Read the section entitled "Economic enlistment for indebted military-age Americans". They're arguing to put over a million US citizens on the ground in Iran and the mechanism they want to do this is by exploiting the average American's debt.
"The average American aged 18 to 34 carries more than $40 thousand in non-mortgage debt across student loans, credit card balances, auto loans, and personal loans, with some estimates go as high as $100 thousand. This is the cohort the Pentagon needs. A federally administered debt-forgiveness enlistment program that fully discharges student loan, credit card, and loan balances after 24 or 36 months of service, and extends the GI Bill, would produce voluntary enlistment at scale."
Never for a moment thought my Subaru would be sending me to die for Israel. How could a patriotic Israeli write deranged dreck like this knowing full well the PR catastrophe the state is experiencing in the United States? It's so beyond the pale that you might even read it as parody.
> I remember this approach was ridiculed by the west when Russia used it few years back to staff the army...
And how has that worked out for Russia? They're still stuck in a stalemate and have an enormous number of casualties to show for it. The current hot war in Ukraine started in February 2022, so 3.5 years on despite offering money to fill billets they cannot win the war.
There's probably a lesson in there somewhere about how desperate people don't necessarily make good, professional and effective soldiers, and the corollary to that: poor, unprofessional, ineffective soldiers don't win you wars.
The section on supporting minority communities is probably not going to work. In a "fool me once" kind of way, the US has reliably failed to support such groups over the years, including the Kurds (mentioned in the article) on numerous occasions leading to lots of harm for them and their communities. They should not trust the US again, especially under this administration which is proving even more unreliable on all matters.
> It is the American state doing what the American state has always done when it needed staff it could not otherwise generate. World War II offered the GI Bill. Vietnam offered college deferments. The post 9/11 wars offered signing bonuses and citizenship pathways. The Iran war will need to offer debt relief. The economics of the indebted American 20-and 30-something make this the most efficient conversion mechanism available to the Pentagon and the Trump administration.
This paragraph is weird. It suggests that the GI Bill, enacted towards the end of WWII, was used to incentivize enlistment during the war that was already nearly over when it was enacted. It's a strange world where information flows backward in time. The college deferments of Vietnam was a way of getting a better assignment (and often an officer commission instead of enlisting) than you would have if you were drafted, people took the option because it was a way to survive a terrible situation where the alternative was to go and jump out of a helicopter and hope to live. Signing bonuses have been a thing for ages, predating 9/11, and used for select fields that had a harder time recruiting or retaining (pilots, for instance, weren't hard to recruit, but were hard to retain so various bonuses were used to keep them in the active duty service).
There are also existing student debt forgiveness programs that don't require anyone to go to fight in a war almost no one in the US wants to fight. There are certainly a lot of desperate people who would take them up on an offer like this, but I sincerely doubt it'll cover the necessary staffing gaps in the armed services. Also, if you've got a college degree you will usually try to go in as an officer, not enlisted, and what we'll need with boots on the ground are enlisted soldiers, not a larger officer core. So you're offering people debt forgiveness for shitty pay to get shot at in a war they don't actually support.
For being in combat zones they'd not pay income tax (helpful) and there's combat pay and there are other incentives and subsidies they will receive. But enlisted pay still sucks. Let's say we're generous to these enlisted debtors and drop them in as E-4s and credit them with 10 years of service (for pay calculation purposes), that's about $46k/year for basic pay for them. The debt forgiveness has to be very generous, and we're already blowing up our deficit for this war so it'll only be worse. The US would become, in this article's proposition, the payer for $40-100k in debt per person. It's a terrible economic proposition when ending the damn war would be much, much cheaper.
Not to mention Trump's empty promise to these Iranians that the US would be there to support them as they protested and were summarily executed en masse.
Added to that, how do the people enlisting know and trust the program will actually be there at the end?
I'm one of the people with a ton of student loans, and I was also one of the people who consolidated my loans when the Biden admin rolled out SAVE. Now the government pulled SAVE but did nothing for those of us who consolidated to take advantage of it. We were told one thing, and it was almost immediately reversed.
The US government is unreliable and sees no need to keep the promises it made a few years ago. Why would anyone sign up to be in mortal harm's way for relief that has a decent chance of not even happening? They've lit their integrity on fire. The promises of something after a few years means nothing.
He really doesn't want to think about it anymore, but I'm sure he's not thought through the potential for the Epstein-Trump files to become a story again in the media without the Iran war to preoccupy the pundits
When Trump attacked, he confirmed right off the bat that his attention span was not going to last half this long.
In his own words, so I guess you would have to take them at face value whether that was zero or some other number. More likely negative numbers like during the business ventures that made him well-known to begin with.
I cannot be emphasize enough how understated I am being when I say this: I expect our president to be capable of accurately assessing the consequences of military engagement with foreign nations, and if he is so easily "duped" he is unfit to continue in the position.
Perhaps he should be spending less time lining his own pockets with crypto scams, pump and dump schemes, insider trading, and paid access to his tweets. There was no shortage of advisors who could have warned him that this was an asinine plan.
This is a war that Trump voluntarily and unilaterally entered, and he can stop fighting it at any time he chooses. He chooses not to, which tells me he wants war.
Meh. A few clicks, and you can read the author's previous JPost editorials on the topic. Briefly put, he knows how to tell JPost's audience what they want to hear. Which starts with "Fixing this hellish quagmire that we (Israel) are in is America's problem, not ours". Then he plays extremely fast and loose with the history of the US and US Army, and generally daydreams all his problems away.
America has a worse problem with it than Israel does, it sort of is America's problem. It's not the Israeli army taking lead or Israel's diplomacy taking a hit.
Except for the problems caused by attacking Iran earlier this year, the US does not have a problem with Iran so big it warrants trying to recruit one million soldiers and deploy them to Iran to subjugate the nation. And even the current problems aren't big enough to warrant that effort (yet, at least).
America has a worse problem only in that America is still (Lord knows how) viewed as the default global superpower - so things going wrong in far-away places are somehow our problem.
So America can walk away from this. Vs. Israel can't.
Worse - if Israel's popularity with American voters continues to fall, America could place its support for Israel on the bargaining table with Iran. Think about just how much Tehran might give up, to end that support. And about just how poor Israel's situation might soon become without it.
If Israel still has any competent leaders, they should be terrified by the possibility.
I really don't understand why Israel has such animus against Iran. Didn't Cyrus the Great, the Iranian emperor, free the Israelites from bondage in Babylon, and to boot, rebuilt the temple in Jerusalem? Don't the Israelites owe a long-standing debt to the Iranians?
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[ 0.23 ms ] story [ 2.9 ms ] threadNever for a moment thought my Subaru would be sending me to die for Israel. How could a patriotic Israeli write deranged dreck like this knowing full well the PR catastrophe the state is experiencing in the United States? It's so beyond the pale that you might even read it as parody.
And how has that worked out for Russia? They're still stuck in a stalemate and have an enormous number of casualties to show for it. The current hot war in Ukraine started in February 2022, so 3.5 years on despite offering money to fill billets they cannot win the war.
There's probably a lesson in there somewhere about how desperate people don't necessarily make good, professional and effective soldiers, and the corollary to that: poor, unprofessional, ineffective soldiers don't win you wars.
> It is the American state doing what the American state has always done when it needed staff it could not otherwise generate. World War II offered the GI Bill. Vietnam offered college deferments. The post 9/11 wars offered signing bonuses and citizenship pathways. The Iran war will need to offer debt relief. The economics of the indebted American 20-and 30-something make this the most efficient conversion mechanism available to the Pentagon and the Trump administration.
This paragraph is weird. It suggests that the GI Bill, enacted towards the end of WWII, was used to incentivize enlistment during the war that was already nearly over when it was enacted. It's a strange world where information flows backward in time. The college deferments of Vietnam was a way of getting a better assignment (and often an officer commission instead of enlisting) than you would have if you were drafted, people took the option because it was a way to survive a terrible situation where the alternative was to go and jump out of a helicopter and hope to live. Signing bonuses have been a thing for ages, predating 9/11, and used for select fields that had a harder time recruiting or retaining (pilots, for instance, weren't hard to recruit, but were hard to retain so various bonuses were used to keep them in the active duty service).
There are also existing student debt forgiveness programs that don't require anyone to go to fight in a war almost no one in the US wants to fight. There are certainly a lot of desperate people who would take them up on an offer like this, but I sincerely doubt it'll cover the necessary staffing gaps in the armed services. Also, if you've got a college degree you will usually try to go in as an officer, not enlisted, and what we'll need with boots on the ground are enlisted soldiers, not a larger officer core. So you're offering people debt forgiveness for shitty pay to get shot at in a war they don't actually support.
https://www.dfas.mil/MilitaryMembers/payentitlements/Pay-Tab... - monthly enlisted pay rates
For being in combat zones they'd not pay income tax (helpful) and there's combat pay and there are other incentives and subsidies they will receive. But enlisted pay still sucks. Let's say we're generous to these enlisted debtors and drop them in as E-4s and credit them with 10 years of service (for pay calculation purposes), that's about $46k/year for basic pay for them. The debt forgiveness has to be very generous, and we're already blowing up our deficit for this war so it'll only be worse. The US would become, in this article's proposition, the payer for $40-100k in debt per person. It's a terrible economic proposition when ending the damn war would be much, much cheaper.
I'm one of the people with a ton of student loans, and I was also one of the people who consolidated my loans when the Biden admin rolled out SAVE. Now the government pulled SAVE but did nothing for those of us who consolidated to take advantage of it. We were told one thing, and it was almost immediately reversed.
The US government is unreliable and sees no need to keep the promises it made a few years ago. Why would anyone sign up to be in mortal harm's way for relief that has a decent chance of not even happening? They've lit their integrity on fire. The promises of something after a few years means nothing.
He really doesn't want a ground war.
In his own words, so I guess you would have to take them at face value whether that was zero or some other number. More likely negative numbers like during the business ventures that made him well-known to begin with.
This is an incredible spin on this whole fiasco.
I cannot be emphasize enough how understated I am being when I say this: I expect our president to be capable of accurately assessing the consequences of military engagement with foreign nations, and if he is so easily "duped" he is unfit to continue in the position.
Perhaps he should be spending less time lining his own pockets with crypto scams, pump and dump schemes, insider trading, and paid access to his tweets. There was no shortage of advisors who could have warned him that this was an asinine plan.
I'd file this one under Cargo-Cult Fantasies.
So America can walk away from this. Vs. Israel can't.
Worse - if Israel's popularity with American voters continues to fall, America could place its support for Israel on the bargaining table with Iran. Think about just how much Tehran might give up, to end that support. And about just how poor Israel's situation might soon become without it.
If Israel still has any competent leaders, they should be terrified by the possibility.
"The counter-trade is Taiwan. Beijing has wanted a public American recalibration on Taiwan for two decades. "
Trump has declared victory many times and there are a lot of rationales out there https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rationale_for_the_2026_Iran_wa...
a creative idea might be a more coherent leader.