The upper middle class and upper class is not serving in the military today. It’s interesting to remember that all of FDR’s children served. All the Kennedy brothers served. Winston Churchill’s son was a behind-the-lines commando. That’s when you get the people willing to sacrifice. It is when their leaders are willing to sacrifice. It’s a scandal, for example, that only a half dozen members of our Senate and Congress have children in the military yet they vote to go to war.
A recurring theme on these threads involves how to sustain American public support in an extended war. My own theory is that if you don’t have all classes of American society involved in the war effort, support will weaken if the fight drags on. Because basically there’s this unspoken idea (which I will speak up about), that if the sons and daughters of the leadership and well off aren’t paying a price, then this can’t be that terribly important. It’s not a matter of national survival. It’s optional, or we’d ALL be out there. So it is viewed as some kind of cabinet war not worth the mounting cost.
Our generals seem to think they can only fight wars with a recruited force. Well, our citizen soldier army got it done in previous wars. Our armed forces are at war, but America as a nation is not at war. If you want to get the people as a whole involved in this conflict, that means everyone having some skin in this game.
The Left won’t go along with this because they are suspicious of the military, in general. The Right has an “every man for himself attitude” and I’m sure they’d argue it would be bad for business (that’s the Right’s objection for everything it doesn’t like). We’ll be hiring foreigners to serve in the U.S. military before there is a stateside draft, however. I’ll let you make any suitable comparisons to the Roman legions on that, and what it might mean for us down the road.
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