Presumably the idea would be to test them on intake, assign them to GED prep classes accordingly, and begin basic once they've finished their education?
Quick google has claims most people prep and pass their GED in 3 months which is already longer than the basic training recruits go through. Depending on their MOS school they go to after that you're maybe adding 30-50% training time and that's assuming they can hit the average GED time.
~90% of those who meet the age requirements have completed high school. Anyone who hasn't completed high school by that point almost certainly can't, and won't be accepted into the army for the same reason. The small number of exceptions who could, but have chosen not to, aren't exactly going to be attracted to the army if you force them into doing something they have explicitly chosen not to do.
Also, the article is from 2022 and the requirement was reinstated a week later, so this is moot anyway. At least as it pertains to the Army. Granted, the Navy lifted the same requirement on Friday. We shall see if they last longer than a week. There remains a strong social impetus, particularly in government, to paint a picture that you can't get a job without completing high school, even though everyone already completes it these days anyway...
Not a good sign for a country that depends on its military to maintain a hegemony. It’s also not like our “enemies” are reducing their armies or anything.
in an all out war, it certainly is a numbers game. There just hasn't been all out war in decades, but that doesn't mean one isn't around the corner. Being prepared is better than not.
What constitutes an all-out war in the modern era? If it includes nukes, numbers have little value. Even pulling nukes out of the equation, modern armaments make the idea of overwhelming the US with bodies storming the shores/borders an almost certainly futile strategy.
human wave is not the game. The Ukraine-Russia war has shown us how important the technology is. The whole war is fighting with drones to detect and kill enemies.
At least in the current Ukraine context: tech + a lot of dumb 155 mm shells, highly mobile artillery. Although guided shells would be even more useful if they were cheaper to build.
Russia's human waves were just means to reduce the prison population: practical stalinism 101. They are phasing out prisoner benefits as the recruiting pool is getting smaller. Also there is an increased chance Putin might order be mass mobilization after he wins the elections in May.
> Also there is an increased chance Putin might order be mass mobilization after he wins the elections in May.
Increased but still highly unlikely. The Russian military inducts ~260,000 men annually just from conscription. Now that the Ukrainians have exhausted their supplies of ammunition, manpower, and funding, it's unlikely that the AFU can sustain its ability to attrite Russian manpower faster than it can be replaced.
The only way for Putin to win in Ukraine is to open new frontlines in Europe to divert attention and resources. And the most likely place is between the Baltics and Poland. That's exactly why part of Steadfast Defender 2024 exercise is taking place there.
A surprisingly straightforward article from Xinhua correspondent Zhang Zhang:
"The central locations involved in the drill are the Baltic nations, identified by NATO as particularly vulnerable to a possible Russian assault. Other areas include Norway and Romania, situated on the outskirts of the alliance; Poland on the alliance's eastern flank; and Germany as a central hub for reinforcements."
> The whole war is fighting with drones to detect and kill enemies.
This is a very wrong take.
A big continental war like this one in Ukraine is fought with artillery and with enough men capable of holding the territory (already under control or conquered), i.e. the story of WW1 and the WW2 (when it came to the Eastern Front). You don't have that, you lose. Trouble for Ukraine (and for the West supporting Ukraine) is that they're running out of artillery shells and they're running out of Ukrainian men.
A “continental” war without air superiority. You think Russia against Greece or Turkey who just got multi dozen gen 5 and 4.5 aircraft (not sure when delivery is) would be the same? No. It’s not even continental. It’s a proxy war.
This is on the same level of hubris as militarly comparing Russia with Italy in February 2022 based on their nominal GDP figures alone, and yet, here we are, two years later and major politicians here in Europe warning us about a future war with the same Russia.
I guess the Germans or the Brits didn’t get the memo that the Greek aviation would be enough of an opposing force.
Greece and Turkey while both in NATO have their own rivalry. And enlistment is down in most western counties, so this is a good opportunity to effect a reversal. Many doctrines require a minimum amount of manpower. As for Ukraine and Russia, the War began in 2014. They have been stockpiling artillery for this express tactic for decades now. Anyone who simply compares spending across two arbitrary countries does deserve hubris. But that’s not what’s happening.
Why there’s not more Western defense of Ukraine I can’t explain except for present greed over future problem
solving, but nothing is that surprising.
In my opinion, they need to be important enough to be worth murdering and mutilating lots of young people before you can call them important, which is rare. I’d argue 95+% of human wars have been worthless by this metric.
It may not be 2003 any longer, but what happened then is still reverberating. Seeing the US military and so many lives just get utterly squandered running imperial errands for the president's daddy's friends. Who wouldn't strongly discourage their own kids from putting themselves in such a vulnerable position, or be skeptical of the claim that the next war might actually be important?
Similarly so much of Russia's current war propaganda is repurposed anti-war themes from Iraq and Afghanistan. The US has screwed around aggressively intervening around the globe for so long, that it's all too easy to pigeonhole what actually appears to be reasonable support for a would-be ally into the same bag. And now the chief opponents of such aid are actually the same party that led us into those useless wars! "Can't get fooled again"
Those wars really were a total waste of our country's resources, international stature, and so much of our future. It was seen by so many at the time, including our allies. But the war boosters ruled the day, drunk on corporate/nationalist propaganda and those fucking yellow "support our troops" bracelets, as if the soldiers coming home wouldn't end up being some of the strongest anti-war voices. And now here we are.
> it's all too easy to pigeonhole what actually appears to be reasonable support for a would-be ally into the same bag.
This seems to imply that Soviet intervention into an American war declared over the Cuban Missile Crisis would have been fairly characterized as "reasonable support for a would-be [in this case, already formalized] ally".
In a rough sense, sure? That was before my time so I don't have much of an opinion. It would seem the real root of the problem there was the mutually escalating global cold war. Whereas for current events, the West was quite happy integrating with the former Soviet Union including Russia, until Boomer Putin got high on his own supply and started trying to Make Russia Great Again.
There's also a bit about Panama being chill (possibly because of all the business generated by the canal), and Nicaragua basically held in place by international law.
A draftee always has the choice to not go. Barring a tyrannical regime that sends them in as cannon fodder, they may stay in prison until the tides turn, but they will live.
I grew up in an "anti-military" household but tried to sign up when I had no opportunities after leaving high school without a diploma (and was turned away). I wasn't trying to sign up to fight -- just to survive. It's clear that many who do sign up do so for the same reason.
We collectively agreed on a national jobs program (via the military), so we should consider redirecting a significant portion of those jobs to a national jobs program that actually helps with domestic infrastructure with an emphasis on learning skills that translate into private sector opportunities.
Then let those that do want to fight be the ones to sign up, and make more effective use of them. I'm still not a fan of the military industrial complex but national defense will always be necessary and should be staffed for defense rather than just keeping people off the dole.
Then you get something like the KPA (North Korean army): not very good at fighting wars but quite good at construction work.
In order to have a capable military, it needs to fight wars. Hence all the countries joining the US in Afghanistan to achieve valuable on the field training.
What use is a big stick, other than intimidation, when you just carry it around, not knowing how to actually use it?
Future recruits will also need to be good at E-sports, as they'll increasingly be in charge of drone operations.
The drone thing is just a fantasy some of us nerds like to tell ourselves, I've seen it in some reddit subs, too.
As per North Korea, they were able to come up with 1 million artillery shells for their friends the Russians, while the West couldn't do the same for their friends the Ukrainians [1], I'd say that North Korea got the better of the West here.
At the moment it's not NKs shells that keep the war rolling but the huge Russian population which allows for a seemingly endless supply of corpses to be.
Just because they've been "taken from China" over a century ago doesn't mean they're not "Russian" today. They surely have Russian documents and were allowed to vote in Russia for their president. They might be ethnic minorities, but this fact comes with the size of this country. And yes, I'm aware of the point you want to make. I do know that there is a huge racist issue at play. They're still Russians, though.
Those foreigners are negligible compared to all those actual Russians.
Between Tartarstan and Buryatia and Moscow and St. Petersburg? Quite a lot of difference. Ethnicity, religion, income, education etc. They are also throwing Central Asian migrants towards the frontline after a short trip to prison. You'll find largely the same ethnic groups in North-Western Kazahstan and Orenburg oblast.
> I'd say that North Korea got the better of the West here.
Depends what's the most important missing item on Ukraine's wish list; Ukraine did get rocket artillery, SAM systems, tanks, and a whole bunch of other stuff.
To me, it suggests that shells are something that NK knows it can spare (and the same for all the stuff everyone else collectively is providing Ukraine, it's stuff the donors know they can spare).
Afghanistan was not really a war in the traditional sense, it was more of what is known as a policing operation. Not sure there was a lot of valuable lessons there in terms of potential high intensity conflicts with near peers.
> Neutrality is support for might makes right. Choosing to be neutral is to say that the strongest party should win.
I'm not sure what you're arguing here. Are you saying that the US has historically been taking a neutral position? I suppose they haven't been prosecuting any particular vision with their pointless wars, but that seems a bit weird.
But no question not having any power to back up their whims will defang the US and make them victims of external actors. Hopefully the threat of this happening is enough to reign in the warmongers in the US government and make them negotiate towards a pro-US policy instead of the anti-random-victims strategy to date.
US foreign policy for the second half of the 20th century was basically: "Communism is real bad and causing millions of people to suffer and die, so let's go start a war that will cause millions of people to suffer and die. Except now a lot of those people get to be our people! Hurray!"
Left alone, communism eventually fails in almost every case. China being the main exception but that's because we pump a half a trillion dollars into their economy every year buying cheap goods.
China has had a weird mix of free market and political totalitarianism since they liberalized in 1990.
Before that their economy was a complete non-event. All of their rapid growth really started in the mid-90’s, and the West started paying attention even later.
>Another article is more explicit about exactly who isn’t joining the military anymore.
The article doesn't confirm whether the total of any other groups is dropping, but it can be inferred from the numbers given that recruiting is very low across the board. It's worth having a racial remark in the title for clicks alone.
> In 2018, 56.4% of new recruits were categorized as white. In 2023, that number had fallen to 44%. During that same five-year period, Black recruits have gone from 20% to 24% of the pool, and Hispanic recruits have risen from 17% to 24%, with both groups seeing largely flat recruiting totals but increasing as a percentage of incoming soldiers as white recruiting has fallen.
The use of proportions rather than actual totals means the number of recruits could have dropped by that same 12.4% in every category, in which case the focus on race is completely meaningless.
> the drop in white recruitment has baffled Army staff and isn't easily explained by any one particular factor
... after a whole article full of explanations, none of which involve surveying white men to ask them why they don't want to sign up anymore. Classic journalism.
The idea of military was that you have below average pay but insane benefits (and depending on the time, cultural respect), both directly and indirectly (There are/were so many places that give a military discount). The latter is falling off as of late (both directly and indirectly, again), so what's the point if you're not conscripted?
They aren’t underpaid, at least not on the low end.
A raw recruit (E1) gets $23,000 per year. Housing, food, work clothing and healthcare is paid for. After tax, it’s like ~$1,500 in completely discretionary income. This is why you get 19 year old new recruits buying new sports cars. They can afford it. The smart ones start socking away money while they are young.
A new officer (O1) gets $43,000 per year. If they are married they can live off base and get a housing allowance. If lucky enough to get stationed in SF, that’s another $4,017 per month. So just base pay and allowance is $91,000. And the housing allowance is tax free, so it’s equivalent to making more than $100,000 per year.
Then add on top sign on or enlistment bonuses especially for in demand MOSs, relocation allowances, etc.
Then you put in 20 years and you get a pension you can live on and healthcare for the rest of your life.
They aren’t making Silicon Valley money but it puts most members in firmly middle class territory.
I've worked with many that have retired and entered the private sector. My understanding is that they continue to make their tax-free enlisted salary (via their pension) after retirement on top of whatever they're making in their private sector job. For high-ranking officers, this can be >$100k!
Many of these folks have second homes, a small RE portfolio, and more!
It's some percentage of their pay, depending on how long they were in. There's a few different plans, but roughly...50% if you're in 20 years, 75% at 30 years, etc. Also, only a percentage of the base pay. Not of the housing allowances and other pay they receive while active.
It's very difficult comparing salaries in different nations, because expenses vary so much. However, your comment confirms my opinion. I would like to see a 50% increase in that E1/E2/E3 base pay. I've worked with them - they earn it.
Could they learn from the mining industry? Terrible job, long hours in the middle of no-where (in Australia) and poor family life, but the salaries and benefits are huge. There is no shortage of people wanting to work in the mining industry.
It surprises me that this obvious solution is the one the government avoids the most. I would expect salaries to keep pace with the private sector. Especially when the cost of mistakes by a CEO (company goes bankrupt) is much less than the cost of a mistake by an officer (many people die). Might also stop the systemic corruption in the military AKA the revolving door between the military and private contractors.
As an ex-soldier, I'm sympathetic, but it's hard to do that when the military's budget is already so high. Fixing military budgets internally is a multi-pronged problem, with any such proposal taking multiple years to execute, none of which are low-risk / high-chance of success.
I could continue if I wanted, but I'll stop there, because I think I've made my point that "The things I claimed happened," did, in fact, happen. Even if you'd rather not accept them.
>There are families in which four generations have served, with the current generation of fathers telling their kids, "You shouldn't go serve there, because of your skin color. Because my friends still in there are seeing people promoted or not based not on their skills and proven character, but on their skin color."
Missing in discussions about the US military recruiting problem is a discussion of the shift away from 20 year defined benefit pensions to the “Blended Retirement System.” When such a terrific deal slides off the table, economic incentives shift accordingly.
I disagree, the high 3 wasnt a good system. The difference between 2.0 and 2.5 % is minimal when you can completely lose the whole shebang at anytime for reasons that have nothing to do with your competence at any time between day 1 all the way through day 7304.
Also the vast majority don't get their 20. It's like >80% leaving before 20 yrs.
The bigger contributing factors to declining enlistment are: general lack of support for the military among younger people (the latest round of forever wars didn't exactly help), better options in the civilian world (especially increasing benefits on student loan suppprt), and decreasing physical fitness (the increase in obesity rates directly lowers the available recruitment population).
People have different ideas about life. If you can get a 9-5 job that pays the bills why join the military and be deployed overseas for months on end not being a part of your family?
The civilian sector has the same problem with truck drivers and maritime shipping.
It’s somewhat more likely that you don’t statistically, yes. Admittedly I don’t really get the point when they already aptitude test, but I also like to hate the military so whatever.
Just the navy, who instituted a similar change on Friday. This article about the army is from 2022 and the army reverted the change a week later. High school completion is a requirement again. It remains to be seen if the navy makes it the fully week.
A bit of sensationalism going on. They still have to pass a standardize test that mostly proves they have an IQ suitable for military service.
There are people that could be a great soldier/servicemember that didn’t make it through high school. Some will flourish under a military environment that failed out of high school.
I don’t really like people assuming somebody that didn’t graduate high school are somehow inferior or stupid people. The issue is complicated.
It would seem to be in their self interest to not skew the test results. The military has done a lot of research on their testing. A soldier that is too incompetent is a danger to his/her comrades. Previous attempts to recruit soldiers with too low of an IQ was a disaster. More danger than help.
I don’t really see how they would he less trustworthy than a school board. Especially considering the stakes.
Agreed. The military is incredibly scientific about their approach to testing. No test is perfect of course, but they have high levels of funding for full-time professionals to do nothing but study this in a rigorous academic way. Also worth remembering is that the military academies are ivy league, so not exactly low value institutions.
Where there is a need for personnel, there is some incentive to accept people who might not be ideal, but they are going to approach that in the most sane way possible.
The problem is that a high school education represents literally years of knowledge a person has accumulated. People not having that knowledge means they will not be able to participate.
It's not about whether they will be smart enough to learn; it's about the fact that they will have to be taught. There's no foundation to build on, there's no axiomatic knowledge we can rely on.
People who haven't graduated high school are inferior. They're not less human, but they are incontrovertibly less able.
Denying that might feel good, but society didn't mandate 10 years of public education for shits and giggles.
> The problem is that a high school education represents literally years of knowledge a person has accumulated.
The vast majority of states require that you be at least 17, and often 18, before you can choose to stop with said education. Everyone the military is willing to accept on other fronts has the literal years spent in school that you speak of. If there is a gap, it's only on the order of a few months, if that.
Right. My best friend in high school dropped out, and later joined the army after getting a GED. I dropped out as well but got a diploma from an alternative school for adults and joined.
Everyone I know who did not complete high School got within a year or two. Paradoxically, it was the smartest people I know who dropped out. None of our reasons were academic. A combination of social and financial
Your nonsense is unwelcome here, please stay on topic, it sucks scrolling through threads and hearing interesting debate about a topic, only to have someone interject with bait/non sequiturs.
Unless you're passing honors and AP classes in HS, the knowledge gained by simply graduating does not give a strong signal about superiority / inferiority for military purposes.
Granted the Army will have to work harder on average to train these people, but some learn better outside of the traditional classroom.
> There's no foundation to build on, there's no axiomatic knowledge we can rely on.
Did you serve in the military? I'm wondering what axiomatic knowledge taught in 12th or 11th grade, exactly, that you think military training depends on.
Axiomatic knowledge? Perhaps in maths and science. The rest is different in various countries, so surely cannot form some universal knowledge base.
And in maths/science, a typical high school or even non-technical medium-end college graduate has ~zero skills or knowledge, so that cannot be a factor either.
>The problem is that a high school education represents literally years of knowledge a person has accumulated.
A high school diploma only signifies the individual was approved by the indoctrination of public education, unless you're the handful that had private or homeschooling which still doesn't mean much academically (see below).
Incidentally, in the US we have what's called the GED[1]. The GED can be taken at any time without any requirement for prior education, and passing the GED is equivalent to graduating high school.
So no, a high school education in the US does not represent "literally years of knowledge".[2]
[2]: I'm a GED graduate, and I can tell you its contents are roughly equivalent to elementary schooling in most other countries. I can also tell you that is what a high school diploma represents in the US, academic wise, because they are the same. If you can calculate 1+1=2 and speak basic English, you are an American high school graduate.
I don't disagree, but I do think it's important to note that any two high school experiences can differ drastically. For someone who is barely making it through high school academically, their high school diploma may represent a basic level of math and other subjects. For someone else who is in advanced or AP classes, their high school diploma is going to be substantially more advanced than what the GED is. The GED is a fairly basic measurement. I don't think I would consider it high school equivalent, although when there is a requirement for a high school diploma, it is absolutely true that a GED will nearly always suffice, so from that perspective they are equivalent.
Edit: also worth noting, is that I know of people who have graduated high school who probably could not pass a GED. It is definitely possible in the right school to coast your way to graduation, even if you would not meet the normal expectations. So in those cases, a GED would be superior to a diploma. All of this I think indicates that high school diploma is becoming somewhat meaningless
Homeschooling is full of indoctrination. If anything, indoctrination is stronger, because it is much easier to isolate kid from anything outside of a small bubble.
“The problem is that a high school education represents literally years of knowledge a person has accumulated. People not having that knowledge means they will not be able to participate.”
The problem is, if you aren’t there on graduation day, you don’t get that proof of paper saying you know what you know. So before you go and put people down without context in their lives, you should be aware that there are dozens of reasons why someone who aced high school - didn’t get a diploma.
A failing grade or too low attendance score, for a single required class does though. Granted it's possible to return and complete the credit but lots of people, for lots of different reasons, never do it.
Moving to a new state a couple months before graduation and the old school drags their feet on transfer papers will certainly make one miss graduating and not get a diploma. Illness is another. If you miss out on last quarter because of an illness you were hospitalized for. Don’t be so obtuse. Obviously if you sleep in and miss graduation day, you can still stop by the office and get your diploma.
> “People who haven't graduated high school are inferior. They're not less human, but they are incontrovertibly less able.”
I didn’t graduate from high school, and I completely disagree with you.
I learned more math as a teenager than most people ever do, learned two languages to fluency in my 20s, both in very different language families from my native one, and got into a nice software career in my 30s, first in Beijing and then in SF.
Why exactly am I “inferior”? Just because I didn’t choose to pursue the piece of paper that your world view dictates?
I think you may be overestimating the amount of education many high school graduates have as a practical matter. Similarly, I know people that never finished high school that achieved more in computer science disciplines than most people that post here ever will. Most things of value you have to teach yourself, no matter how much schooling you have, and that has far more bearing on outcomes than people like to acknowledge.
For people that didn’t graduate high school, being a moron typically was not a causal factor. Knowing how to write and do basic algebra is sufficient to bootstrap yourself to anywhere you want to go, and many people get an adequate foundation in that before they ever get to high school, never mind graduate.
> People who haven't graduated high school are inferior. They're not less human, but they are incontrovertibly less able.
I didn't graduate from high school. I ran business groups, founded startups, exited, accumulated patents, and am usually considered articulate and capable.
Yes, the distribution of people who didn't graduate from high school are different from those who did. But you can measure the things you actually care about. High school education (or other educational attainment) is just one signal of a person's capability.
Lots of people fail to graduate because of a single failing grade in a single class senior year. Or they get suspended/expelled in their last months. Those people certainly didn't miss out on years of education.
Then there are folks like me. I dropped out of kindergarten. I didn't do any structured schooling until I was 16 when I passed a GED and ACT test then went to college for Computer Science and Physics. My GPA in college was 3.89 and I've been a highly competent software engineer for ~20 years. Nothing that I missed from high school has held me back in any significant way.
Everything covered in high school was retaught within 1 year at my university to bring everyone up to a common baseline level. They have students from all over the world.
It really isn't years worth of useful knowledge, the military is capable of giving recruits the knowledge they need much more quickly, especially given the much more disciplined/controlled environment involved.
Doubt. If someone can't even read, or even have a solid concept of abstraction with numbers, I doubt you can came up to even the lowest bar of college. There is an unspoken filter to even get the chance to take that one year catch up.
In a year you can teach kids who are a little behind enough to get them up to the min high school will teach them, but certainly not the most that high school will teach them if they want it.
Of course this overlooks what the minimum bar for a college is. At my college the lowest math they offered that wasn't considered remedial was calculus. That's a far cry from many community colleges where the lowest is alegebra. You definitely should have learned alegebra in high school and not knowing it definitely extends your timeline on certain disciplines.
> Deny that might feel good, but society didn't mandate 10 years of public education for shits and giggles.
k12 was created by industrialists who wanted obedient workers and well behaved citizens who won’t cause crime and instability in the ruling class’ assets.
School prepares workers, not the actual people changing the world.
Most high school grads will know more about how the mitochondria is the power of the cell, more so than know about taxes and personal finance. That’s by design.
When I dropped out all of my teachers said "you know, some of the smartest and successful people dropped out" etc. The fact that "education" is compulsory isn't really a good indicator, depending on what kind of abilities we're talking about. Years of "knowledge" "accumulated" sounds a little unmalleable. A ship in a harbor is safe, but that's not what ships are for. On the other hand, standardization, setting a low enough or average enough common denominator, socialization, behavior modification, etc are all features of the education system which do provide some utility. I'll be the first to say an org or team of outliers isn't generally going to be effective.
Schools are doing a piss-poor job of educating people. Only 20% of schools can muster a 70% proficiency score, with the vast majority being much worse.
What this indicates is a startlingly large number of students are receiving an education that holds no value whatsoever.
Further, as already mentioned by someone else, the military will still use its own test as a means to determine where to place a recruit.
Either society isn't giving a prospective good parent the resources to achieve success. Any or many reasons exist; rent is too high, jobs got replaced by AI craze, only qualified for jobs that aren't valued at a living wage. If the parents do have the resources but still fail, society is at fault as the kids haven't been rehomed to other environments.
Okay, a failing student is the fault of the parents. Now what?
Do you think parents want their children to fail? Failing children are generally associated with low socioeconomic status.
So, now, you have to fix low socioeconomic status. Now what?
etc.
You are correct that schools and teachers can only do so much. However, schools and teachers must also operate in the reality of what actually exists rather than what they would like.
Is the proficiency score you're talking about defined at the US level, or is the same proficiency test used by other countries as well?
A scoring system is only useful when comparing parts of the entire population. If the score is only used in the US, for example, then it's only really useful for comparing states relative to each other.
When looking at the entire population and saying US students only pass the US proficiency test 20% of the time, there's no relative comparison to look at. We could simply change the test or the scoring system if we wanted a higher or lower result in the population.
>I don’t really like people assuming somebody that didn’t graduate high school are somehow inferior or stupid people.
I took it the opposite way. High schools are designed to provide a bare floor of knowledge a citizen should achieve. The top side may be extremely competitive, but the bar for passing high school is meant to be low.
Someone who can't pass that and doesn't have developmental issues likely have environmental issues to address. So having someone be exploited by the government to fight instead of improve that environment feels scummy.
It's more of a spiritual gesture than some hard law. They aren't called "standardized tests" because they test for the exceptional.
I'm sure we can put the relevant education board in a room and have them argue over what should/shouldn't be on such tests, but the current result is a compromise after years of deliberation, being tweaked a little each year.
I'll be a bit more specific and say "high school testing is designed to provide a floor of knowledge a government feels its citizens should achieve" if that helps.
> High schools are designed to provide a bare floor of knowledge a citizen should achieve.
I agree with your general point, but I don't know about high school per se.
I quit school at age 14, got my GED, and this was one of the best decisions I had ever made. I feel like there should be more options for people to leave the system early, once they've attained that bare floor of knowledge. (Which, for a sufficiently motivated child, could in all seriousness be at age 11 or 12. The GED test was laughably easy, and it still amazes me that people sit through four years of school for that.)
FWIW, the military frowned upon GEDs, often requiring a waiver, but allowed GED holders to enlist.
I think you shouldn't equate "didn't graduate" with "can't graduate" - I feel that a large part, perhaps most, high school dropouts didn't drop out because of various social issues, and for a young person without a high-school diploma, very likely lack of money and potential jobs, and very likely a lack of a supportive home environment, the army can provide a stable employment and a community that has its issues but is likely less abusive than whatever home environment prevented them from graduating high school.
I feel my "that student has environmental issues" agrees with your sentiment. I do agree that very few students who did not graduate truly can't pass the curriculum. And lower socioeconomic standing is a huge (if not biggest) reason.
>the army can provide a stable employment and a community that has its issues but is likely less abusive than whatever home environment prevented them from graduating high school.
For such a student I feel it's out of the frying pan and into the fire. Now they are bound to the government for X years for everything, from a meager pay to living quarters (you also needed to look the way they told you to look, but I think they are relaxing those hair/tattoo codes a bit). You go where they tell you to go and do what they tell you to do. And "leaving your job" if it's not for you means you can be put at trial.
It's an awful lot of a gamble being taken here for someone who likely hasn't addressed their core traumas to begin with.
I'm just saying that there isn't a safety net that provides a better alternative, such a high-school dropout without a supporting family becoming homeless does even less for their core traumas than being told what to do in the army; whatever the drawbacks are, for many this is legitimately the least worst option that's available to them.
Perhaps. That's what brought my main point of the feeling being "entrapment" (i don't know the exact term for this sort of phenomenon).
Hey, did our system utterly fail you? Submit yourself to us and we'll fix the problem we continue to propogate! You don't even need to complete the educational system we outlined anymore, just be a warm body to throw at future battles for oil.
There's less incentive to provide proper housing when you can instead put your citizens in barracks.
Yes exactly. For all the flaws and bad practices of the military and its recruitment, hitting down on people with bad circumstances is not flexing on those flaws and bad practices of the military. People's worth shouldn't depend on a high school diploma.
100x this. One of the smartest, most compassionate, successful, and resourceful people I've ever met, is a high school dropout. Even the story of that dropout alone is amazing (he managed to secure a huge grant for the said school, and decided there are more important/interesting things to do next).
That standardised test administered by the US military has some history. The idea was that folks who were below an 85IQ would be harder to train. During the Vietnam war they tried abandoning the requirement and the results were sad. It cost the military a lot more in remedial training, but the real tragedy is that these folks died at 3 times the rate of people who would have passed the test. They weren’t cut out to be sent to a war zone.
So intelligence is important for military service but a person’s completion of high school isn’t an indication of low intelligence. They may have dropped out for any other reason. It’s entirely possible that they may flourish in the structured environment the military offers.
It’s fair to ask if the IQ test is a good measure of intelligence, or if it’s measuring something else. But in this context, it’s measuring something that is strongly correlated to success as a solider.
It would be really fascinating to see a graph of IQ vs chance of being killed in a war (normalised for people in the same role); would it continuously be increasing, or would there be diminishing or even negative returns to IQ beyond a certain point?
85 IQ really isn't that low. It's one standard deviation below average, so about 16% of people are below that.
In your average high school class of 30 people, the 4 stupidest would be rejected by the military on these grounds (assume the bottom 1/31 have such severe developmental difficulties they can't even attend a normal high school).
You’re overlooking a hidden pernicious effect, that IQ is a relative measure that does not identify a declining trend very effectively, i.e., any identified decline in IQ is both a momentary and transient indicator as the norm, i.e., 100 IQ, integrated; and the 100 IQ norm also does not say anything about the overall relative state to any other previous state.
In other words, this is how we end up with Idiocracy where a low IQ person becomes the smartest person in the world right under everyone’s nose.
IQ hasn’t declined though. The Flynn effect means that the median IQ has gone up steadily every decade since they started measuring. It’s unclear why. Maybe better nutrition, better schooling, less leaded petrol - hard to tell.
So an 85 IQ person today is substantially more intelligent than an 85 IQ person in the Vietnam war. That said, the modern infantry man’s job is more complex. I would postulate that the job’s complexity has grown to keep pace with the Flynn effect.
For others interested, this doesn't seem to be fully accepted. A few studies in EU countries (and Australia)) have shown slight regressions from past increases.
No studies done in the US which is the cohort here.
Studies have been done in the US. Here [1] is (to my knowledge) the latest, and it does indeed show a substantial reversal of the Flynn Effect. And to my knowledge the reversal of the Flynn Effect is indeed globally acknowledged. The debate at this point is on the cause.
The main reason early studies were in places like Scandinavia is that they have compulsory military enlistment alongside IQ tests, whose results are made available for research. Studies in places like the US came later, because simply getting a representative and comparable sample is non-trivial. There's also the cultural issue that studies on IQ are walking on eggshells in the US.
And it's not slight regressions. We've gone from gradually and consistently gaining IQ, to the current scenario where some studies [2] have shown declines as great as .29 standard deviation per decade. Meaning in 40 years we'd all be a whole standard deviation away from where the mean used to be. That is exceptionally disconcerting, particularly if it doesn't just flat-line at some point.
About 10% of people are too cognitively challenged to positively contribute in the US Army even in the least mentally challenging roles.
At 80 - 85 IQ level person can typically read basic level. They gradate from schools and comprehend simple texts and sentences but may struggle with more complex language structures, vocabulary, and abstract concepts. People with reading disorders or other disorders should not be confused with low IQ.
A friend of mine I met while serving in Afghanistan,
He was working for the Department of Agriculture, trying to get the Afghan farmers to grow saffron instead of poppy. He was a professor in agronomy and would help his students back home in the US with their assignments.
He had signed up for the US army and ended up serving in the Special Forces in Vietnam for 2 years. He dropped out of school when he was 13.
In my opinion, the military should be a second chance for a country’s citizens, who have for some reason slipped through the cracks.
You are making an assumption that a person dropping out of school at 13 in the ~1960s would have the same education level as someone dropping out of school at 13 today, let alone that the conditions and circumstances one would find themselves in having dropped out are equivalent to the 1960s. Frankly, especially with the crumbling and cracking discipline, order, and hierarchy in the U.S. military now, you are also making an assumption that they would gain the benefits you surely assume based on a historical perception.
Two things. I didn’t say anything about school in the 1960s. I only said, they used they’ve used the IQ test for about a century to good effect. When they abandoned it for expediency, the results were tragic. That’s why they’ll stick to the IQ test, correct or not.
You’re saying that the US military has issues and it may well have. I’m no expert on that. But I still believe that a person who has dropped out of high school has a lot to offer society. It seems like the US military is coming around to the same line of thinking, as long as the person passes the IQ test. I think that’s a reasonable compromise.
The program might fail but if we never try then we’ll never know.
Do you have a source on the 'cracking discipline, order and hierarchy' of the US army? I know a 35 yo French artillery officer (now he's teaching new officers) who has worked with the US military for 15years, last year he told us that the US army is the only western army that didn't stagnate and became better, organization-wise, in the last 15 year.
That makes sense, it's one of the few armies which has been involved in one war or another, at scale, for the last several decades. Practice makes perfect. And this is probably the only way such an organization can evolve, just like a muscle will only evolve if used, and will atrophy otherwise.
I think the original reason for requesting the high-school diploma is two fold. On one hand the person can come back and pick up where they left off, with a better chance of serving society. But maybe the more important one was that it lowered the chances of teens enlisting it the pit of desperation, seeing themselves as failures, with no other way out. Those may not be the people you really want because those may not be the people who really want you. This is the kind of deal that's hard to pull out of, and the Army would probably not want to be in the situation to have a wave of desperate teens realizing they just made a rash decision. The Army also doesn't want to be drained of new recruits, so here they are, taking what's on the table. It's a clear sign that young people are sending to the Army though.
Whatever you think might be going on with the overall discipline of the US military today, it has nothing on how bad things were in the Vietnam era. Enlisted men slipping grenades into their officers’ tents after getting high as a kite in a combat zone was a regular occurrence.
Fragging was more often a rational act of self preservation than drug-induced madness. It was mostly soldiers getting rid of officers who were likely to get them killed. Heroin and weed don't just turn otherwise good men into murderers.
Maybe my phrasing implied too much causality, but a mixture of psychoactive drugs, extended sleep deprivation, and combat stress could turn anyone into a murderer.
And recent research absolutely has shown that heavy cannabis usage in adolescence and early adulthood does have a clear association with an increased risk of developing psychosis and schizophrenia. Just because the war on drugs lied about the effects of less harmful drugs like cannabis doesn’t mean they can’t be hazardous to your health like any other substance.
Regarding heroin - one may not be particularly murderous while zonked out, but addiction can make people surprisingly aggressive.
I’d also like to add that the company-grade officers stuck in the mud alongside enlisted were less at fault for the needless deaths than the incompetent general staff or the political actors who got us and kept us over there in the first place. You might enj the novel “Matterhorn” by Karl Marlantes, a Marine infantry officer who served with distinction in Vietnam. Or you might prefer “Dereliction of Duty” by Lt General H.R. McMaster, a renowned commander of the GWOT era who wrote his PhD thesis on the failures of Westmoreland and the other generals who mangled Vietnam.
All I know is that my army captain was the first real role model I ever had.
Perhaps it doesn't work out that way for everyone, but I bet it does for many.
The only thing on the ASVAB the Army cares about is the GT score. When I took the test as a dumb high school kid I was only smarter than 79% of the population and had a GT score of 107, which is too dumb to become an officer. Many years later after almost 7 years programming full time in the corporate world I retook the ASVAB. Then I was smarter than 98% of the population and had a GT score of 129. The max is 130, so I may have had the highest GT score among test takers that year.
The GT score is comprised of combinations of several different segments of the ASVAB of which the most important is applied arithmetic. Those are math problems in paragraph form that requires careful reading and multiple steps of very simple algebra like calculating pricing for a retail purchase and deduction of the coin denomination in return. The challenge there is just finishing the test because they, by design, do not provide enough time.
EDIT
I just want to point out that I did not become more intelligent as I got older. My ability to read and instantly formulate logic substantially improved as I got older through practice. Those, reading and logic, are skills and the performance improvement is permanent.
There are similar results for other IQ tests as well. You can study and practice to improve your score. Which shows that they aren’t really measuring raw intelligence. But, that doesn’t mean they aren’t measuring fitness for a task at least at that point in time.
We also seem to take it as fact that intelligence is an unchanging attribute you get at birth. Wouldn’t your brain upgrade itself as it optimizes for the world around it?
I wonder how IQ higer than 85 relates to the chances of dying, maybe still relevant? There's probably a sweet spot not too dumb but dumb enough to join the military.
This was interesting to me as well. I'm assuming the more limited IQ resulted in more of those soldiers falling into inherently more dangerous roles such as the Infantry due to inability to qualify for more technical and safer roles.
Even with a decent IQ, failure to finish high school usually indicates very low commitment / time preference / overall “with it” ness. It’s not a good thing that this is the future of our military but not at all surprised that the military is having recruiting problems.
As I mentioned above, most of my teachers supported me dropping out and told me of the successful types they knew like me. However I would like to stress that this kind of path isn't for everyone and having a low-enough common denominator and standardization does have utility. For most people, not finishing high school could very well mean a lack of commitment. Especially if they need external motivators as most do. However in my adult life as an autodidact and "life long learner" I don't see a lot of self-direction or commitment coming from the general population of graduates.
Back in the day my country still had obligatory military service for the oldest male child of the family. Everyone had to do this. IQ tests were used to sort people coming in.
The military does not only need highly functioning autonomous operators. There were many more menial positions in cleaning, catering, hauling and warm body canon fodder than there were scouts or special forces.
I guess these days many of those auxiliary functions are farmed out in very lucrative deals to select private companies.
Read abt McNamara’s Morons, referenced elsewhere in the thread. Below a certain threshold of low IQ, humans are fundamentally unfit to handle dangerous weapons, and lack basic awareness and understanding to perform even menial roles.
> Back in the day my country still had obligatory military service for the oldest male child of the family. Everyone had to do this. IQ tests were used to sort people coming in.
With due respect for your country, which country you're talking about is highly relevant. There are <5 countries with militaries comparable in efficiency to the US military and only Israel is really soldier-per-soldier competitive. That's not a criticism of your country--your country likely spends its efforts on better things--but if we're talking about what's effective for a military, US military practices really are a reasonable gold standard.
That starts with the fact that the US doesn't do compulsory military service, because soldiers who don't want to be there aren't effective soldiers (note that Israel does do compulsory military service, which is because they have different problems than we do).
> The military does not only need highly functioning autonomous operators. There were many more menial positions in cleaning, catering, hauling and warm body canon fodder than there were scouts or special forces.
Thinking that "warm body cannon fodder" is something the military needs demonstrates a bit of a misconception on how modern militaries work.
Cleaning, catering, hauling, etc. need to be handled by high-functioning people as well, because in a warzone, attacks on things like cleanliness to reduce morale, or attacks on food and other supplies, are effective attacks.
All this is to say, that if the US military doesn't want low-IQ folks, there are good reasons for that.
>That starts with the fact that the US doesn't do compulsory military service, because soldiers who don't want to be there aren't effective soldiers (note that Israel does do compulsory military service, which is because they have different problems than we do).
While the security concerns of certain countries have motivated compelled military service, I wonder if a side-effect is less division/greater intra-country tolerance? And would the U.S. benefit from instituting compelled military service, or perhaps, compelled national service, which doesn't necessarily entail holding a weapon.
It doesn't really matter if the US would benefit from forced military service because that's not the kind of values the country was founded on. Drafts may sometimes be necessary in wartime, but during peace it's an awful idea to force military training on everyone.
On the one hand, one of the values our country was founded on was maintaining the right to own slaves. On the other hand, the values that our country was founded on that I still care about, like free speech and privacy, have been eroded far more severely than a draft would erode them.
I'm definitely ethically opposed to a draft, but it's a bit naive to think that the US has ethical values or even ever has.
Not only are you correct here but the personality type you are describing is actually a quite common one in that environment.
People who did terribly in the context of a class rooom but thrive in the military in very complicated roles.
This recent interview with the commander of Delta Force comes to mind for me but what you’re describing is not rare. It cuts both ways like any organisation, there’s plenty of people who don’t thrive there as well but I’m not upset about this change at all, I think it’s sensible overall.
I was constantly failing classes in high school, but I ended up as an engineer at FANG company without breaking a sweat. My cofounder didn’t finish high school and worked as an HFT trader.
People here who are judging people based on their high school accomplishments must be coming from a sheltered middle class background.
Shouldn't be surprising, in any group there will be a normal distribution. A person that didn't finish high school and succeeding isn't shocking, but falls way to the right of the distribution.
Of course they exist, but until you find one yourself one would think the same.
'Some', 'could', 'mostly', not too strong arguments for the abolishment of generic rules applied on all.
'Some' 'could' see that the ability of jumping the requirements of education is 'mostly' coincides with a certain level of mental abilities.
'Some' smart people do not participate in organized education and 'some' graduates regardless of modest abilities, but those are never arguments for the generic population and generic rules. Probably those passing a good(!) admission test 'could' understand that still...
> Some', 'could', 'mostly', not too strong arguments for the abolishment of generic rules applied on all.
"Some", "could", and "mostly" are words that people use when they're concerned with saying what's true, not when they have a weak argument. The facts are rarely absolutes and if you don't use qualifying words like that, what you're saying is rarely strictly true.
This has been a litmus test for me over the years honestly. I tend to trust people much less if they speak in absolutes on complex topics.
Yes, it can make your argument more strong, but you're lying if it doesn't cover 100% of the cases for the subject. For the lay person, this might be fine, they don't know, but for anyone who knows the subject matter in depth, chances are you sound like an idiot.
I'd argue this mentality plays a good part in making some social media so toxic. People generally aren't going to read detailed explanations on a topic, so people who would write them have less incentive, meanwhile some pop star's 10 word tweet over simplifying some complex global crisis, like you can just make it go away overnight, will get a million likes.
> They vaccinate for all sorts of diseases. Covid is no different.
But the covid vaccines ARE different:
Vaccines typically take 10-15 years of research and clinical trials before approval [1].
The covid vaccines OTOH got developed, "tested" and approved within the timespan of less than a year. They literally had to invoke a sci-fi trope ("warp speed") to justify this timetable [2].
> It’s a risk and threat to them being functional as an organization.
The injection poses a bigger threat to them as an organisation than the disease itself: men below 40 are 6 times more likely to get heart damage from the mRNA shot than from the disease [3]. And this for a disease that has a lower IFR than influenza among people younger than 60 [4].
Pre-2020, decades of research into vaccines for (other) coronaviruses only resulted in vaccines that either didn't work at all or led to enhanced disease [5].
After a gain-of-function experiment went south in Wuhan, all that hard-earned wisdom got thrown out of the window (along with the Nuremberg code [6]) for a panicked and rushed vaccination program.
Yes, these vaccines improve the short-term relative outcomes for the elderly, the obese and the sick. About six months after vaccination you still are somewhat protected against symptoms, but are more likely to get infected than the non-vaccinated [7] [8] [9].
The issue with optional vaccinations wasn't the poke, it was pulling soldiers or entire ships from the field. Those resources were there for a reason and either needed to be replaced or weakened our posture.
With COVID under control, and 96% of soldiers vaccinated there is no longer a need to make it mandatory.
This is what we want right? Policy based on evaluated risks and threats?
They should institute a voluntary conscripted amnesty/asylum for those who entered into the country and are on immigration parole. This program could allow for retroactive application to spouses/children (no extended family transferability until completion of service contract).
There would be no need for sign-on bonus, you could add additional qualifications for g.i. benefits in the form of naturalization.
It would really be a net positive as they would be forced to assimilate into our society in a way that is a net benefit at many different layers of the civil stack. The kind of people who are willing to serve the country rather than acting as a sanctioned entitlement case would be a win/win. No?
I'm a little worried that if we implement the "service guarantees citizenship" scheme you allude to, we'll be forced to fight a war against an interstellar insect race soon after.
No I didn’t say that or allude to it, voluntary conscripted amnesty. They would still have to naturalize as well, and only offer that after a sufficient period of service and all the rigors of training, ait, and actual term.
Do you believe we are not already having an inter-domain/dimensional information war with something of a nature you describe? (Kind of kidding)
Your comment is dismissive, and unhelpful. I think if you were to maybe review the concept in a less shallow manner, you would see this is voluntary, for those already in country on parole anyways. If you think you can dismiss the concept by being disrespectful of your lack of depth I’d suggest you work on comprehension with logic puzzles or the like.
All of what I said requires effort, which is not guaranteed, they are options for the motivated, which is what we want those coming to this country to hold of personal value. Have a nice day though.
I giggled at this, but in starship troopers you'd not inherit citizenship.
OP's proposal seem more like what the Roman empire did granting citizenship to conscripted barbarians, which worked or not depending on your perspective.
It worked as long as they were properly integrated into the legionary structure. Auxilia were organized, disciplined, led, and ulimately paid and rewarded like the non-auxilia. The system stopped working because they abandoned it. Due to time pressure, they hired entire war bands and armies as mercenaries led by their kings instead of reorganizing them into Roman-style forces. It didn't help at all that the Romans were prone to cheating them out of their rewards.
They did the hiring part that you mention most probably because it was cheaper (in the context of the then Roman economy, that is).
I also think that the much higher level of taxation inflicted on the (local) Roman population certainly didn’t help, as I feel that by the 3rd-4th century many parts of the Roman hinterland were much less populated than they should have been (had not the higher taxation hindered the Roman demographics, that is). In a way the outside-the-limes “barbarians” had the comparative advantage of not having had to pay those very high taxes, and most probably that was good for their (the “barbarians’”) demographics. And on a large enough time scale demographics is destiny.
Yeah, maybe. Money is not the only issue. Battle-hardened troops simply take a long time to be replaced. The early 5th century saw lots of infighting between eastern and western emperors and ambitious provincial rulers, which predictably depleted the army and emptied the coffers of the empire. The Eastern Empire fared better because it was more affluent and more densely settled than the western half.
The fall of the western empire is more accurately described as a fragmentation, after which live mostly went on like it did before. The true downfall of Roman civilization in Italy happened during the decades-long unsuccessful attempt by the Eastern Empire to recover the peninsula.
Don't have to go that far back. The union did this during the Civil War.
A boat comes in from EU with immigrants, men get off the boat, are handled a Union uniform and are put right back on another boat down south to the war.
I feel like "service guarantees citizenship" was debated in 50BC in Ancient Rome. "In this framework, the blood and toil of immigrants won't just contribute to our nation's fabric, but will be the very bedrock of its defense."
I agree the sentiment of that period was dark, and giving the people who have sacrificed their homes and have made a perilous journey here hope is what they came for to begin with. There is an argument to be made for ejecting people with no prospects outside of abhorrence, this is my attempting to soften it with something to strive for.
If we don’t do things like this, what do we expect these people who need to care for themselves and potentially their families are going to be willing to do?
We also have to be serious in consideration of the current climate, and having recruiting down will just lead to drafts or forced conscriptions if the climate turns further.
I wish we wouldn’t have enabled the current belief in the country being an opportunity for foreign actors to come to without using the proper mechanisms. Unfortunately it has and we are now in a situation that is untenable. We can hold back in fear of the “invasion” or come up with plans to integrate and/or assimilate these individuals in their family that will be a benefit or leave them to languish to our detriment.
I keep hearing about it being military-aged men whom are illegally emigrating to the u.s., and low recruiting would seem like a low-hanging fruit in the form of conscription for immigrants.
I mean it also would afford their actual stations more contract labor in non-military support roles at their posts for their spouses. Also would reduce recruitment costs as you wouldn’t need so many incentives to get em through the door, reduce over-crowded shelters, and the kind of people willing to serve and improve their station are the kind of immigrants we profess to want.
For the most part, my views on migration are "why do we even have borders?" (And then I look at humans choosing to be all Machiavellian to each other and am sad for a bit).
Given we live in a world with borders where nations try to subvert each other to their own interests, I think training migrants to use weapons you give them is going to be a great way for, say, America to give Mexico a military for free. (As a European, I think this would be hilarious… but more as a plot for a Peter Sellers film rather than as actual news to wake up to).
Do you mean like right now? You would propose removing world wide borders and citizenship requirements?
Or do you mean in a utopian future? If the former, is there any real programmatic intelligent analysis of how this would actually happen and what the negatives would be?
> You would propose removing world wide borders and citizenship requirements?
From the point of view of citizens or economies rather than nations, their removal would apparently be a good thing, free movement boosting trade and the economy: https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2018/08/06/open-borders-econ... (Michael Clemens also quoted in other papers, I don't think I've heard of wbur.org before).
But it's the same problem as anarchy: to focus on only some aspect of freedom is to ignore harms prevented by the absence of, or limits to, that freedom.
> If the former, is there any real programmatic intelligent analysis of how this would actually happen and what the negatives would be?
I lack the necessary foundation to distinguish between such an analysis and a think-piece in a newspaper (or, these days, the output of a LLM, or a YouTuber in a suit and tie). Link I gave above? I can Google Michael Clemens, but even seeing a list of accolades whose standards I don't know either, means I can't tell how he and his views are rated by other economists. And worse, when I do look up a list of works by Michael Clemens, one of the results tells me:
> They should institute a voluntary conscripted amnesty/asylum for those who entered into the country and are on immigration parole.
There are ways to do this. The French Foreign Legion is perhaps the most time tested, but the requirements it has also mean that the model is incompatible with US Democrat party ideology:
* Only male recruits.
* Criminal history check, including with Interpol
* Identity must be verificiable with official documents from country of origin
* Health screening including dental, psychological, and fitness. No waivers for anything.
The initial contract is for 5 years. If you make it and re-enlist for an additional contract (usually a couple of years), you can now apply for French citizenship.
I am a well educated individual. I did not have to work very hard at all for a well paying job after college from a respected company. I have skill sets that are absolutely in demand, particularly in areas the military would like.
When China re-colonized Hong Kong I gave strong thought to joining the military. When Russia invaded Ukraine, I similarly felt called to join the military, if not to fight for Ukraine, to prepare to fight for Taiwan.
The reason I won't join the military is because America does not support Rule of Law.
We invaded a country under false pretenses and invaded another country because we could. The aftermath of Vietnam inundated popular culture and media with a clear message: America fucked up. The people I looked up to, Anthony Bourdain for example, hated people like Kissinger, and imparted that hatred to me. Bourdain showed America's military legacy in Asia. I heard about Haliburton profiteering. I heard about the military industrial complex. I heard about Lejune water, and burn pits, and trouble with Tricare. Military bases that pump cancer into the ground when there is a fire. People like Jon Stewart showed nightly how bad faith American journalism and politicians are. He interviewed the deputy secretary of defense who was aghast that someone might try to ask for accountability. Historians, like Timothy Snyder (Yale professor specializing in eastern european history) are saying that America is headed into very very dark times and writing guides on how to combat tyranny.
Even today, America is actively supporting a genocidal regime in Israel, spitting in the face of a rules based international order. Rules for your enemies, but not your friends is not Rule of Law, it is exactly the opposite.
I grew up understanding that America was evil and that the American military was a tool for evil.
So when I listen to people like Anothony Blinken get on stage and talk about Rule of Law, that's exciting. But then I see them ignore Rule of Law for our allies. When I listen to General Milley talk about Trump, and General Mattis talk about Trump, I get excited. These are clearly educated individuals who understand fascism and want to do the right thing, but then they resign rather than fight or walk to church showing support for someone evil.
I do not ever want to have to treat American Soil like a "battle space" because Americans want racial justice.
If you want professionals to join the military, you have to support Rule of Law. You have to take care of political corruption at home.
If you want professionals to join the military, you have to get rid of Stock Trading Nancy pelosi for openly supporting conflicts of interests. You have to put Trump in the slammer for literally trying to end constitutional rule, something military officers took an oath they are not living up to to do. You have to tax billionaires so the government is for the people and not for the people with billions. You have to end private funding of candidates for elections, which major American colleges (Harvard and Yale) say directly results in a government that looks more like plutocracy than democracy.
Most of all, most of all, you have to convince professionals that the military is a place they can change the world for the better, rather than a place where you kill brown people to make sure the "spice" flows and billionaires pockets are lined.
In 2019 when China fully claimed legal supremacy over Hong Kong, not only in violation of international law, but in violation of the wishes of the people of Hong Kong themselves.
China used colonial policies such as forced immigration (requiring Hong Kong to accept Chinese settlers), forced public expenditure for the benefit of the colonizer (bridge), linguistic domination (via forced changes to education), political pre-selection (Chinese approval of candidates), violent put down of dissent, rewriting history in school books, etc.
Equivocation and appeals to history to justify domination of a people who do not wish to be dominated are standard tactics. "Ukraine never had a tradition of genuine statehood," "We are all kievan rus, we are one people." "Ukrainian identity is artificially created by the west."
China asserted itself as the authority in Hong Kong with force over a people who largely saw themselves as distinct from mainland China. China then used policies of oppression, assimilation, and settling in an attempt to destroy hong kong self rule and ultimately the idea of Hong Kong-ness (in favor of chinese-ness) against the wishes of indigenous residents. To me, that is colonialism.
I wonder if 20th century Britain and America were up to your political standards when they fought in WW2. Back when the British king was Emperor of India and America had just finished retreating from occupying South American countries because they lost money for the United Fruit Company. I think Nancy Pelosi was still trading stocks in Congress when the Kosovo genocide was ended by NATO.
When the US attacked Cuba for foreign encroachment and supported Israel in its revanchist genocides, what Rule of Law were they following when it supported Ukraine against Russia doing the same thing? Seems pretty blatantly hypocritical to me.
That was one of many historical opportunities for professionals to see the US' many contradictions and domestic problems and abandon the US military. By these political standards, professionals should have abandoned US military capability back in 2014 when the latest outrageous hypocrisy was laid bare so it wouldn't have the power to be used as a tool for evil in 2022 and beyond.
Well, chop chop, America, better solve this quickly.
I guess I don't really doubt that you have good or patriotic intentions, I've seen comments like this often enough that I think it's some kind of Ralph Nader-esque "if you want to effect change, attack your friends not your enemies" strategy which doesn't strike me as particularly effective when there's any real stakes involved.
Right, just like a lot of people give strong thoughts to a lot of things that are difficult but in reality will never happen. They convince themselves that they could do it if it weren't for this ONE thing. The one thing is always conveniently there.
Instead of action we get a rant of hot topic soup like yours. But as long as "I thought about it" is prefaced, then it's all good. This is the definition of a keyboard warrior.
I don't see the military as a challenge to be conquered, a privilege to participate in, or as a place to rise the ranks. I have little desire to prove how much of a man I am in the marines.
I do look up to people such as Admiral Rickover. Jocko is the type of person that makes the military appealing. There is a legacy of quality engineering and civic contribution in the past that has been decimated by the consequences of Nixon/Reagan era policies, chiefly, selling out America to billionaires.
So "convince themselves that they could do it" is a characterization that does not make sense because I don't (and most middle class people don't) see the military as an achievement. Doctor, Lawyer, or Engineer is what the middle class sees as achievement, not military. Military is strictly viewed as an act of service and a sacrifice.
> ONE thing
It's not one thing. It is the thing. The US military is famously civilian led, and the civilian leaders are an absolutely corrupt mess in complete disarray. Characterizing that as "this ONE thing" is bad faith. Saying you don't want to join an organization because the leadership sucks isn't "ONE thing." It's not a triviality. It is core to the organizations mission and execution of that mission.
> hot topic soup
If you think I'm providing hot topic soup and not a generational liberal middle class understanding of America and our place in the world, well I wish you would be a bit more open minded. The institutions that train the people that build your tools are full of people with an understanding not too dissimilar to mine. The people who work in cybersecurity and signals frequently come from the same background as me. The government has explicitly talked about how hard it is to train for cybersecurity and how hard it is to attract cybersecurity talent. That's because cybersecurity is not about domination and hierarchy. Cybersecurity is about curiosity. A rigid hierarchy with a mission of dominance is not conducive to curiosity. Curiosity is a fundamentally liberal principle so an illiberal military is going to have a hard time attracting the curious. The act of hacking is practically an act of questioning authority.
This has all the historical overtones of McNamara's Morons [1], and those guys were far more likely to get killed or seriously injured in combat, basically because they were too dumb to process events quickly enough under pressure. While having (or not having) a high school diploma isn't necessarily a measure of intelligence, or lack thereof, it's a good enough proxy. I just hope anyone calling in an artillery strike in any future conflict can read a map first.
Similar thing in France for the CRS a while back. CRS are a special kind of police that can be dispatched anywhere quickly in big packs. They're mostly here to "handle protests". They had trouble hiring so they lowered the required test score from 10/20 to 8/20.
279 comments
[ 141 ms ] story [ 6106 ms ] threadAlso, the article is from 2022 and the requirement was reinstated a week later, so this is moot anyway. At least as it pertains to the Army. Granted, the Navy lifted the same requirement on Friday. We shall see if they last longer than a week. There remains a strong social impetus, particularly in government, to paint a picture that you can't get a job without completing high school, even though everyone already completes it these days anyway...
Russia's human waves were just means to reduce the prison population: practical stalinism 101. They are phasing out prisoner benefits as the recruiting pool is getting smaller. Also there is an increased chance Putin might order be mass mobilization after he wins the elections in May.
Increased but still highly unlikely. The Russian military inducts ~260,000 men annually just from conscription. Now that the Ukrainians have exhausted their supplies of ammunition, manpower, and funding, it's unlikely that the AFU can sustain its ability to attrite Russian manpower faster than it can be replaced.
A surprisingly straightforward article from Xinhua correspondent Zhang Zhang:
"The central locations involved in the drill are the Baltic nations, identified by NATO as particularly vulnerable to a possible Russian assault. Other areas include Norway and Romania, situated on the outskirts of the alliance; Poland on the alliance's eastern flank; and Germany as a central hub for reinforcements."
https://english.news.cn/20240128/95fbdec4ab7b4285b8f017ffeb1...
This is a very wrong take.
A big continental war like this one in Ukraine is fought with artillery and with enough men capable of holding the territory (already under control or conquered), i.e. the story of WW1 and the WW2 (when it came to the Eastern Front). You don't have that, you lose. Trouble for Ukraine (and for the West supporting Ukraine) is that they're running out of artillery shells and they're running out of Ukrainian men.
I guess the Germans or the Brits didn’t get the memo that the Greek aviation would be enough of an opposing force.
Why there’s not more Western defense of Ukraine I can’t explain except for present greed over future problem solving, but nothing is that surprising.
Similarly so much of Russia's current war propaganda is repurposed anti-war themes from Iraq and Afghanistan. The US has screwed around aggressively intervening around the globe for so long, that it's all too easy to pigeonhole what actually appears to be reasonable support for a would-be ally into the same bag. And now the chief opponents of such aid are actually the same party that led us into those useless wars! "Can't get fooled again"
Those wars really were a total waste of our country's resources, international stature, and so much of our future. It was seen by so many at the time, including our allies. But the war boosters ruled the day, drunk on corporate/nationalist propaganda and those fucking yellow "support our troops" bracelets, as if the soldiers coming home wouldn't end up being some of the strongest anti-war voices. And now here we are.
This seems to imply that Soviet intervention into an American war declared over the Cuban Missile Crisis would have been fairly characterized as "reasonable support for a would-be [in this case, already formalized] ally".
It's easy to have no military, as long as you don't mind being completely controlled by a country with one.
There's also a bit about Panama being chill (possibly because of all the business generated by the canal), and Nicaragua basically held in place by international law.
We collectively agreed on a national jobs program (via the military), so we should consider redirecting a significant portion of those jobs to a national jobs program that actually helps with domestic infrastructure with an emphasis on learning skills that translate into private sector opportunities.
Then let those that do want to fight be the ones to sign up, and make more effective use of them. I'm still not a fan of the military industrial complex but national defense will always be necessary and should be staffed for defense rather than just keeping people off the dole.
Not being prepared to be violent makes you harmless. Having the capacity for violence and choosing not to use it makes you peaceful.
If you speak softly, but don't carry a big stick, then you are just speaking softly.
Might might not make right, but it determines who gets to make the rules.
In order to have a capable military, it needs to fight wars. Hence all the countries joining the US in Afghanistan to achieve valuable on the field training.
What use is a big stick, other than intimidation, when you just carry it around, not knowing how to actually use it?
Future recruits will also need to be good at E-sports, as they'll increasingly be in charge of drone operations.
As per North Korea, they were able to come up with 1 million artillery shells for their friends the Russians, while the West couldn't do the same for their friends the Ukrainians [1], I'd say that North Korea got the better of the West here.
[1] https://unn.ua/en/news/it-seems-that-north-korea-is-a-more-e...
At the moment it's not NKs shells that keep the war rolling but the huge Russian population which allows for a seemingly endless supply of corpses to be.
Those foreigners are negligible compared to all those actual Russians.
When people say "Russian" they have an expectation. What is the difference between these foreigners and there ethnic groups in your eyes?
>They surely have Russian documents and were allowed to vote in Russia for their president.
I'm not sure if you were trying to be funny but you are.
Their nationality, obviously.
Additionally, in this conflict, often the fact that the foreigners have a choice to join the war.
> I'm not sure if you were trying to be funny but you are.
I'm aware of the diplomatically said, "flawed democracy" which is the Russian political system, but the fact remains valid.
Depends what's the most important missing item on Ukraine's wish list; Ukraine did get rocket artillery, SAM systems, tanks, and a whole bunch of other stuff.
To me, it suggests that shells are something that NK knows it can spare (and the same for all the stuff everyone else collectively is providing Ukraine, it's stuff the donors know they can spare).
I'm not sure what you're arguing here. Are you saying that the US has historically been taking a neutral position? I suppose they haven't been prosecuting any particular vision with their pointless wars, but that seems a bit weird.
But no question not having any power to back up their whims will defang the US and make them victims of external actors. Hopefully the threat of this happening is enough to reign in the warmongers in the US government and make them negotiate towards a pro-US policy instead of the anti-random-victims strategy to date.
In a war the strongest party also usually wins, so it's totally rational to not incur the opportunity costs of risking one's life by joining a war.
Left alone, communism eventually fails in almost every case. China being the main exception but that's because we pump a half a trillion dollars into their economy every year buying cheap goods.
Before that their economy was a complete non-event. All of their rapid growth really started in the mid-90’s, and the West started paying attention even later.
Having a strong military may result in fewer deaths.
Another article is more explicit about exactly who isn’t joining the military anymore. https://www.military.com/daily-news/2024/01/10/army-sees-sha...
The article doesn't confirm whether the total of any other groups is dropping, but it can be inferred from the numbers given that recruiting is very low across the board. It's worth having a racial remark in the title for clicks alone.
https://www.defenseone.com/policy/2022/07/after-criticism-ar...
... after a whole article full of explanations, none of which involve surveying white men to ask them why they don't want to sign up anymore. Classic journalism.
Increase the base pay, increase the long-term incentives. They're not working for tips.
A raw recruit (E1) gets $23,000 per year. Housing, food, work clothing and healthcare is paid for. After tax, it’s like ~$1,500 in completely discretionary income. This is why you get 19 year old new recruits buying new sports cars. They can afford it. The smart ones start socking away money while they are young.
A new officer (O1) gets $43,000 per year. If they are married they can live off base and get a housing allowance. If lucky enough to get stationed in SF, that’s another $4,017 per month. So just base pay and allowance is $91,000. And the housing allowance is tax free, so it’s equivalent to making more than $100,000 per year.
Then add on top sign on or enlistment bonuses especially for in demand MOSs, relocation allowances, etc.
Then you put in 20 years and you get a pension you can live on and healthcare for the rest of your life.
They aren’t making Silicon Valley money but it puts most members in firmly middle class territory.
Many of these folks have second homes, a small RE portfolio, and more!
https://militarypay.defense.gov/Pay/Retirement/
Look at mercenaries, get paid shit tons, still always need more.
The US Army 2021 video, "Emma, The Calling," is exactly what I described: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C8-Yslv4PME
And the "Army sees sharp decline in white recruits." https://www.military.com/daily-news/2024/01/10/army-sees-sha...
I could continue if I wanted, but I'll stop there, because I think I've made my point that "The things I claimed happened," did, in fact, happen. Even if you'd rather not accept them.
2. It happened, but it was just an isolated incident
3. It's happening, and that's a good thing
4. It's always been happening, so what? No one ever claimed it never happened, that's just a far-right conspiracy theory.
what about this?
> I could continue if I wanted, but I'll stop there
Conveniently stopping before most of your claims were addressed of course
The bigger contributing factors to declining enlistment are: general lack of support for the military among younger people (the latest round of forever wars didn't exactly help), better options in the civilian world (especially increasing benefits on student loan suppprt), and decreasing physical fitness (the increase in obesity rates directly lowers the available recruitment population).
The civilian sector has the same problem with truck drivers and maritime shipping.
> The civilian sector has the same problem with truck drivers and maritime shipping.
Hell, maritime anything. Even super local ferry work has a hard time recruiting.
https://www.businessinsider.com/gen-z-american-army-soldiers...
Edit:
https://www.businessinsider.com/us-army-invites-back-vaccine...
If someone interprets that as the same as someone who tries to complete high school and fails they are the ones we should worry about.
If you use something that people didn't do as a signal you run into all sorts of problems.
Just the navy, who instituted a similar change on Friday. This article about the army is from 2022 and the army reverted the change a week later. High school completion is a requirement again. It remains to be seen if the navy makes it the fully week.
https://www.military.com/daily-news/2024/01/27/no-diploma-no...
There are people that could be a great soldier/servicemember that didn’t make it through high school. Some will flourish under a military environment that failed out of high school.
I don’t really like people assuming somebody that didn’t graduate high school are somehow inferior or stupid people. The issue is complicated.
I don’t really see how they would he less trustworthy than a school board. Especially considering the stakes.
Where there is a need for personnel, there is some incentive to accept people who might not be ideal, but they are going to approach that in the most sane way possible.
It's not about whether they will be smart enough to learn; it's about the fact that they will have to be taught. There's no foundation to build on, there's no axiomatic knowledge we can rely on.
People who haven't graduated high school are inferior. They're not less human, but they are incontrovertibly less able.
Denying that might feel good, but society didn't mandate 10 years of public education for shits and giggles.
The vast majority of states require that you be at least 17, and often 18, before you can choose to stop with said education. Everyone the military is willing to accept on other fronts has the literal years spent in school that you speak of. If there is a gap, it's only on the order of a few months, if that.
Everyone I know who did not complete high School got within a year or two. Paradoxically, it was the smartest people I know who dropped out. None of our reasons were academic. A combination of social and financial
So they’re inferior because they didn’t receive some paper? What if they dropped out of last class?
Granted the Army will have to work harder on average to train these people, but some learn better outside of the traditional classroom.
Did you serve in the military? I'm wondering what axiomatic knowledge taught in 12th or 11th grade, exactly, that you think military training depends on.
Axiomatic knowledge? Perhaps in maths and science. The rest is different in various countries, so surely cannot form some universal knowledge base.
And in maths/science, a typical high school or even non-technical medium-end college graduate has ~zero skills or knowledge, so that cannot be a factor either.
A high school diploma only signifies the individual was approved by the indoctrination of public education, unless you're the handful that had private or homeschooling which still doesn't mean much academically (see below).
Incidentally, in the US we have what's called the GED[1]. The GED can be taken at any time without any requirement for prior education, and passing the GED is equivalent to graduating high school.
So no, a high school education in the US does not represent "literally years of knowledge".[2]
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Educational_Developmen...
[2]: I'm a GED graduate, and I can tell you its contents are roughly equivalent to elementary schooling in most other countries. I can also tell you that is what a high school diploma represents in the US, academic wise, because they are the same. If you can calculate 1+1=2 and speak basic English, you are an American high school graduate.
Edit: also worth noting, is that I know of people who have graduated high school who probably could not pass a GED. It is definitely possible in the right school to coast your way to graduation, even if you would not meet the normal expectations. So in those cases, a GED would be superior to a diploma. All of this I think indicates that high school diploma is becoming somewhat meaningless
The problem is, if you aren’t there on graduation day, you don’t get that proof of paper saying you know what you know. So before you go and put people down without context in their lives, you should be aware that there are dozens of reasons why someone who aced high school - didn’t get a diploma.
A flat tyre, or the flu, on graduation day doesn’t mean the last X years of your life have been wasted and you don’t get a diploma…
I didn’t graduate from high school, and I completely disagree with you.
I learned more math as a teenager than most people ever do, learned two languages to fluency in my 20s, both in very different language families from my native one, and got into a nice software career in my 30s, first in Beijing and then in SF.
Why exactly am I “inferior”? Just because I didn’t choose to pursue the piece of paper that your world view dictates?
For people that didn’t graduate high school, being a moron typically was not a causal factor. Knowing how to write and do basic algebra is sufficient to bootstrap yourself to anywhere you want to go, and many people get an adequate foundation in that before they ever get to high school, never mind graduate.
I didn't graduate from high school. I ran business groups, founded startups, exited, accumulated patents, and am usually considered articulate and capable.
Yes, the distribution of people who didn't graduate from high school are different from those who did. But you can measure the things you actually care about. High school education (or other educational attainment) is just one signal of a person's capability.
Then there are folks like me. I dropped out of kindergarten. I didn't do any structured schooling until I was 16 when I passed a GED and ACT test then went to college for Computer Science and Physics. My GPA in college was 3.89 and I've been a highly competent software engineer for ~20 years. Nothing that I missed from high school has held me back in any significant way.
It really isn't years worth of useful knowledge, the military is capable of giving recruits the knowledge they need much more quickly, especially given the much more disciplined/controlled environment involved.
In a year you can teach kids who are a little behind enough to get them up to the min high school will teach them, but certainly not the most that high school will teach them if they want it.
Of course this overlooks what the minimum bar for a college is. At my college the lowest math they offered that wasn't considered remedial was calculus. That's a far cry from many community colleges where the lowest is alegebra. You definitely should have learned alegebra in high school and not knowing it definitely extends your timeline on certain disciplines.
k12 was created by industrialists who wanted obedient workers and well behaved citizens who won’t cause crime and instability in the ruling class’ assets.
School prepares workers, not the actual people changing the world.
Most high school grads will know more about how the mitochondria is the power of the cell, more so than know about taxes and personal finance. That’s by design.
Many failing students simply got passed through grade to grade.
If a high school diploma has no value as a signal, requiring it throws out eligible people for no reason whatsoever.
Schools are doing a piss-poor job of educating people. Only 20% of schools can muster a 70% proficiency score, with the vast majority being much worse.
What this indicates is a startlingly large number of students are receiving an education that holds no value whatsoever.
Further, as already mentioned by someone else, the military will still use its own test as a means to determine where to place a recruit.
This seemed apparent to me when I was in school. I can't imagine it's changed much.
Either society isn't giving a prospective good parent the resources to achieve success. Any or many reasons exist; rent is too high, jobs got replaced by AI craze, only qualified for jobs that aren't valued at a living wage. If the parents do have the resources but still fail, society is at fault as the kids haven't been rehomed to other environments.
> it is society's fault
We can't step in and fix everything. Systems don't scale like that. There has to be individual responsibility.
> Either society isn't giving a prospective good parent the resources to achieve success
Some parents simply do not care.
> haven't been rehomed to other environments
There are already enough kids without parents. You'd be making the problem worse.
> jobs got replaced by AI craze
Hasn't even come close to happening yet.
Okay, a failing student is the fault of the parents. Now what?
Do you think parents want their children to fail? Failing children are generally associated with low socioeconomic status.
So, now, you have to fix low socioeconomic status. Now what?
etc.
You are correct that schools and teachers can only do so much. However, schools and teachers must also operate in the reality of what actually exists rather than what they would like.
A scoring system is only useful when comparing parts of the entire population. If the score is only used in the US, for example, then it's only really useful for comparing states relative to each other.
When looking at the entire population and saying US students only pass the US proficiency test 20% of the time, there's no relative comparison to look at. We could simply change the test or the scoring system if we wanted a higher or lower result in the population.
I took it the opposite way. High schools are designed to provide a bare floor of knowledge a citizen should achieve. The top side may be extremely competitive, but the bar for passing high school is meant to be low.
Someone who can't pass that and doesn't have developmental issues likely have environmental issues to address. So having someone be exploited by the government to fight instead of improve that environment feels scummy.
That's a bold claim. Can you back it up?
On the flip side, an actual path to citizenship is military service.
https://www.uscis.gov/military/naturalization-through-milita...
It's more of a spiritual gesture than some hard law. They aren't called "standardized tests" because they test for the exceptional.
I'm sure we can put the relevant education board in a room and have them argue over what should/shouldn't be on such tests, but the current result is a compromise after years of deliberation, being tweaked a little each year.
I'll be a bit more specific and say "high school testing is designed to provide a floor of knowledge a government feels its citizens should achieve" if that helps.
I agree with your general point, but I don't know about high school per se.
I quit school at age 14, got my GED, and this was one of the best decisions I had ever made. I feel like there should be more options for people to leave the system early, once they've attained that bare floor of knowledge. (Which, for a sufficiently motivated child, could in all seriousness be at age 11 or 12. The GED test was laughably easy, and it still amazes me that people sit through four years of school for that.)
FWIW, the military frowned upon GEDs, often requiring a waiver, but allowed GED holders to enlist.
>the army can provide a stable employment and a community that has its issues but is likely less abusive than whatever home environment prevented them from graduating high school.
For such a student I feel it's out of the frying pan and into the fire. Now they are bound to the government for X years for everything, from a meager pay to living quarters (you also needed to look the way they told you to look, but I think they are relaxing those hair/tattoo codes a bit). You go where they tell you to go and do what they tell you to do. And "leaving your job" if it's not for you means you can be put at trial.
It's an awful lot of a gamble being taken here for someone who likely hasn't addressed their core traumas to begin with.
Hey, did our system utterly fail you? Submit yourself to us and we'll fix the problem we continue to propogate! You don't even need to complete the educational system we outlined anymore, just be a warm body to throw at future battles for oil.
There's less incentive to provide proper housing when you can instead put your citizens in barracks.
So intelligence is important for military service but a person’s completion of high school isn’t an indication of low intelligence. They may have dropped out for any other reason. It’s entirely possible that they may flourish in the structured environment the military offers.
It’s fair to ask if the IQ test is a good measure of intelligence, or if it’s measuring something else. But in this context, it’s measuring something that is strongly correlated to success as a solider.
In your average high school class of 30 people, the 4 stupidest would be rejected by the military on these grounds (assume the bottom 1/31 have such severe developmental difficulties they can't even attend a normal high school).
Doesn't that seem like quite a high bar?
In other words, this is how we end up with Idiocracy where a low IQ person becomes the smartest person in the world right under everyone’s nose.
So an 85 IQ person today is substantially more intelligent than an 85 IQ person in the Vietnam war. That said, the modern infantry man’s job is more complex. I would postulate that the job’s complexity has grown to keep pace with the Flynn effect.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect#/media/File:Sunde...
No studies done in the US which is the cohort here.
The main reason early studies were in places like Scandinavia is that they have compulsory military enlistment alongside IQ tests, whose results are made available for research. Studies in places like the US came later, because simply getting a representative and comparable sample is non-trivial. There's also the cultural issue that studies on IQ are walking on eggshells in the US.
And it's not slight regressions. We've gone from gradually and consistently gaining IQ, to the current scenario where some studies [2] have shown declines as great as .29 standard deviation per decade. Meaning in 40 years we'd all be a whole standard deviation away from where the mean used to be. That is exceptionally disconcerting, particularly if it doesn't just flat-line at some point.
[1] - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016028962...
[2] - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01602...
About 10% of people are too cognitively challenged to positively contribute in the US Army even in the least mentally challenging roles.
At 80 - 85 IQ level person can typically read basic level. They gradate from schools and comprehend simple texts and sentences but may struggle with more complex language structures, vocabulary, and abstract concepts. People with reading disorders or other disorders should not be confused with low IQ.
He was working for the Department of Agriculture, trying to get the Afghan farmers to grow saffron instead of poppy. He was a professor in agronomy and would help his students back home in the US with their assignments.
He had signed up for the US army and ended up serving in the Special Forces in Vietnam for 2 years. He dropped out of school when he was 13.
In my opinion, the military should be a second chance for a country’s citizens, who have for some reason slipped through the cracks.
You’re saying that the US military has issues and it may well have. I’m no expert on that. But I still believe that a person who has dropped out of high school has a lot to offer society. It seems like the US military is coming around to the same line of thinking, as long as the person passes the IQ test. I think that’s a reasonable compromise.
The program might fail but if we never try then we’ll never know.
I think the original reason for requesting the high-school diploma is two fold. On one hand the person can come back and pick up where they left off, with a better chance of serving society. But maybe the more important one was that it lowered the chances of teens enlisting it the pit of desperation, seeing themselves as failures, with no other way out. Those may not be the people you really want because those may not be the people who really want you. This is the kind of deal that's hard to pull out of, and the Army would probably not want to be in the situation to have a wave of desperate teens realizing they just made a rash decision. The Army also doesn't want to be drained of new recruits, so here they are, taking what's on the table. It's a clear sign that young people are sending to the Army though.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fragging
This comment just shows you to be ignorant and contrarian.
And recent research absolutely has shown that heavy cannabis usage in adolescence and early adulthood does have a clear association with an increased risk of developing psychosis and schizophrenia. Just because the war on drugs lied about the effects of less harmful drugs like cannabis doesn’t mean they can’t be hazardous to your health like any other substance.
Regarding heroin - one may not be particularly murderous while zonked out, but addiction can make people surprisingly aggressive.
I’d also like to add that the company-grade officers stuck in the mud alongside enlisted were less at fault for the needless deaths than the incompetent general staff or the political actors who got us and kept us over there in the first place. You might enj the novel “Matterhorn” by Karl Marlantes, a Marine infantry officer who served with distinction in Vietnam. Or you might prefer “Dereliction of Duty” by Lt General H.R. McMaster, a renowned commander of the GWOT era who wrote his PhD thesis on the failures of Westmoreland and the other generals who mangled Vietnam.
Of course the military is the answer /s
The GT score is comprised of combinations of several different segments of the ASVAB of which the most important is applied arithmetic. Those are math problems in paragraph form that requires careful reading and multiple steps of very simple algebra like calculating pricing for a retail purchase and deduction of the coin denomination in return. The challenge there is just finishing the test because they, by design, do not provide enough time.
EDIT
I just want to point out that I did not become more intelligent as I got older. My ability to read and instantly formulate logic substantially improved as I got older through practice. Those, reading and logic, are skills and the performance improvement is permanent.
I’d argue that is more intelligent. People generally get smarter as they age (up to a point)
That’s why IQ is relative to your peers. A child with a high IQ may still not be as intelligent as an adult with an average IQ
The military does not only need highly functioning autonomous operators. There were many more menial positions in cleaning, catering, hauling and warm body canon fodder than there were scouts or special forces.
I guess these days many of those auxiliary functions are farmed out in very lucrative deals to select private companies.
Man, your Army Band really takes their Bach to the extreme.
With due respect for your country, which country you're talking about is highly relevant. There are <5 countries with militaries comparable in efficiency to the US military and only Israel is really soldier-per-soldier competitive. That's not a criticism of your country--your country likely spends its efforts on better things--but if we're talking about what's effective for a military, US military practices really are a reasonable gold standard.
That starts with the fact that the US doesn't do compulsory military service, because soldiers who don't want to be there aren't effective soldiers (note that Israel does do compulsory military service, which is because they have different problems than we do).
> The military does not only need highly functioning autonomous operators. There were many more menial positions in cleaning, catering, hauling and warm body canon fodder than there were scouts or special forces.
Thinking that "warm body cannon fodder" is something the military needs demonstrates a bit of a misconception on how modern militaries work.
Cleaning, catering, hauling, etc. need to be handled by high-functioning people as well, because in a warzone, attacks on things like cleanliness to reduce morale, or attacks on food and other supplies, are effective attacks.
All this is to say, that if the US military doesn't want low-IQ folks, there are good reasons for that.
While the security concerns of certain countries have motivated compelled military service, I wonder if a side-effect is less division/greater intra-country tolerance? And would the U.S. benefit from instituting compelled military service, or perhaps, compelled national service, which doesn't necessarily entail holding a weapon.
Some cursory searching turned up this study from Brookings suggesting that it would. https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/nationa...
And here's a paper - more of an opinion piece - arguing against it: https://www.cato.org/testimony/mandatory-universal-national-...
I'm definitely ethically opposed to a draft, but it's a bit naive to think that the US has ethical values or even ever has.
People who did terribly in the context of a class rooom but thrive in the military in very complicated roles.
This recent interview with the commander of Delta Force comes to mind for me but what you’re describing is not rare. It cuts both ways like any organisation, there’s plenty of people who don’t thrive there as well but I’m not upset about this change at all, I think it’s sensible overall.
https://www.youtube.com/live/d_mI3XxiNec
You can listen to that person for just 5 minutes and see exactly what I’m referring to
People here who are judging people based on their high school accomplishments must be coming from a sheltered middle class background.
Shouldn't be surprising, in any group there will be a normal distribution. A person that didn't finish high school and succeeding isn't shocking, but falls way to the right of the distribution.
Of course they exist, but until you find one yourself one would think the same.
It won't work in places like Medicine or Army, where human lives are at stake.
There is a progression your have to work through to get to serious places, else bad things can happen to both you and many people around you.
'Some' 'could' see that the ability of jumping the requirements of education is 'mostly' coincides with a certain level of mental abilities.
'Some' smart people do not participate in organized education and 'some' graduates regardless of modest abilities, but those are never arguments for the generic population and generic rules. Probably those passing a good(!) admission test 'could' understand that still...
"Some", "could", and "mostly" are words that people use when they're concerned with saying what's true, not when they have a weak argument. The facts are rarely absolutes and if you don't use qualifying words like that, what you're saying is rarely strictly true.
Yes, it can make your argument more strong, but you're lying if it doesn't cover 100% of the cases for the subject. For the lay person, this might be fine, they don't know, but for anyone who knows the subject matter in depth, chances are you sound like an idiot.
I'd argue this mentality plays a good part in making some social media so toxic. People generally aren't going to read detailed explanations on a topic, so people who would write them have less incentive, meanwhile some pop star's 10 word tweet over simplifying some complex global crisis, like you can just make it go away overnight, will get a million likes.
But the covid vaccines ARE different:
Vaccines typically take 10-15 years of research and clinical trials before approval [1].
The covid vaccines OTOH got developed, "tested" and approved within the timespan of less than a year. They literally had to invoke a sci-fi trope ("warp speed") to justify this timetable [2].
> It’s a risk and threat to them being functional as an organization.
The injection poses a bigger threat to them as an organisation than the disease itself: men below 40 are 6 times more likely to get heart damage from the mRNA shot than from the disease [3]. And this for a disease that has a lower IFR than influenza among people younger than 60 [4].
Pre-2020, decades of research into vaccines for (other) coronaviruses only resulted in vaccines that either didn't work at all or led to enhanced disease [5].
After a gain-of-function experiment went south in Wuhan, all that hard-earned wisdom got thrown out of the window (along with the Nuremberg code [6]) for a panicked and rushed vaccination program.
Yes, these vaccines improve the short-term relative outcomes for the elderly, the obese and the sick. About six months after vaccination you still are somewhat protected against symptoms, but are more likely to get infected than the non-vaccinated [7] [8] [9].
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/basics/test-approve.html
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Warp_Speed
[3] https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/CIRCULATIONAHA.122.0...
[4] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9613797/
[5] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4369385/#Sec12t...
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuremberg_Code
[7] https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/full/10.2105/AJPH.2022...
[8] https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.11.14.22282103v...
[9] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
It would be a significant strain on their logistics, which the us military is very good at, to let these shots be optional
It's mission oriented, not politics.
Sounds like it was a significant strain on their logistics to mandate the COVID shots, not to allow them to be optional.
With COVID under control, and 96% of soldiers vaccinated there is no longer a need to make it mandatory.
This is what we want right? Policy based on evaluated risks and threats?
There would be no need for sign-on bonus, you could add additional qualifications for g.i. benefits in the form of naturalization.
It would really be a net positive as they would be forced to assimilate into our society in a way that is a net benefit at many different layers of the civil stack. The kind of people who are willing to serve the country rather than acting as a sanctioned entitlement case would be a win/win. No?
Do you believe we are not already having an inter-domain/dimensional information war with something of a nature you describe? (Kind of kidding)
> No I didn’t say that or allude to it
Did you forget what you put in your own comment?
>>> There would be no need for sign-on bonus, you could add additional qualifications for g.i. benefits in the form of naturalization.
All of what I said requires effort, which is not guaranteed, they are options for the motivated, which is what we want those coming to this country to hold of personal value. Have a nice day though.
OP's proposal seem more like what the Roman empire did granting citizenship to conscripted barbarians, which worked or not depending on your perspective.
I also think that the much higher level of taxation inflicted on the (local) Roman population certainly didn’t help, as I feel that by the 3rd-4th century many parts of the Roman hinterland were much less populated than they should have been (had not the higher taxation hindered the Roman demographics, that is). In a way the outside-the-limes “barbarians” had the comparative advantage of not having had to pay those very high taxes, and most probably that was good for their (the “barbarians’”) demographics. And on a large enough time scale demographics is destiny.
The fall of the western empire is more accurately described as a fragmentation, after which live mostly went on like it did before. The true downfall of Roman civilization in Italy happened during the decades-long unsuccessful attempt by the Eastern Empire to recover the peninsula.
A boat comes in from EU with immigrants, men get off the boat, are handled a Union uniform and are put right back on another boat down south to the war.
We are going dark here.
If we don’t do things like this, what do we expect these people who need to care for themselves and potentially their families are going to be willing to do?
We also have to be serious in consideration of the current climate, and having recruiting down will just lead to drafts or forced conscriptions if the climate turns further.
I wish we wouldn’t have enabled the current belief in the country being an opportunity for foreign actors to come to without using the proper mechanisms. Unfortunately it has and we are now in a situation that is untenable. We can hold back in fear of the “invasion” or come up with plans to integrate and/or assimilate these individuals in their family that will be a benefit or leave them to languish to our detriment.
I mean it also would afford their actual stations more contract labor in non-military support roles at their posts for their spouses. Also would reduce recruitment costs as you wouldn’t need so many incentives to get em through the door, reduce over-crowded shelters, and the kind of people willing to serve and improve their station are the kind of immigrants we profess to want.
Given we live in a world with borders where nations try to subvert each other to their own interests, I think training migrants to use weapons you give them is going to be a great way for, say, America to give Mexico a military for free. (As a European, I think this would be hilarious… but more as a plot for a Peter Sellers film rather than as actual news to wake up to).
Do you mean like right now? You would propose removing world wide borders and citizenship requirements?
Or do you mean in a utopian future? If the former, is there any real programmatic intelligent analysis of how this would actually happen and what the negatives would be?
From the point of view of citizens or economies rather than nations, their removal would apparently be a good thing, free movement boosting trade and the economy: https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2018/08/06/open-borders-econ... (Michael Clemens also quoted in other papers, I don't think I've heard of wbur.org before).
But it's the same problem as anarchy: to focus on only some aspect of freedom is to ignore harms prevented by the absence of, or limits to, that freedom.
> If the former, is there any real programmatic intelligent analysis of how this would actually happen and what the negatives would be?
I lack the necessary foundation to distinguish between such an analysis and a think-piece in a newspaper (or, these days, the output of a LLM, or a YouTuber in a suit and tie). Link I gave above? I can Google Michael Clemens, but even seeing a list of accolades whose standards I don't know either, means I can't tell how he and his views are rated by other economists. And worse, when I do look up a list of works by Michael Clemens, one of the results tells me:
"Michael A. Clemens [\n] Not to be confused with: Michael Peter Clements" - https://ideas.repec.org/e/pcl20.html
(And I'm only 80% sure the one quoted in the paper was A. not P.)
And even if he's great, Gell-Mann Amnesia effect says I can't just assume that he'd necessarily agree with how his views were presented by the press.
Treat my position as vibes, not a policy proposal.
Conscription by definition is involuntary.
There are ways to do this. The French Foreign Legion is perhaps the most time tested, but the requirements it has also mean that the model is incompatible with US Democrat party ideology:
* Only male recruits.
* Criminal history check, including with Interpol
* Identity must be verificiable with official documents from country of origin
* Health screening including dental, psychological, and fitness. No waivers for anything.
The initial contract is for 5 years. If you make it and re-enlist for an additional contract (usually a couple of years), you can now apply for French citizenship.
See: https://foreignlegion.info/joining/#Requirements
When China re-colonized Hong Kong I gave strong thought to joining the military. When Russia invaded Ukraine, I similarly felt called to join the military, if not to fight for Ukraine, to prepare to fight for Taiwan.
The reason I won't join the military is because America does not support Rule of Law.
We invaded a country under false pretenses and invaded another country because we could. The aftermath of Vietnam inundated popular culture and media with a clear message: America fucked up. The people I looked up to, Anthony Bourdain for example, hated people like Kissinger, and imparted that hatred to me. Bourdain showed America's military legacy in Asia. I heard about Haliburton profiteering. I heard about the military industrial complex. I heard about Lejune water, and burn pits, and trouble with Tricare. Military bases that pump cancer into the ground when there is a fire. People like Jon Stewart showed nightly how bad faith American journalism and politicians are. He interviewed the deputy secretary of defense who was aghast that someone might try to ask for accountability. Historians, like Timothy Snyder (Yale professor specializing in eastern european history) are saying that America is headed into very very dark times and writing guides on how to combat tyranny.
Even today, America is actively supporting a genocidal regime in Israel, spitting in the face of a rules based international order. Rules for your enemies, but not your friends is not Rule of Law, it is exactly the opposite.
I grew up understanding that America was evil and that the American military was a tool for evil.
So when I listen to people like Anothony Blinken get on stage and talk about Rule of Law, that's exciting. But then I see them ignore Rule of Law for our allies. When I listen to General Milley talk about Trump, and General Mattis talk about Trump, I get excited. These are clearly educated individuals who understand fascism and want to do the right thing, but then they resign rather than fight or walk to church showing support for someone evil.
I do not ever want to have to treat American Soil like a "battle space" because Americans want racial justice.
If you want professionals to join the military, you have to support Rule of Law. You have to take care of political corruption at home.
If you want professionals to join the military, you have to get rid of Stock Trading Nancy pelosi for openly supporting conflicts of interests. You have to put Trump in the slammer for literally trying to end constitutional rule, something military officers took an oath they are not living up to to do. You have to tax billionaires so the government is for the people and not for the people with billions. You have to end private funding of candidates for elections, which major American colleges (Harvard and Yale) say directly results in a government that looks more like plutocracy than democracy.
Most of all, most of all, you have to convince professionals that the military is a place they can change the world for the better, rather than a place where you kill brown people to make sure the "spice" flows and billionaires pockets are lined.
In 1997?
China used colonial policies such as forced immigration (requiring Hong Kong to accept Chinese settlers), forced public expenditure for the benefit of the colonizer (bridge), linguistic domination (via forced changes to education), political pre-selection (Chinese approval of candidates), violent put down of dissent, rewriting history in school books, etc.
Equivocation and appeals to history to justify domination of a people who do not wish to be dominated are standard tactics. "Ukraine never had a tradition of genuine statehood," "We are all kievan rus, we are one people." "Ukrainian identity is artificially created by the west."
China asserted itself as the authority in Hong Kong with force over a people who largely saw themselves as distinct from mainland China. China then used policies of oppression, assimilation, and settling in an attempt to destroy hong kong self rule and ultimately the idea of Hong Kong-ness (in favor of chinese-ness) against the wishes of indigenous residents. To me, that is colonialism.
When the US attacked Cuba for foreign encroachment and supported Israel in its revanchist genocides, what Rule of Law were they following when it supported Ukraine against Russia doing the same thing? Seems pretty blatantly hypocritical to me.
That was one of many historical opportunities for professionals to see the US' many contradictions and domestic problems and abandon the US military. By these political standards, professionals should have abandoned US military capability back in 2014 when the latest outrageous hypocrisy was laid bare so it wouldn't have the power to be used as a tool for evil in 2022 and beyond.
Well, chop chop, America, better solve this quickly.
I guess I don't really doubt that you have good or patriotic intentions, I've seen comments like this often enough that I think it's some kind of Ralph Nader-esque "if you want to effect change, attack your friends not your enemies" strategy which doesn't strike me as particularly effective when there's any real stakes involved.
Right, just like a lot of people give strong thoughts to a lot of things that are difficult but in reality will never happen. They convince themselves that they could do it if it weren't for this ONE thing. The one thing is always conveniently there.
Instead of action we get a rant of hot topic soup like yours. But as long as "I thought about it" is prefaced, then it's all good. This is the definition of a keyboard warrior.
I do look up to people such as Admiral Rickover. Jocko is the type of person that makes the military appealing. There is a legacy of quality engineering and civic contribution in the past that has been decimated by the consequences of Nixon/Reagan era policies, chiefly, selling out America to billionaires.
So "convince themselves that they could do it" is a characterization that does not make sense because I don't (and most middle class people don't) see the military as an achievement. Doctor, Lawyer, or Engineer is what the middle class sees as achievement, not military. Military is strictly viewed as an act of service and a sacrifice.
> ONE thing
It's not one thing. It is the thing. The US military is famously civilian led, and the civilian leaders are an absolutely corrupt mess in complete disarray. Characterizing that as "this ONE thing" is bad faith. Saying you don't want to join an organization because the leadership sucks isn't "ONE thing." It's not a triviality. It is core to the organizations mission and execution of that mission.
> hot topic soup
If you think I'm providing hot topic soup and not a generational liberal middle class understanding of America and our place in the world, well I wish you would be a bit more open minded. The institutions that train the people that build your tools are full of people with an understanding not too dissimilar to mine. The people who work in cybersecurity and signals frequently come from the same background as me. The government has explicitly talked about how hard it is to train for cybersecurity and how hard it is to attract cybersecurity talent. That's because cybersecurity is not about domination and hierarchy. Cybersecurity is about curiosity. A rigid hierarchy with a mission of dominance is not conducive to curiosity. Curiosity is a fundamentally liberal principle so an illiberal military is going to have a hard time attracting the curious. The act of hacking is practically an act of questioning authority.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_100,000
In my local school district, of students that enter high school:
- by 11th grade, ~50% meet state standards 11th grade standards for math
- by 11th grade, ~50% meet state standards 11th grade standards for English
- by 12th grade ~90% graduate
Passing rate is 99%.