1) I'll assume you know more than I do regarding Vietnam. It seemed to me as if the military was never allowed to go "all the way" in developing a strategy for that war? Perhaps no one in the military demanded this?
2) I think you may have point here with this 1/3 concept.
3) In the United States we have many groups who extract economic rents from the government. Some groups deserve more than others. Taking care of combat soldiers and their families is one way of attracting people to the military, and most importantly, seems to be the honnorable thing to do? When I read about soldier's families living on food stamps, or veterans getting the run-around at the VA, it disappoints me. It especially disappoints me when I read about other groups that get taken care of or "bailed out" while combat soldiers do not. I should mention that in my own experiences I feel the federal government has treated me very good (education benefits, health care).
As far as my voting plan goes, I'm not sure what "fairness" you're talking about? The way I see it, if you can't pass a simple civics test in English and come with $100 every ten years, then you shouldn't have much of a say in what happens in this country. And while someone could pay for someone's vote under my plan, they can do so today as well.
4) I pretty sure that you're wrong about the same proportion of the rich serving as the working and middle classes? This is something we'll have to find data on to confirm.
5) Nowhere did I say Americans are "bad." I can go on for a long time on why I think America is a better place to live than anywhere else. I just don't think Americans handle war very well. In fact, most of the Western world doesn't handle war very well. Somehow the West went from a people that thought its destiny was to conquer the world to being conquered by political correctness and decadence. Given the Zeitgeist of today, do you think we could conquer North America like the early Americans did? The allies killed 130,000 Germans in a day at Dresden, and the US vaporized 200,000 Japanese with the two atom bombs. This could never happen today. We could have ended our "problems" in Iraq and Afghanistan in no time if we still had the will that we had back in WWII.
I believe its WILL that wins wars (this isn't a new idea of course), and I see very little of it in the West today.
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