Luzinski's Gut wrote:I would make smaller bases, especially with the Army and the Marine Corps, and spread them out throughout the country. The armored units would need to be consolidated around large training areas that can support maneuver training and they need to be far enough away that people aren't being annoyed with the sounds of tank cannons and howitzers.

The consolidation of bases through the BRAC process has gone too far. The Army has one major base in the Northeast, and it's on the Canadian border in Watertown, NY (Ft. Drum).

The Air Force could also be spread out, however, the noise from jets basically forces them to be in rural areas. The Navy is tied to deep water ports.

It's not efficient, but it spreads the military out across the country and provides our citizenry with a chance to see military personnel, talk with them, and the like. I'd think it be far better than the current system.

pacino wrote:

TenuredVulture wrote:

The Crimson Cyclone wrote:I don't get those memes as it's the republican congress that refuses to bring any bills for spending to help vets, hell they won't even extend the first responders bill

Read an interesting article in the Economist on the difficulty the military has attracting qualified recruits. A big problem is that those most likely to enlist are simply ineligible--they lack the appropriate education, have a criminal record, or are too fat. (Also, the military won't take you if you have visible tattoos, but I would guess relaxing that standard could be considered.) But I would hypothesize the perception that the VA won't take care of you is probably hurting recruiting efforts. The article also pointed to a significant and growing disjuncture between the military and everyone else--people enjoy thanking vets, and even giving them #$!&@ discounts at Denny's--few actually considers doing service themselves.

a professional military has undoubtedly made our military better, but it's also detached it from everyday life and from much of our population. Before, if we went to war everyone felt it. Now, it's almost an abstract idea that affects very few people in the homeland. It becomes easier to simply avoid the war and the effects of it.

i'm not sure of the solution.

CalvinBall wrote:When 95 percent of the posts you make jn a thread are snark and then you make a snarky worded response people probably will read it as such.

Slowhand wrote:This is like an Abbott and Costello routine

The Dude wrote:I don't think there's been enough chatter about this. We're there different restrictions then?

http://abcnews.go.com/International/ter ... d=35252500

U.S. refugee resettlement places a particular focus on economic integration: Even before the 1996 welfare reform law was passed, some refugees to the U.S. saw their cash benefits connected to employment status. “It’s not just people arrive and then we provide the health care, we provide the housing, we provide income and food but they don’t have anything to do, they don’t have any attachment to the society,” Capps said. “We attach people to the labor force and therefore to the general society much more quickly.”

So are there any refugees who have become terrorists since finding a home in the U.S.? Yes — three.

That’s out of the 784,000 refugees who have been resettled in the U.S. since 9/11. Kathleen Newland, also of the MPI, pointed this out earlier in the fall, adding that it was “worth noting two were not planning an attack in the United States and the plans of the third were barely credible.” History doesn’t seem to bear out that refugees are more likely to be disaffected enough by life in the U.S. to lash out through terrorism.
But it’s undeniable that the number of Westerners attempting to join Islamic State, also known as ISIS, has skyrocketed (there’s no data available on whether any of these were refugees). According to Courtney Schuster, co-author of a New America Foundation report, “ISIS in the West,” 83 Americans from 21 different states have attempted to join the group. George Washington University’s Program on Extremism reported that a majority had tried to do so in 2015 alone.

The profile of a Western Islamic State fighter doesn’t have much to do with income, educational level, or English language proficiency, though. Around 40 percent of those trying to leave the U.S. to join Islamic State had converted to Islam, a disproportionate number given that only 23 percent of American Muslims are converts, Seamus Hughes, deputy director of GW’s Program on Extremism, noted in an e-mail. It’s reasonable to assume that included in this number are those who were — with all the attending Springsteen-ian undertones — born in the USA.

The New America report showed that age, online activity and family ties to jihadist organizations are the commonalities that bind together the Westerners who have looked to join Islamic State. In the European cases, recruiting was more likely to center around family connections; Schuster said 40 percent of U.K. fighters had familial ties to jihadist organizations. In the U.S., though, the great radicalizer has been the Internet: Only 20 percent of the 83 recruits had family ties to Islamic State, but a whopping 90 percent had active social-media interactions with extremists.

pacino wrote:I saw this reported as 'the Syrian border'...yeah, WITH TURKEY. Russia is out of control; first they were bombing Syrian rebels, then they demanded that Lebanon allow them to conduct drills in LEBANESE airspace, now they are breaching Turkish airpsace (which gets NATO involved). Russia is screwing everything up more than it already is.

The Dude wrote:i wasn't asking about odds or anything. i was interested in the evolution of the refugee process and whether or not anything was changed bc of events like this

At the time of ABC News’ original investigation in 2013, then-Department of Homeland Security spokesperson Peter Boogaard said the U.S. government “continually improves and expands its procedures for vetting immigrants, refugees and visa applicants, and today [the] vetting process considers a far broader range of information than it did in years past.”

pacino wrote:truthiness

The Dude wrote:wish you were here at 9 last night

pacino wrote:It says in the article they constantly reassess

The Crimson Cyclone wrote:demagogue: a political leader who seeks support by appealing to popular desires and prejudices rather than by using rational argument.

is there any denying that Trump fits that definition to a T?