The American Spectator

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My son is with a Marine Corps unit which will be making its third rotation to somewhere in the Sunni Triangle beginning in February. He is in a weapons company and being a large guy, likes to be the point man, kicking in the door. I'm his biggest fan; nevertheless, this gives a father cause to think a bit.

One of the most compelling thoughts I have concerns the seemingly universally accepted notion that our "professional" (read: not drafted) armed forces are just so much better than ever.

Some argue that this is necessary because of the training required to master complex new technology. Curiously none of these observers want to talk about how easy this technology is to learn and how much we pay defense contractors to make it so.

Most, though, are just happy that we basically don't have to think about it much. I mean, how many educated families do you know who really have a son or daughter in uniform, let alone in a combat unit? The author Frank Schaeffer has written eloquently about how shocked his friends and neighbors were to find out such a thing could happen.

I don't think it was a coincidence that it was a National Guard member who actually had the nerve to ask Defense Secretary Rumsfeld the armor question. No career service member would dare to ever open his mouth over a controversial issue, the merits aside. This is precisely the reason no field officers are heard to be asking their Commander in Chief for more troops. The President has made a major issue of rejecting this course of action. It would be immediate career suicide to oppose a major policy of the CIC. With only career personnel, who is to speak up?

Furthermore, last year retired General Tommy Franks came to town and spoke. Someone asked him why more troops were not committed to the Iraq invasion and his response was literally, "That would have been so Norm Schwartzkopf." Here you have a war commander who is more concerned about imprinting his own methods than he is anything else. The fact is that we have enough troops in Iraq to make plenty of targets, but not enough to secure the borders, towns and pipelines. Does any reasonable person actually believe that with the manpower we used in our first Iraq invasion we could not do a better job of keeping the peace?

So much of modern life is absorbed by an "entitlement" mentality, when our country was built up by people who thought only about the "opportunity" mentality. Young people could be enticed (or compelled) to give 2 years of service to their country after high school and our society, the military and these citizens would all be better off for it. If the Democrat John F. Kennedy could inspire young people to national service, why can't a Republican do the same today?

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