skin in the game.

Universal Service is a concept that was kicked around for a long, long time in the 20th century. It never took hold. I like the idea. Doesn't have to be military obviously but I like the idea. It will never happen though.

Most of the European countries went that route. It worked OK. They didn't have haircut standards either and that was pretty kewl. Their militaries weren't bad.

South Korea has it. They have a badass Army and corporal punishment is a thing. But the rich kids get to be KATUSAs. They serve with U. S. Army units and do as little as possible.