Quote Originally Posted by Slap
As to question number two of course not! We never should group people by color or custom or any other Commie collective grouping system but by performance standards. THAT IS WHAT MAKES AMERICA EXCEPTIONAL! If you work for it you get, not who your daddy is or what you look like or where you went to school or how much money you have.
With the exception of your amusing definition of communism, I agree with you in principle. The problem is how to make this work in practice. I think on the matters of race, with the exception of a few minor policy points evident in the news, the military has largely figured this out. It's now tackling the issue of sex (and maybe in the future, even gender ). In alot of ways, though, "where you went to school" for example, does matter. The article I quoted earlier notes that many high schools cannot educate their students sufficiently to pass the AFQT. High schools are funded locally. For a number of historical-socio-political reasons, schools in minority communities are typically disproportionately underfunded. This means that minorites are less likely to meet the same standards for enlistment. It's not because minorities are inherently less capable - it's because their starting point is more distant from the standard than their white counterparts.

Quote Originally Posted by former_0302
Can you give an example of the sort of policy which is "...actually destructive of good order and discipline?" Not entirely sure of what you're driving at.
I think the military's handling of females in combat arms is probably the most destructive policy at the moment.

Is it military problem? Only if the military requires significantly more people than it does now. You're saying 75% of the potential recruits are eligible? According to the figures on the census.gov site, there's about 29 million 17-29 year old males in the US. If 75% of that is fit for military service, I'd say our problem isn't too severe, unless we plan to occupy China.
My bad. I meant 1 in 4 are eligible. So that's about 7.25 million fit for military service.

We must be thinking of "values" in different contexts. Your response doesn't make any sense to me in relation to the point I was trying to make, so I'll assume I just didn't state what I meant very clearly...
What did you mean by values?