Other countries have compulsory military service, for example Finland. Generally speaking I am a fan of the idea that everyone should be required to do some kind of community service for 2 years once they turn 18. Military service would just be one option, could be other kinds of civic engagement. This can really help people feel connected to their society and understand that there is something to show up for.
BUT - this really only works if there's a social contract in place. In the United States it's hard to see how compulsory service works if people don't feel like the country is showing up for them.
These days, what are American soldiers dying for? A society with great health care? Fantastic education? Wealth and social stability? Absolutely not! Until that changes I don't see any good reason why we should send our young people off to die. (EDIT: if you want a sobering experience, visit a military graveyard and pay special attention to the ages of the soldiers. We might as well call a military graveyard a children's graveyard).
And to agree with others on this thread, the folks who push for war should 100% be required to participate in them and lead from the front. Don't sell the rest of our lives while you hide in a nice air conditioned bunker.
> Generally speaking I am a fan of the idea that everyone should be required to do some kind of community service for 2 years once they turn 18.
Why? I get the warm-and-fuzzy angle of "instilling civic responsibility", but you're effectively instilling that at gunpoint: the government forces you to do this, else you go to prison. Is that really such an enlightened thing to do?
It takes away two years of your life, possibly delaying your education, entry into the workforce, or having children. So again, what's the rigorous justification for this? The government already calls dibs on a good chunk of your economic output, on a percentage of every penny you spend, and on certain types of property you own; so why should they also be able to draft you for some free labor if there's no war or other emergency going on?
It also implies that most normal work isn't in the interest of society, which if that were true, would be a major problem on its own. In what sense is 2 years of military service or "community service" strictly better for society than going to school, or working as a waiter, or starting a small business?
Roughly speaking, 2 years of community service should be worth some % of local & federal taxes.
In a developed society, I'm not sure what kind of labor an 18-year old can perform (what I mean is that it would be mostly unskilled labor), that would be better than taxing this same individual later in life, without delaying their education by 2 years.
I suppose there would have to be exemptions for college students as there typically are in such schemes in other countries?
Shouldn't be. Just have a more-level playing field, make everyone (college-track or not) participate.
You seem to assume that tax dollars are equivalent to labor. A pile of quarters never did anything sitting there, it takes a human to do something for the most part. Money is a tool sitting there, not actual work.
> A pile of quarters never did anything sitting there
Luckily, we don't have a pile of quarters sitting there doing anything, because the US operates at a deficit. So dollars are being borrowed then spent on projects.
I mean, yes? I think when we say, we should force 18 year olds to do something useful for society instead of working doordash or taking college classes that they don't care about, that is kind of saying something about the usefulness of those things.
If the market figured it out we wouldn't be having these discussions in the first place.
It's not a market failure. If you pay enough money you can attract either citizens or even destitute African people to volunteer to get blown up for the glory of Trump and the oil companies.
I'm not sure what I believe is right but one thing I can think of is there could be a bias for a certain type of people to join branches of the military and therefore our capabilities are held back by that bias. The same goes for companies that work with the military/defense which I think the parent article lays out as well.
If you allow everyone to pick and choose what they want to do, we may actually end up (or already have ended up) with all of the talented people and cutting edge businesses chasing money here and only second tier folks working with and for the government.
I think a great example of this is with NASA. They are doing a big hiring blitz (someone posted about it recently here). They have a ton of openings but I have to imagine that the talented folks that work in the field are chasing the money that is paid by private companies right now. I personally believe NASA is an important thing that needs to exist and we need to figure out a way to make it happen. Maybe we need to just pay folks more to make them incentivized to work in government? Maybe even more so if you working for the armed forces because you lose a lot of people based upon the sheer fact that your life is more at risk.
It would definitely be worth some research. I don't think free market concepts align well with working in the armed forces and there could be some arguments that we need to tip the scales to make it work better. For some things like the usual government services that aren't vital for our existence, I think we can all accept the longer wait at the DMV or the two decades to get a Real ID implemented. I don't think we can accept not defending our own country from an adversarial invasion so we need to make that importance reflected somewhere.
> there could be a bias for a certain type of people to join branches of the military and therefore our capabilities are held back by that bias.
Not only is there a bias, there is one on purpose (not saying that's a good thing). For example, the Marines are known to prefer recruiting from lower-income and lower-education backgrounds. They want scrappy, tough people.
Conversely, the Air Force is the "geek" branch of the military.
There are lots of other examples. If you go on YouTube you can see funny videos of the branches poking friendly fun at each other; e.g., Marines eating crayons.
> Maybe we need to just pay folks more to make them incentivized to work in government?
In the US I think this may be the only way. Private industry pays so much it's hard to compete.
> Why? I get the warm-and-fuzzy angle of "instilling civic responsibility"
I have found that when older people ask young people to do this kind of "mandatory service" they never specify what exactly are they going to do while being on the government's leash.
It's always this warm fuzzy hand wavy "civic responsibility" or "build communities" thing, that they always seem to think is something someone else should do when they are fully capable of doing it themselves.
In the conventional view, the earliest preparations for war involve building a strong industrial base, reducing corruption, and securing alliances through cooperative foreign policy. The near-term preparations for war include diverting a fraction of total resources away from compounding growth and towards non-compounding defense manufacturing. A draft is something you do after the war starts.
The strategic idea is to remain in a pose of compounding growth as long as possible by avoiding war and war preparations until they're known to be absolutely necessary. Peacetime investments like scientific research build on themselves, while military spending sits in a depot until it's obsolete and then costs even more to safely dispose. The same goes for replacing the first two years of professional school with standing around in a big shed.
> The same goes for replacing the first two years of professional school with standing around in a big shed.
This may be true in an American context (though I don't actually know) in the sense that the US military is highly specialized and matrixed. In smaller militaries soldiers tend to be more generalist, while still having specializations.
e.g., they say in the British forces, if you ask an artillery soldier what they do, it's a little bit of everything. In the US military, a soldier might say "I pull the rope!" Not a good use of talent.
There are other bases besides war for national service, eg disaster prep, taking care of the poor and so on. In any case, being somewhat prepared for war at the human level and understanding what that entails is more productive that not being prepared and having to educate people in an unwelcome emergency.
The same goes for replacing the first two years of professional school with standing around in a big shed.
Exaggerated tropes like this don't make for useful discussion.
One of the paradoxes of military service is that the real experiences of servicemembers sound exaggerated, while what sounds like reality is expressed through Hollywood tropes.
From some quick googling, I think the average firefighter fights about two fires per month, which is pretty good! And the average specialized wildlands kind of firefighter fights fires much more often.
But firefighters don't just fight fires, they mostly do medical emergencies, which keep them very busy. And that's the problem with standing armies: we generally don't want soldiers doing a bunch of other kinds of work besides wars because they're around.
> but you're effectively instilling that at gunpoint: the government forces you to do this, else you go to prison. Is that really such an enlightened thing to do?
if you want rights, you need to do more than just exist.
gunpoint is optional; West Germany used to force people to go either into the Army, or else do a longer stint of service in hospitals, firefighting, old folks homes, rescue services, youth organizations, or other civil roles.
Do you believe that in American civil society there are only privileges and not responsibilities?
Government already got the tax dollars to pay for the service at gunpoint. And makes you get a passport to travel internationally or a driver's license to get yourself around at gunpoint.
All of this is only for citizens. Many try to get out of it, but "everybody" is flat wrong.
It sounds like you are aware of, and accept, responsibilities. Nothing wrong with adding to them.
I'm not sure anywhere expects people to do their national service for free - which is to say that such a programme would also likely be very expensive.
you're effectively instilling that at gunpoint: the government forces you to do this
I'm so sick of libertarian tropes. Starting every argument with oerwrought emotionalism has made me increasingly indifferent to your 'plight' over the years, because it's just victimization politics. Perhaps if we rebalanced public/private obligations overall tax burdens owuld be lower and society would be more pleasant to live in.
I'm not a libertarian but I think they have a point here - conscription is tantamount to slave labor. The fact that it was accepted by societies for hundreds of years doesn't make it any less so.
First, "national service" does not necessarily mean relocation like a military deployment does. Second, there is no requirement that national service be free.
This has me thinking about a way to encourage some level of public service in exchange for better access to government programs, like an extra 10% in retirement benefits or something.
Reminds me of Starship Troopers: "Service Guarantees Citizenship!" Yes, I know it's a play on fascism.
So, disclaimer: I'm very aware that Verhoeven created Starship Troopers satirizing fascism and holding up a mirror to American society.
That said, I am somewhat a fan of the idea that citizenship is something that should be earned. For example, birthright citizenship - I think it's a good thing and should be kept around. That said, as far as I know no natural-born American is required to raise their right hand and swear that they will take up arms to defend the United States in case of war. A naturalized citizen is required to do this. That creates a real bifurcation in the society in my opinion.
What if it didn't delay your education? In some countries an undergrad degree is only three years. I'd take a person with 1 year of civil service + 3 years of a degree over someone with 4 years of a degree any day.
Somebody who is confident enough to handle a rifle and throw a hand grenade is way more useful to me than someone who was forced to another literature or geology course.
Have someone demonstrate a command of the English language by following written instructions that require coordinating activities with a small group of people.
Instead of learning how to read a topographical map for first year geology lab final actually put the map in their hand with a compass and have them do an orienteering exercise as a group.
> What if it didn't delay your education? In some countries an undergrad degree is only three years. I'd take a person with 1 year of civil service + 3 years of a degree over someone with 4 years of a degree any day.
In a world where 1 year of civil service was normal for most people, I'm skeptical that this is the choice the labor market would consistently make. Remember, if pretty much everyone in society is doing the same national service, then that means the military had to find jobs for everyone to do, including people with mediocre general competence or who are in fact bad at following written instructions in English. "I completed my mandatory national service, just like pretty much everyone else" is not that strong of a signal.
In the Soviet Union, smart math and science students often competed hard for academic and technical positions that would let them fulfill their military obligation by doing some kind of math or science for the Soviet state, instead of being a conscript foot-soldier for a few years like was normal for Soviet males (boot camp sucks for everyone, but it really sucks for most smart nerds). If the US had a system like this, there would definitely be industries where it was normal for everyone working in them to have avoided the worst of actual combat training somehow or another - or for actually having done normal soldiering to be a culturally-unusual thing to do. Just like how in our actual society it's unusual for someone who works at a silicon valley tech company to have actually volunteered to serve in the US military earlier in life.
I'd prefer someone who is confident enough to take another geology or literature course over the gun-handler. I'd make sure that person is in a supervisory position over welfare-state products of our armed forces, certainly.
If you were presented with three options for hiring, each with identical professional experience, but the first has a four year degree, while the second has a three year degree, and the third has a three year degree plus + year of national service in a country with an effective military which one would you pick and why?
Taxpayers in non-failed states like Finland that are able to provide astoundingly high quality of life for their citizens while also providing a strong military that is based around mandatory national service.
Finland has been rated the happiest country in the world what, eight or nine years in a row now and was able to secure they borders against a overwhelmingly more capable neighbour with no participation in a mutual aid defensive alliance like NATO until very recently.
In so many ways Finland is the model we should all be looking at emulating in Western countries.
While the majority of Finns speak highly of their conscription system, there's also an understanding that it's propped up by Finland's unique history and place in the world. I think people are seriously naive as to how much shit the Finnish people have suffered over the last millenia, and how that has contextualized their modern existence.
> Finland has been rated the happiest country in the world
"Tilastollinen onnellisuus" is a concept relentlessly mocked by Finns. Finns are very proud of their country, but many are also very quick to call it a shithole, to engage in valittaminen, and for good reason. Their love for it is practically an expression of sisu. The contradiction of it being an absolute dreg of a swamp populated by insufferable FINNS, yet they would all agree to throw their life away to defend it anyways, is not a situation that was conjured out of thin air with some clever social policies and progressive tax reform.
I like the idea of civic engagement / service in theory too, but I feel like the Vietnam war was a demonstration of possible failure modes when draft is in place: a lot of poor kids died, some rich kids allegedly used parental influence to dodge the draft. No incentive for leaders to avoid war while loop holes remain for their own interests.
I think you could argue the draft forced the war to be real for more families (and the expansion of TV), intensifying the resistance to it. Quick googling says almost 10% of the population served in Vietnam in some capacity. Less than 1% served in the War on Terror.
This was part of Charles Rangel's (D) reasoning to propose bringing back the draft. [1]
> I think you could argue the draft forced the war to be real for more families (and the expansion of TV), intensifying the resistance to it.
Yeah, it did, all the young men of draft age had to live knowing that they might get drafted and be forced to fight and die. Even if they were never called, or in retrospect were too old at the time.
We seem to have largely forgotten that now, along with the "Vietnam Syndrome" that the US military "suffered" through until we were successful in applying military force in 1991 with the Gulf War.
I almost hope they're successful in doing this. We've also lost the focus on clearly defined objectives for war.
It seems like we need a horrible mess to learn all the hard lessons all over again.
> We've also lost the focus on clearly defined objectives for war.
Are you saying we had this in Vietnam?
And I don't think the evidence is strong that these "hard lessons" did anything to keep that same generation from supporting the pointless wars that followed.
> It seems like we need a horrible mess to learn all the hard lessons all over again.
Indeed. This is all of human history. No matter what the problem is we are infatuated with the idea of the ultimate solution being exterminating everyone who does not agree with our worldview.
Drafts, and by extension wars, should be unpopular. War should be the last resort that no one wants to take. No one should be cheering for a war they won't have to participate in.
War has become too remote and comfortable for most Americans.
A major reason why the draft was stopped is that because when you take a disunified and unwilling populace and start giving them weapons, their target may not be the enemy.
The word allegedly should be dropped many ie.. Taco got out of it, however much better men John McCain, John Kerry, and Robert Mueller did not. Serving is okay if everyone serves no exceptions.
A relative of mine who was of draft age during the Vietnam war, deliberately enlisted in the US army because he thought that this would reduce his chances of being sent to fight in Vietnam And it worked, he spent his time overseas in the military in Japan in a non-combat role. I'm sure many males of draft age made similar choices.
For others' sake, I double-checked: 2.59 million served, of which 648,500 were draftees. Right at 25%
Is there a study of soldiers who enlisted but only because their draft number was low? There were substantial benefits to enlisting, because you could choose your branch of service.
Should break that down by people who had enlisted before hostilities began. Material difference enlisting during peace time vs when there is an active theater of war.
It would be more interesting to see those numbers broken down by frontline service. What percentage of the guys actually dying in the jungle were drafted?
Finland doesn't have compulsory military service to help people feel connected to their society. Feeling connected to one's society is not an end in itself, people should be free to choose how connected they want to feel. Finland has compulsory military service because it's a small country that borders Russia. The US is a big country that borders Canada and Mexico.
> people should be free to choose how connected they want to feel
Yes and no. Of course people should be free, at the same time you live in a society and not a state of nature.
If someone never has to put back into society, that's dangerous. It could lead to people feeling that society has no value, that there's no sense in investing in it, that since nobody else cares why should I.
> If someone never has to put back into society, that's dangerous.
Most people I meet and interact with in the United States already feel like they don't need to contribute anything back into society besides the taxes they already pay to the local and federal government.
And what I mean by that is that some of them may SAY they would like to contribute, but none of them actually do (beyond taxes).
Instead of complaining about the average person not contributing enough to society why don’t we focus on the people (I.e. politicians) who directly leech off of society and make it worse? I’d rather they simply had no impact either way.
Do bureaucratic mandates instill a humanistic sense of value and commitment, particularly in societies which are at peak levels of institutional skepticism?
Only works if everyone has to do it. Once you slice it into only a certain part of the population, it becomes an unfair class system. Example, rich and well connected people would never do it. If you say only men should do it, that's unfair as well.
Edit: I'm for this BTW, I think everyone should have to do some form of service, but I'd also like to see anyone in the gov with the power to send people to war be required to have served in the armed forces.
The American way of life, which is still the most preferred way of life, as evidenced by (a) people wanting to emigrate here more than any other country in the world and (b) more people immigrating here than any other country.
Yes? Iran threatens a nuclear attack on the US constantly. Not saying the war is some great idea but it definitely is about defending the american way of life
you actually believe this? that American soldiers dying in Afghanistan, Iraq, Vietnam, etc., were actually preserving the "American way of life" (whatever that means)??
And if it were true (which it isn't), if enjoying the "American way of life" requires killing people in other countries, then it's probably not a very good way of life.
I would do it as a civic corps like the military in structure and pay but for civil projects and work experience. Enable our youth to learn on the job and actually value that experieence.
> And to agree with others on this thread, the folks who push for war should 100% be required to participate in them and lead from the front
I agree but I don't think it goes far enough. Leading from the front of the best equipped military in the world doesn't balance your incentives against the misery you are inflicting on the innocent denizens of the poor country you're pointlessly destroying.
There's also the economic destruction back home to balance against. So, those who call for war should be forbidden to privately fund their healthcare and children's education.
Agree. I believe during WW2 the government put rules in place to prevent companies from making too much profit from the war. From what I recall in history class taxes were raised significantly as well.
War is a mighty economic engine, this cannot be denied. But if we take an entire country to war, then it stands to reason that the entire country should benefit from the spoils (to the extent that there are any).
I may be misunderstanding but I don't think so. War forces people's hand in terms having to make progress. This is because during progress can be measured in number of body bags returning from the front and the reduction thereof.
Our modern world was born out of scientific advancements made during WW2. Could these same achievements have occurred in peace time? Obviously the answer is yes. However during war, everything becomes accelerated and things that normally would take a long time can happen very quickly.
I agree that paying for scientific progress with human lives is a bad thing.
Yes; WWII was an economic disaster for huge swaths of the world. The US is pretty much the only industrialized country at the time where it wasn't a complete economic disaster, because it was separated by oceans from nearly all the fighting and destruction.
If there's a shootout in a town that ends up with most peoples' windows getting shot out, the one town glazier will make money off of this, even though it's a net-negative for the town as a whole.
Why not make the people so proud and happy to live in the country that they choose to serve without you having to force them to do it with the barrel of a gun?
The US hasn't cared about the social contract for decades and it hasn't taken justifiable military action for a longer stretch of time. Healthcare is byzantine and terrible, education is being gutted on ideological grounds, social stability is eroding, wealth inequality is an ever widening chasm, the climate is being degraded, AI is a threat looming over much (if not all) of this. Why volunteer? The arrogance to think a draft or mandatory service is anywhere in the realm of acceptable is galling.
It's almost suicidal. It's so stupidly hubristic that one has to wonder if the end goal is a total institutional collapse, with the belief that the technocracy will end up holding the cards?
> Why volunteer? The arrogance to think a draft or mandatory service is anywhere in the realm of acceptable is galling.
Agree. That's what we saw during Vietnam. The public finally got involved because it couldn't be ignored that the children of "normies" were being sent overseas to die in a meaningless and stupid war.
I absolutely love the idea of me or my children going through a challenging few years as a tool of our society, whether that be military training or something else.
...with the enormous caveat that our society must be cohesive, which it is no longer (culturally, politically - you name it).
The issue is, in America, we gave those less fortunate the path of military service as we value the greedy, the corrupt, nepotistic, capitalist notion that if you have enough money, laws do not apply to you.
When's the last time Finland or Switzerland attacked or invaded another country? People are willing to engage in compulsory military service if they feel that it's truly meant to help the country defend itself from actual attack, not potentially being shipped off somewhere to serve some political or economic goal.
> When's the last time Finland or Switzerland attacked or invaded another country?
Not recently to my knowledge, but Finland has extensive experience being invaded given they are neighbors with Russia (and Sweden in the past). When your next door neighbor keeps seeing your country as "their property," you need means to push them back.
One of the many issues with this supposedly being for everyone is that rich folks like Donald Trump's dad will get a doctor to get them out of it. Rules for thee and not for me is basically their motto.
One of the benefits of it being some form of civil service and not specifically military service is that it eliminates large categories of medical exemptions from being relevant.
> And to agree with others on this thread, the folks who push for war should 100% be required to participate in them and lead from the front. Don't sell the rest of our lives while you hide in a nice air conditioned bunker.
It never happens because those in power use their power to avoid it, even if they bind the rest of us with rules they enforce. By saying they "should be required", you are promoting the idea that their desire for war is acceptable as long as they codify certain standards, which they are able to use their powers to personally circumvent.
> By saying they "should be required", you are promoting the idea that their desire for war is acceptable as long as they codify certain standards, which they are able to use their powers to personally circumvent.
Spoiler alert: military "service" is an oxymoron. No American has served me by joining the military and killing black, brown, and asian women and children
Wars used to be paid for by raising taxes. Now we have no idea how much they cost. How many years in a row has the Pentagon failed it's audit? How many years (decades?) was the Iraq war funded through annual (unbudgeted) emergency measures? How many trillions in promised healthcare does America owe its veterans?
If the President had to make the case that taking on Iran would cost each American around $1000 on top of higher prices for fuel and food, how many would sign off on that?
So I guess I agree with Palantir. Be honest about the actual costs of war and chances are we will get into fewer.
> Be honest about the actual costs of war and chances are we will get into fewer.
This is a naive comment. The people deciding to send people to war do not concern themselves with the costs. The people concerned about the cost have no say in deciding to start military conflicts.
The most recent episode of the podcast “Search Engine” explored the cost of war and pretty much said exactly what you did. Besides the obvious war is bad, it’s so unfortunate we are passing on the cost to future generations. And for what?
Unless you have popular support behind you, a draft is a great way to make your military less effective. You get a bunch of soldiers who don't want to be there, who may not do their job to the utmost either out of apathy or active malice. It also gives lots of people, who might otherwise passively disagree with your war, a great incentive to actively resist your war and your attempts to force them to fight in it.
It worked in WWII because of Pearl Harbor and the Axis being cartoon villains. Direct US involvement also only lasted 4-5 years. Vietnam demonstrated that an unpopular, long-term conflict is ill-suited to the draft.
This is very much anecdotal but the concept of fragging has gone mainstream in my social media feeds. Mostly gen z joking about ww3 when the Iran conflict kicked off
Even if folks don't kill their commanding officers, this attitude indicates that they are less than willing to just accept their fate (with the usual caveat that you made about anecdotes and also that social media in general isn't necessarily reflective of reality).
Situation: you are a poor draftee being led by some other kid who happens to have a college degree (an officer). There are several of you, and one of him. Your living conditions are terrible and you're often asked to do things that might get you killed, and all of the reasons you're told you have to do this sure smell like bullshit.
Solution: you make your officer (another kid) piss-pants scared that if he doesn't lie and say you all totally went on that combat patrol you were sent on (rather than hanging around in the woods somewhere relatively safe for a couple hours, then walking right back to base) he might go to bed and not wake up because someone tossed a hand grenade in his tent and killed him. Or if he confiscates your drugs or hooch. Or tries to enforce grooming standards. Or anything else that makes your life worse. Basically, make him deathly afraid of upsetting "his men" in any way.
Grenades were the threat/weapon of choice because one tossed into a tent was pretty damn certain to kill the person sleeping there; deploying a grenade is very quiet (up until the boom, of course); they're much smaller than a firearm (easier to conceal even than a service pistol); and the slight delay between throw and detonation gave time to get some distance. In practice, it turned out to be extremely hard to prove who had committed these murders, especially if others in the unit weren't inclined to be honest about things they'd seen and heard that night.
This was A Thing toward the later end of the Vietnam War, and contributed mightily to reduced effectiveness of US ground forces. Turns out when you threaten people with death for no good reason they get kinda pissed off and murdery.
"Fragging" comes from "fragmentation grenade", or "frag" for short.
Bizarre for them to suggest this right after the US unilaterally launched the most unpopular war in modern history. A war with almost no tangible upside for US citizens, and a war many people think was started on the whims of another country.
Having grown up in Norway, I did my conscription when I was 18. Not really a big deal - even though I was incredibly unmotivated in the beginning. Back in the old days (read: Cold War days) everyone had to serve, but then as Russia became less of a threat, so did military funding, and the number of conscripted. Today around 15%-20% will be conscripted.
But interestingly enough, for the past 10 years we've seen a trend here in Norway where conscription service is viewed almost as a prestigious thing - due to how selective the military can be.
When I served, everyone would be called in. It wasn't a prestigious thing to do, just something you pushed through. We had one guy in our platoon during boot camp that was so big and heavy, he could not get into any standard issue boots. He was completely unable to run. Eventually he was discharged for medical reasons - but these days someone like that wouldn't have gotten past the screening stage. They can pretty much pick and choose among the fittest and brightest.
I'd wager that being conscripted in Norwary carries a different level of risk of deployment than being conscripted in the US, given the fact that we've been essentially been nonstop involved in wars for my entire lifetime.
When you were conscripted did you fear you might be sent to Iraq or Afganistan? It just feels like given our history an American conscript will litearlly always have some active warzone to possibly be sent off to. Our contries and our armies are not the same. Is Norway today chomping at the bit to send its soldiers to Iran? Or, per Trump, "our next conquest" Cuba? I really don't think you can think of being drafted into the American army the same way you think of the compulsory service of countries like South Korea or your own.
Being conscripted in a defensive army is materially different than being conscripted into one that takes every opportunity to engage in conflicts across the globe.
I did my service right around the time GWOT started, and it was around this time that our military started to focus more on transitioning to a professional (we do have professional units) military aimed at fighting terrorism in the middle east(Afghanistan/ISAF) as part of our NATO duties.
By the time you were finishing up your service (6-12 months depending on where you were stationed), you'd get a presentation on "the road ahead" if you wanted to continue military life: military school/college, become a professional soldier, etc.
With that said, I think maybe 10%-15% of the guys in our platoon decided to go with the Afghanistan route. IIRC that meant transferring / trying out for the professional battalion (TMBN), training for some time, and then deployed.
I don't think sending all conscripted soldiers to some foreign war will yield good results. But I do think that by the end of their service, some will be hyped up and "thirsty" enough to just go for it.
The notion that the work done by "the engineering elite" at tech companies and research organizations aren't contributing to the national defense unless they're pressed into military service or working directly on weapons systems is absurd.
Who does he think invented, designed, and implemented the hardware and software underlying modern military technology?
Or for that matter, the tech that makes running any organization at the scale of the modern US military even possible.
Consider: with computer technology, the Defense Finance and Accounting Service employs over 12,000 people responsible for the Department of Defense's basic accounting functions like accounts payable, accounts receivable, and payroll.
Forget building bombs and drafting soldiers.
Without computer technology, you'd need to draft an army of clerical workers.
I'm in favor of mandatory public service (not exclusively military) but I also don't think a private company should be weighing in on such topics, since it's just a bunch of capital owners preaching about what everyone else should do.
We can, we just choose not to because of how we prioritize accounting. I see no reason why a well-run program shouldn't pay for itself since people would be doing some work as well as getting trained. Obviously, I'm picturing this as part of a broad realignment of national priorities and governance mores, not as a drop-in solution that we could just put in place tomorrow.
Opening graph: "We should, as a society, seriously consider moving away from an all-volunteer force and only fight the next war if everyone shares in the risk and the cost," says military contractor and all-around surveillance-enabler Palantir.
If that's the case, then every war to be fought needs to have the say so of those that will be doing the fighting and not the solitary decision made by a delusional leader that had already circumvented the required process from Congress.
Robert Heinlein proposed something like that in his "lost" novel For Us, the Living: instead of declaring war, Congress would authorize a war referendum, in which only those eligible for military service could vote. The catch was, everyone voting "Yes" would thereby automatically sign themselves up in the military for the duration. If a further draft was needed, it would first be composed of those that didn't vote, and lastly those who voted "No."
(In the book, the "future" Congress had called war referenda on three occasions; each time, the vote was overwhelmingly "No," and historians believed those decisions were justified.)
It seems a good idea, but then I remember the history of World War I: the French and the German populations were very happy and willing to go to war (especially the French). A quick war that will settle it, they thought. And then they ended up in one of the worst meatgrinders of history.
Even if they had a referendum system such as the one proposed, I don't think that would make it a better decision. And given how people don't assume the consequences of their decisions, they would just find excuses later on - "we were manipulated, they lied to us" - but the damage will still be done.
Simpler: Leaders who engage in military engagements should face a public referendum 6 months/1 year later, with exactly 1 question: "Should [Leader] die?". Presidents in the US rarely get elected with less than 40% of the popular vote, and I reckon about 30% of people wouldn't vote to kill someone pretty much no matter what they did. Half of those people are your supporters, so really it's just a matter of avoiding your popularity plummeting to sub 35% because of your warmongering. By that math. By that math, Trump, W. Bush, and Truman would have gotten the gallows. Biden, Carter, and Nixon all fell below 35%, but didn't start any foreign wars.
Having those sent to fight in a war being the ones to decide if the war should be fought was on of the major points in General Butler’s 1935 book War is a Racket
I used to think this is a good idea. However, the reality is when you join the military it should be reasonable assumption you are going to be sent somewhere to actually fight at some point.
My proposed alternative would be, when you sign up for the military, you are presented with a list of "regions" in which you are willing to be deployed in a combat role, with pay/benefits scaling accordingly the more regions (and more "in demand" regions) you are willing to be deployed. So you could potentially ahve a group that would not fight in the Middle East but would fight in the Pacific, etc. Of course you can't have too many declining service in too many reasons, but if it starts to get expensive to find recruits willing to fight in a given region thats a clear sign somethings amiss with popular sentiment.
> Butler, a retired Marine Corps major general, testified under oath that wealthy businessmen were plotting to create a fascist veterans' organization with him as its leader and use it in a coup d'état to overthrow Roosevelt.
I was going to make a sarcastic comment about how everyone in Russia shared the risks and costs with Nicolas Romanov but then realized it was true. If politicians sending kids to kill and die shared the risk and cost of war then they wouldn't get to come home from Washington when the war is finished.
Whatever its other merits or demerits, reinstating the draft would cut back on needless wars. Abandoning the draft is what ended the anti-war movement, and to reinstate it would be to revive those protests. For this reason, if nothing else, it probably won't be reinstated.
What this has to do with the argument Palantir is apparently making, I have no idea. I can't make any sense of it.
Palantir is a more dangerous enemy of the USA (or any people of Earth) than, say, Iran.
There's no point in addressing their propaganda, but the idea that that a draft leads to everyone from every class of life having to be involved in war equally is so obviously untrue it's a joke.
It's hard to take them seriously given the omission of the biggest catastrophe of the 2000s-2020s that underlies everything they do, i.e., wealth inequality, the creation of a parasitic ruling class that uses propaganda to control the political narrative (and seeking AI for even greater control with less support), and the destitution of the poor by the rich, from the manufactured opium epidemic, gig economy, financial crises, etc.
Their sundry list reminds me of the smarty boys in undergrad philosophy who pretend to be great philosophers before they have taken even one step into self-criticism and self-knowledge.
Karp has a right to his opinion as bonkers as it may be but it is doubly bonkers to release this as company policy. Especially coupled with all the other bonkers things that went into this manifesto. Rearming Germany and Japan? Why does Palantir care about that? Toss in some unsubtle racism and you're really just staking your company position as aligned with a very narrow political niche. Seemingly at odds with the company's interest to provide services to whoever will pay.
Unless I'm mistaken Germany has US-owned nuclear weapons on it's soil at all times. There are some part of the German military that could use a serious rethinking because of a decay of operational capacity. But exactly what else would we be arming them with?
the absurdity to even entertain this dorks musings.
imagine if tim cook or satya came out and talked about how there needs to be a draft. people would say lol shut up nerd and move on.
some dorkus who heads a company that's just providing over reaching surveillance data to governments so they can do dumb data analytics should have no say in these affairs, and we should promptly discard what they have to say. peter thiel is a sociopath, karp is a dork, these people just want to be known as "the guy with the ideas" and they've crossed deep into the "what are you even saying right now" territory.
tbh we should jettison them into the sun they're kind of a scourge on civilization and clearly lake any real stakes that keep them grounded in the world.
Surely he means that himself and his billionaire buddies will be the first boots on the ground when we decide to plunder another country for oil again. No?
> Silicon Valley owes a moral debt to the country that made its rise possible
I would agree with that, but its debt is to the people of that country, not their current government. But instead, Palantir conspires to surveil and repress those people at the bidding of an elite, anti-democratic minority.
And would the leaders of Palantir still argue it had a moral debt to serve the government if it was a left-wing one, engaged in a process of wealth redistribution? No, they wouldn't. This supposed moral ideology is a facile sham.
The movements and announcements of large tech companies tend to be newsworthy, whether it's "we made a new iPhone", "our new model is so good it's dangerous!" or "we should have a draft to support new American imperialism"
I understand why your first two examples would be newsworthy – they are 1) about technical products that 2) are produced by the company that is making the announcement. But what does Palantir have to do with the draft? Isn't this comment on the same level as, I dunno, Elon Musk tweeting that families should have at least 3 kids?
I never liked activist for-profit companies. Not "woke SV", not the new "anti-woke", well, everything in the US.
IMO companies should focus on profits and activing within the law, and we shouldn't expect them to go beyond that. If their behaviour seems socially net negative then the law, or it's enforcement should change.
But activist corporations, especially big ones, are a weird chimera where they have a loudspeaker for opinions that are neither representative (it's an owners/C-suite persons PoV, or marketing) nor high quality from a journalistic PoV, yet somehow dressed up as a noble civic duty. SV was so big on allyship and diversity, until Trump said too much woke, and they put it all in the bin, alongside their crumpled backbone. There is no virtue in corporate activism and hypocritical opportunism only.
It feels so off that late-middle-age CEO Karp and his military contractor AI company should be even taking a side in a debate about the state compelling young people (men?) to do something they wouldn't do of their own volition.
"We should, as a society, seriously consider moving away from an all-volunteer force and only fight the next war if everyone shares in the risk and the cost,"
OK, sure, but only if we agree that a war should be fought. No more fighting a war because six rich guys in a back room decide we need unobtanium. Or because one rich guy doesn't like some other rich guy's religious values.
I still cannot help but look at Palantir as a company that just sends $ to the "oligarchs". I still wonder what real value Palantir provides the US Gov.
After reading the article, are they looking for cheap tech labor. Is that because no one in tech wants to join the military due to pay ?
> I still wonder what real value Palantir provides the US Gov.
Their "product" has always been some hacky database joins behind a web app with a dark mode interface that makes the baby brains at DOD feel like they're in a 90s hacker movie
Different deployments of Palantir Foundry exist in the US gov't/military and do provide real data science/analytics value.
> After reading the article, are they looking for cheap tech labor. Is that because no one in tech wants to join the military due to pay ?
Cyber in the military has abysmal retention because of the pay. You can get an immediate ~$50k pay raise doing the same work as soon as you leave the military.
Even though the title of the Reason article is "Palantir Wants to Reinstate the Draft", suggesting that point 6 is what the Reason editorial staff found most striking about their manifesto, the actual text of what Palantir wrote about conscription is:
> 6. National service should be a universal duty. We should, as a society, seriously consider moving away from an all-volunteer force and only fight the next war if everyone shares in the risk and the cost.
which is actually more of a hedge than most of their other points. "National service should be a universal duty" is vague enough to be compatible with a few different concrete policies. And "seriously consider" moving away from an all-volunteer force is rather different from a specific recommendation to literally re-instate the draft! I suspect that the people inside Palantir responsible for this copy are close enough to the actual military that they're aware of the good arguments for why an all-volunteer military is more effective at achieving its goals than one with a bunch of draftees who really don't want to be there.
And because Palantir frames this point as a way to make "everyone share[...] in the risk and the cost" of wars, there's actually quite a lot of measured agreement even here in this HN thread full of people who dislike Palantir in general. Making everyone share in the risk and the cost of wars does have emotional resonance that makes people a bit less reflexively opposed to bringing back the draft than they might otherwise be.
Anyway, I'm against mandatory national service. The US military works well as an all-volunteer force, the US government is perfectly capable of hiring people at a wage to do other types of national service work, and I don't think it's actually socially desirable to force every US citizen to do some amount of mandatory, low-quality work to make them feel connected to the rest of society or whatever other vague benefit people think it would have on the citizenry at large. I'm also skeptical that mandatory service would involve enough young people actually entering combat roles against their will, to incentivize meaningful change to how the US uses its military in the world.
I think the proper counter move is to seize all assets of oligarchs and distribute it among The People. That way those Vietnam 2.0 loving guys won't get any say in anything anymore.
To those HNers working at Palantir - and there's bound to be a few - what's your deal?
You do realize what sort of company you work for, right? Is it cognitive dissonance or are you really a paranoid right winger that's fully on board with Palantir's efforts to enable authoritarian governments akin to 1984's Big Brother?
I'm curious. Please feel free to explain how you go to work every day and do what you do. Fair warning, the rest of us are pretty disgusted with you.
Money can paper over a lot of moral dilemmas - everyone has a price, whether or not we're necessarily aware of it. I refuse to interview with any company in the "defense," space, but I'm sure if someone threw enough money at me I might entertain it.
For true believers though, which I'm sure exist there, I do wonder much the same things.
The CEO of Palantir, Alex Karp, has extensive ties to the Israeli government and is a self-avowed Jewish-supremacist. Peter Thiel was also featured extensively in the Epstein Files, and the two collaborated on creating Palantir to serve Israeli interests.
Doesn’t ycombinator and hacker news have links with this company? Makes it hard to maintain the hacker ethos when this entire site seems so closely linked with such forces.
The hacker aesthetic has always been largely reactionary and hyperfocused on the individual and individual freedoms. See also the politics of "generation X"
The saddest thing of our age is that "reactionary" and "individual freedom" is equated to authoritarian movements that are anything but.
The hacker aesthetic has always been anarchist in nature, until the rich Californians decided that a hacker is an entrepreneur that participates into the game of capitalism. To be fair, even the concept of libertarianism was an offshoot of anarchism, until the Americans decided that it means right-wing party politics of the rich elite. Words don't mean anything any more, any concept that can equated to its opposite if it rewards one with internet points.
"Right wing politics dominated by the rich" is the natural endpoint of libertarianism, so that makes sense. Whether they're "real" libertarians or not, the elite techies leading the charge are people with politics like Karp, Andreessen, Musk, etc.
Libertarianism is abused by capital in the same exact way that conservatism and progressivism are - by getting primed with easy feel-good answers that are ultimately disempowering and self-defeating. In the case of libertarianism, this is so-called "right-" libertarianism that actively rejects qualitative judgements of freedom and coercion while hyper-emphasizing an axiomatic framework that can be used to justify authoritarianism as long as the logical preconditions have been met.
I'm in complete agreement with your defense of "individual freedom". But how is "reactionary" anything but an authoritarian movement? I'd say those two are basically synonyms regardless of whether we're talking about "reactionary mass media" or the political philosophy laid out by Yarvin where he took ownership of the term. Do you have another definition in mind?
as a counter, it is exactly the hacker ethos to take something and use it not as expected by those that made it so that it can be used for their own purpose
Between idiotic tech bros who wouldn't know a war if it bit them on the butt promoting a draft because they don't think they'd be drafted and HN having links with Palantir/Karp I think I'm done with this site.
This article has a strong slant. If we can look past that, we should consider the claim: everyone having skin in the game is more democratic and leads to a better aligned government.
But everyone won’t have skin in the game. We’ve played this game before. The uber wealthy and politically connected kids will either get outright deferments, or cushy positions that never have them sniffing any danger beyond carpal tunnel.
It’s no different than the republicans that are violently against abortion and then you find out they’ve funded multiple for their mistresses. They’re perfectly fine with a law banning it because they know it will never apply to them.
Right, in the minds of millions right now there's literally no reason to fight for this country. This country certainly ignores their existence and refuses to honor most forms of basic rights as health, education, and shelter. It really only cares if you mess up your tax return.
Not even that long ago, nobility died at higher rates than normal people in ww1 and ww2. Many lines were killed during them. I still know of nobles in my own country in the army. Generals died in WW2 at a decent rate as well.
Nobility lost most relevance now so I'm sure it's different now, owning a castle or a weird last name doesn't make you rich or powerful.
But it’s how it will be sold to us. It’s sure a lot warmer in the abbatoir for some reason. And they give some of us cigarettes. Bill says they even feed him.
Other countries have compulsory military service, for example Finland. Generally speaking I am a fan of the idea that everyone should be required to do some kind of community service for 2 years once they turn 18. Military service would just be one option, could be other kinds of civic engagement. This can really help people feel connected to their society and understand that there is something to show up for.
BUT - this really only works if there's a social contract in place. In the United States it's hard to see how compulsory service works if people don't feel like the country is showing up for them.
These days, what are American soldiers dying for? A society with great health care? Fantastic education? Wealth and social stability? Absolutely not! Until that changes I don't see any good reason why we should send our young people off to die. (EDIT: if you want a sobering experience, visit a military graveyard and pay special attention to the ages of the soldiers. We might as well call a military graveyard a children's graveyard).
And to agree with others on this thread, the folks who push for war should 100% be required to participate in them and lead from the front. Don't sell the rest of our lives while you hide in a nice air conditioned bunker.
> Generally speaking I am a fan of the idea that everyone should be required to do some kind of community service for 2 years once they turn 18.
Why? I get the warm-and-fuzzy angle of "instilling civic responsibility", but you're effectively instilling that at gunpoint: the government forces you to do this, else you go to prison. Is that really such an enlightened thing to do?
It takes away two years of your life, possibly delaying your education, entry into the workforce, or having children. So again, what's the rigorous justification for this? The government already calls dibs on a good chunk of your economic output, on a percentage of every penny you spend, and on certain types of property you own; so why should they also be able to draft you for some free labor if there's no war or other emergency going on?
It also implies that most normal work isn't in the interest of society, which if that were true, would be a major problem on its own. In what sense is 2 years of military service or "community service" strictly better for society than going to school, or working as a waiter, or starting a small business?
Roughly speaking, 2 years of community service should be worth some % of local & federal taxes.
In a developed society, I'm not sure what kind of labor an 18-year old can perform (what I mean is that it would be mostly unskilled labor), that would be better than taxing this same individual later in life, without delaying their education by 2 years.
I suppose there would have to be exemptions for college students as there typically are in such schemes in other countries?
Shouldn't be. Just have a more-level playing field, make everyone (college-track or not) participate.
You seem to assume that tax dollars are equivalent to labor. A pile of quarters never did anything sitting there, it takes a human to do something for the most part. Money is a tool sitting there, not actual work.
> A pile of quarters never did anything sitting there
Luckily, we don't have a pile of quarters sitting there doing anything, because the US operates at a deficit. So dollars are being borrowed then spent on projects.
Sorry, I'm not sure what you're trying to say there. Borrowing money somehow does useful work without being spent?
I mean, yes? I think when we say, we should force 18 year olds to do something useful for society instead of working doordash or taking college classes that they don't care about, that is kind of saying something about the usefulness of those things.
If the market figured it out we wouldn't be having these discussions in the first place.
It's not a market failure. If you pay enough money you can attract either citizens or even destitute African people to volunteer to get blown up for the glory of Trump and the oil companies.
The only reason to force two years of service is to reinforce conformity and suppress outward signs of neurodivergence.
I'm not sure what I believe is right but one thing I can think of is there could be a bias for a certain type of people to join branches of the military and therefore our capabilities are held back by that bias. The same goes for companies that work with the military/defense which I think the parent article lays out as well.
If you allow everyone to pick and choose what they want to do, we may actually end up (or already have ended up) with all of the talented people and cutting edge businesses chasing money here and only second tier folks working with and for the government.
I think a great example of this is with NASA. They are doing a big hiring blitz (someone posted about it recently here). They have a ton of openings but I have to imagine that the talented folks that work in the field are chasing the money that is paid by private companies right now. I personally believe NASA is an important thing that needs to exist and we need to figure out a way to make it happen. Maybe we need to just pay folks more to make them incentivized to work in government? Maybe even more so if you working for the armed forces because you lose a lot of people based upon the sheer fact that your life is more at risk.
It would definitely be worth some research. I don't think free market concepts align well with working in the armed forces and there could be some arguments that we need to tip the scales to make it work better. For some things like the usual government services that aren't vital for our existence, I think we can all accept the longer wait at the DMV or the two decades to get a Real ID implemented. I don't think we can accept not defending our own country from an adversarial invasion so we need to make that importance reflected somewhere.
> there could be a bias for a certain type of people to join branches of the military and therefore our capabilities are held back by that bias.
Not only is there a bias, there is one on purpose (not saying that's a good thing). For example, the Marines are known to prefer recruiting from lower-income and lower-education backgrounds. They want scrappy, tough people.
Conversely, the Air Force is the "geek" branch of the military.
There are lots of other examples. If you go on YouTube you can see funny videos of the branches poking friendly fun at each other; e.g., Marines eating crayons.
> Maybe we need to just pay folks more to make them incentivized to work in government?
In the US I think this may be the only way. Private industry pays so much it's hard to compete.
> Why? I get the warm-and-fuzzy angle of "instilling civic responsibility"
I have found that when older people ask young people to do this kind of "mandatory service" they never specify what exactly are they going to do while being on the government's leash.
It's always this warm fuzzy hand wavy "civic responsibility" or "build communities" thing, that they always seem to think is something someone else should do when they are fully capable of doing it themselves.
> why should they also be able to draft you for some free labor if there's no war or other emergency going on?
You can only prepare for a fire before it starts.
In the conventional view, the earliest preparations for war involve building a strong industrial base, reducing corruption, and securing alliances through cooperative foreign policy. The near-term preparations for war include diverting a fraction of total resources away from compounding growth and towards non-compounding defense manufacturing. A draft is something you do after the war starts.
The strategic idea is to remain in a pose of compounding growth as long as possible by avoiding war and war preparations until they're known to be absolutely necessary. Peacetime investments like scientific research build on themselves, while military spending sits in a depot until it's obsolete and then costs even more to safely dispose. The same goes for replacing the first two years of professional school with standing around in a big shed.
> The same goes for replacing the first two years of professional school with standing around in a big shed.
This may be true in an American context (though I don't actually know) in the sense that the US military is highly specialized and matrixed. In smaller militaries soldiers tend to be more generalist, while still having specializations.
e.g., they say in the British forces, if you ask an artillery soldier what they do, it's a little bit of everything. In the US military, a soldier might say "I pull the rope!" Not a good use of talent.
There are other bases besides war for national service, eg disaster prep, taking care of the poor and so on. In any case, being somewhat prepared for war at the human level and understanding what that entails is more productive that not being prepared and having to educate people in an unwelcome emergency.
The same goes for replacing the first two years of professional school with standing around in a big shed.
Exaggerated tropes like this don't make for useful discussion.
One of the paradoxes of military service is that the real experiences of servicemembers sound exaggerated, while what sounds like reality is expressed through Hollywood tropes.
Sure, but you also don't keep 1.3 million firefighters idling in case of a really big fire.
Of course you do, thats how fire brigades work!? Though you are somewhat right, its closer to only 1.1 million firefighters across the US.
https://www.nfpa.org/education-and-research/research/nfpa-re...
Don't we? That is pretty close to the number of firefighters in the US, and they rarely fight fires
From some quick googling, I think the average firefighter fights about two fires per month, which is pretty good! And the average specialized wildlands kind of firefighter fights fires much more often.
But firefighters don't just fight fires, they mostly do medical emergencies, which keep them very busy. And that's the problem with standing armies: we generally don't want soldiers doing a bunch of other kinds of work besides wars because they're around.
> And the average specialized wildlands kind of firefighter fights fires much more often.
For the most part, only during fire season.
> but you're effectively instilling that at gunpoint: the government forces you to do this, else you go to prison. Is that really such an enlightened thing to do?
if you want rights, you need to do more than just exist.
gunpoint is optional; West Germany used to force people to go either into the Army, or else do a longer stint of service in hospitals, firefighting, old folks homes, rescue services, youth organizations, or other civil roles.
Do you believe that in American civil society there are only privileges and not responsibilities?
Government already got the tax dollars to pay for the service at gunpoint. And makes you get a passport to travel internationally or a driver's license to get yourself around at gunpoint.
> Do you believe that in American civil society there are only privileges and not responsibilities?
Funny enough, the only true responsibility I'm aware of is jury duty. And that's only for citizens and everybody tries to get out of it.
All of this is only for citizens. Many try to get out of it, but "everybody" is flat wrong. It sounds like you are aware of, and accept, responsibilities. Nothing wrong with adding to them.
> free labor
I'm not sure anywhere expects people to do their national service for free - which is to say that such a programme would also likely be very expensive.
you're effectively instilling that at gunpoint: the government forces you to do this
I'm so sick of libertarian tropes. Starting every argument with oerwrought emotionalism has made me increasingly indifferent to your 'plight' over the years, because it's just victimization politics. Perhaps if we rebalanced public/private obligations overall tax burdens owuld be lower and society would be more pleasant to live in.
I'm not a libertarian but I think they have a point here - conscription is tantamount to slave labor. The fact that it was accepted by societies for hundreds of years doesn't make it any less so.
Devil's advocate.
First, "national service" does not necessarily mean relocation like a military deployment does. Second, there is no requirement that national service be free.
This has me thinking about a way to encourage some level of public service in exchange for better access to government programs, like an extra 10% in retirement benefits or something.
Reminds me of Starship Troopers: "Service Guarantees Citizenship!" Yes, I know it's a play on fascism.
> Starship Troopers
So, disclaimer: I'm very aware that Verhoeven created Starship Troopers satirizing fascism and holding up a mirror to American society.
That said, I am somewhat a fan of the idea that citizenship is something that should be earned. For example, birthright citizenship - I think it's a good thing and should be kept around. That said, as far as I know no natural-born American is required to raise their right hand and swear that they will take up arms to defend the United States in case of war. A naturalized citizen is required to do this. That creates a real bifurcation in the society in my opinion.
What if it didn't delay your education? In some countries an undergrad degree is only three years. I'd take a person with 1 year of civil service + 3 years of a degree over someone with 4 years of a degree any day.
Somebody who is confident enough to handle a rifle and throw a hand grenade is way more useful to me than someone who was forced to another literature or geology course.
Have someone demonstrate a command of the English language by following written instructions that require coordinating activities with a small group of people.
Instead of learning how to read a topographical map for first year geology lab final actually put the map in their hand with a compass and have them do an orienteering exercise as a group.
> Somebody who is confident enough to handle a rifle and throw a hand grenade is way more useful to me
For when daily standups go south or just the monthly All-Hands?
> What if it didn't delay your education? In some countries an undergrad degree is only three years. I'd take a person with 1 year of civil service + 3 years of a degree over someone with 4 years of a degree any day.
In a world where 1 year of civil service was normal for most people, I'm skeptical that this is the choice the labor market would consistently make. Remember, if pretty much everyone in society is doing the same national service, then that means the military had to find jobs for everyone to do, including people with mediocre general competence or who are in fact bad at following written instructions in English. "I completed my mandatory national service, just like pretty much everyone else" is not that strong of a signal.
In the Soviet Union, smart math and science students often competed hard for academic and technical positions that would let them fulfill their military obligation by doing some kind of math or science for the Soviet state, instead of being a conscript foot-soldier for a few years like was normal for Soviet males (boot camp sucks for everyone, but it really sucks for most smart nerds). If the US had a system like this, there would definitely be industries where it was normal for everyone working in them to have avoided the worst of actual combat training somehow or another - or for actually having done normal soldiering to be a culturally-unusual thing to do. Just like how in our actual society it's unusual for someone who works at a silicon valley tech company to have actually volunteered to serve in the US military earlier in life.
I'd prefer someone who is confident enough to take another geology or literature course over the gun-handler. I'd make sure that person is in a supervisory position over welfare-state products of our armed forces, certainly.
If you were presented with three options for hiring, each with identical professional experience, but the first has a four year degree, while the second has a three year degree, and the third has a three year degree plus + year of national service in a country with an effective military which one would you pick and why?
Who's going to pay for that?
Taxpayers in non-failed states like Finland that are able to provide astoundingly high quality of life for their citizens while also providing a strong military that is based around mandatory national service.
Finland has been rated the happiest country in the world what, eight or nine years in a row now and was able to secure they borders against a overwhelmingly more capable neighbour with no participation in a mutual aid defensive alliance like NATO until very recently.
In so many ways Finland is the model we should all be looking at emulating in Western countries.
While the majority of Finns speak highly of their conscription system, there's also an understanding that it's propped up by Finland's unique history and place in the world. I think people are seriously naive as to how much shit the Finnish people have suffered over the last millenia, and how that has contextualized their modern existence.
> Finland has been rated the happiest country in the world
"Tilastollinen onnellisuus" is a concept relentlessly mocked by Finns. Finns are very proud of their country, but many are also very quick to call it a shithole, to engage in valittaminen, and for good reason. Their love for it is practically an expression of sisu. The contradiction of it being an absolute dreg of a swamp populated by insufferable FINNS, yet they would all agree to throw their life away to defend it anyways, is not a situation that was conjured out of thin air with some clever social policies and progressive tax reform.
> the government forces you to do this, else you go to prison
You'll never guess what happens if you choose not to pay taxes.
They use tax money to house and feed you?
> They use tax money to house and feed you?
Indeed — just not in the style to which you'd like to become accustomed ....
And this justifies it why?
I like the idea of civic engagement / service in theory too, but I feel like the Vietnam war was a demonstration of possible failure modes when draft is in place: a lot of poor kids died, some rich kids allegedly used parental influence to dodge the draft. No incentive for leaders to avoid war while loop holes remain for their own interests.
I think you could argue the draft forced the war to be real for more families (and the expansion of TV), intensifying the resistance to it. Quick googling says almost 10% of the population served in Vietnam in some capacity. Less than 1% served in the War on Terror.
This was part of Charles Rangel's (D) reasoning to propose bringing back the draft. [1]
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_National_Service_Act
> I think you could argue the draft forced the war to be real for more families (and the expansion of TV), intensifying the resistance to it.
Yeah, it did, all the young men of draft age had to live knowing that they might get drafted and be forced to fight and die. Even if they were never called, or in retrospect were too old at the time.
We seem to have largely forgotten that now, along with the "Vietnam Syndrome" that the US military "suffered" through until we were successful in applying military force in 1991 with the Gulf War.
I almost hope they're successful in doing this. We've also lost the focus on clearly defined objectives for war.
It seems like we need a horrible mess to learn all the hard lessons all over again.
> We've also lost the focus on clearly defined objectives for war.
Are you saying we had this in Vietnam?
And I don't think the evidence is strong that these "hard lessons" did anything to keep that same generation from supporting the pointless wars that followed.
No, I'm saying we had that in the Gulf War, and we're sliding back to Vietnam.
> It seems like we need a horrible mess to learn all the hard lessons all over again.
Indeed. This is all of human history. No matter what the problem is we are infatuated with the idea of the ultimate solution being exterminating everyone who does not agree with our worldview.
That argument falls flat, when considering regions like the Ukraine that are fighting for survival today.
And when contrasting with earlier times like the Civil War, where a draft was unpopular: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enrollment_Act
Drafts, and by extension wars, should be unpopular. War should be the last resort that no one wants to take. No one should be cheering for a war they won't have to participate in.
War has become too remote and comfortable for most Americans.
I don't think I follow why your examples contradict the argument. A draft will always be unpopular.
I misread.
I saw the television portion and thought you meant the televised war was what made it all too real.
Also the poor kids started killing the rich kids.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fragging
A major reason why the draft was stopped is that because when you take a disunified and unwilling populace and start giving them weapons, their target may not be the enemy.
The word allegedly should be dropped many ie.. Taco got out of it, however much better men John McCain, John Kerry, and Robert Mueller did not. Serving is okay if everyone serves no exceptions.
McCain and Kerry volunteered. Don't know about Mueller
People greatly overestimate the number of Vietnam vets who were drafted.
It isn't the number that were drafted that matters. It is the number who were enrolled who might have been drafted that matters.
A relative of mine who was of draft age during the Vietnam war, deliberately enlisted in the US army because he thought that this would reduce his chances of being sent to fight in Vietnam And it worked, he spent his time overseas in the military in Japan in a non-combat role. I'm sure many males of draft age made similar choices.
For maybe people, even one would be too many.
For others' sake, I double-checked: 2.59 million served, of which 648,500 were draftees. Right at 25%
Is there a study of soldiers who enlisted but only because their draft number was low? There were substantial benefits to enlisting, because you could choose your branch of service.
Should break that down by people who had enlisted before hostilities began. Material difference enlisting during peace time vs when there is an active theater of war.
It would be more interesting to see those numbers broken down by frontline service. What percentage of the guys actually dying in the jungle were drafted?
17,725 draftees died, just over 30% of all American combat deaths in the war
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam_War_draft
A formal declaration of war by Congress is the minimum.
Otherwise I agree that the incentives are warped.
Now you're talking crazy talk. Congress stepping up and fulfilling its constitutional role?
Finland doesn't have compulsory military service to help people feel connected to their society. Feeling connected to one's society is not an end in itself, people should be free to choose how connected they want to feel. Finland has compulsory military service because it's a small country that borders Russia. The US is a big country that borders Canada and Mexico.
> people should be free to choose how connected they want to feel
Yes and no. Of course people should be free, at the same time you live in a society and not a state of nature.
If someone never has to put back into society, that's dangerous. It could lead to people feeling that society has no value, that there's no sense in investing in it, that since nobody else cares why should I.
That's not a world I want to live in.
Many people I’ve met in the US feel like they already live in that world.
> If someone never has to put back into society, that's dangerous.
Most people I meet and interact with in the United States already feel like they don't need to contribute anything back into society besides the taxes they already pay to the local and federal government.
And what I mean by that is that some of them may SAY they would like to contribute, but none of them actually do (beyond taxes).
Instead of complaining about the average person not contributing enough to society why don’t we focus on the people (I.e. politicians) who directly leech off of society and make it worse? I’d rather they simply had no impact either way.
Do bureaucratic mandates instill a humanistic sense of value and commitment, particularly in societies which are at peak levels of institutional skepticism?
Yeah, if anyone maybe needs compulsory service, it's Mexico and Canada (to protect against the threat of the US), not the US.
Only works if everyone has to do it. Once you slice it into only a certain part of the population, it becomes an unfair class system. Example, rich and well connected people would never do it. If you say only men should do it, that's unfair as well.
Edit: I'm for this BTW, I think everyone should have to do some form of service, but I'd also like to see anyone in the gov with the power to send people to war be required to have served in the armed forces.
Agree. I also think both men and women should serve.
Austria has this figured out...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zivildienst_in_Austria
https://www.oesterreich.gv.at/en/themen/gesetze_und_recht/we...
> These days, what are American soldiers dying for?
Israel
more likely big tech and the oligarchs.
(The name of my next punk band.)
You restated his point less succinctly.
Good name for a punk band though.
more likely, investment bankers class and war profiteers with their friends!
Why not all three?
> These days, what are American soldiers dying for? A society with great health care? Fantastic education? Wealth and social stability?
Yes, except it's not their own one.
> These days, what are American soldiers dying for?
Why, they're dying for people like Alex Karp and Peter Thiel of course.
> what are American soldiers dying for?
The American way of life, which is still the most preferred way of life, as evidenced by (a) people wanting to emigrate here more than any other country in the world and (b) more people immigrating here than any other country.
> The American way of life
It's your argument that our current and recent engagements in Venezuela, Iran, and soon Cuba, are to defend the American way of life?
Yes? Iran threatens a nuclear attack on the US constantly. Not saying the war is some great idea but it definitely is about defending the american way of life
This is naive. An American soldier hasn't died for the American way of life in decades.
you actually believe this? that American soldiers dying in Afghanistan, Iraq, Vietnam, etc., were actually preserving the "American way of life" (whatever that means)??
And if it were true (which it isn't), if enjoying the "American way of life" requires killing people in other countries, then it's probably not a very good way of life.
Name one conflict we’ve been in since WW2 that protected the “American way of life”
I dont know if its worth 2 years of our lives. 2 years! A lot can be achieved in just two years
Imagine how the recipients of the work done by those spending just two years of their life doing civic projects would feel.
I would do it as a civic corps like the military in structure and pay but for civil projects and work experience. Enable our youth to learn on the job and actually value that experieence.
That's what the ideal would look like in my opinion too. Like the Peace Corps.
> And to agree with others on this thread, the folks who push for war should 100% be required to participate in them and lead from the front
I agree but I don't think it goes far enough. Leading from the front of the best equipped military in the world doesn't balance your incentives against the misery you are inflicting on the innocent denizens of the poor country you're pointlessly destroying.
There's also the economic destruction back home to balance against. So, those who call for war should be forbidden to privately fund their healthcare and children's education.
Agree. I believe during WW2 the government put rules in place to prevent companies from making too much profit from the war. From what I recall in history class taxes were raised significantly as well.
War is a mighty economic engine, this cannot be denied. But if we take an entire country to war, then it stands to reason that the entire country should benefit from the spoils (to the extent that there are any).
War is a mighty economic engine, this cannot be denied.
Isn't that the broken window fallacy writ large?
I may be misunderstanding but I don't think so. War forces people's hand in terms having to make progress. This is because during progress can be measured in number of body bags returning from the front and the reduction thereof.
Our modern world was born out of scientific advancements made during WW2. Could these same achievements have occurred in peace time? Obviously the answer is yes. However during war, everything becomes accelerated and things that normally would take a long time can happen very quickly.
I agree that paying for scientific progress with human lives is a bad thing.
Yes; WWII was an economic disaster for huge swaths of the world. The US is pretty much the only industrialized country at the time where it wasn't a complete economic disaster, because it was separated by oceans from nearly all the fighting and destruction.
If there's a shootout in a town that ends up with most peoples' windows getting shot out, the one town glazier will make money off of this, even though it's a net-negative for the town as a whole.
Why not make the people so proud and happy to live in the country that they choose to serve without you having to force them to do it with the barrel of a gun?
That's two steps. Government and business only cares about instant results.
I think that's a lovely idea.
The US hasn't cared about the social contract for decades and it hasn't taken justifiable military action for a longer stretch of time. Healthcare is byzantine and terrible, education is being gutted on ideological grounds, social stability is eroding, wealth inequality is an ever widening chasm, the climate is being degraded, AI is a threat looming over much (if not all) of this. Why volunteer? The arrogance to think a draft or mandatory service is anywhere in the realm of acceptable is galling.
It's almost suicidal. It's so stupidly hubristic that one has to wonder if the end goal is a total institutional collapse, with the belief that the technocracy will end up holding the cards?
> Why volunteer? The arrogance to think a draft or mandatory service is anywhere in the realm of acceptable is galling.
Agree. That's what we saw during Vietnam. The public finally got involved because it couldn't be ignored that the children of "normies" were being sent overseas to die in a meaningless and stupid war.
Utterly precise.
I absolutely love the idea of me or my children going through a challenging few years as a tool of our society, whether that be military training or something else.
...with the enormous caveat that our society must be cohesive, which it is no longer (culturally, politically - you name it).
The issue is, in America, we gave those less fortunate the path of military service as we value the greedy, the corrupt, nepotistic, capitalist notion that if you have enough money, laws do not apply to you.
When's the last time Finland or Switzerland attacked or invaded another country? People are willing to engage in compulsory military service if they feel that it's truly meant to help the country defend itself from actual attack, not potentially being shipped off somewhere to serve some political or economic goal.
> When's the last time Finland or Switzerland attacked or invaded another country?
Not recently to my knowledge, but Finland has extensive experience being invaded given they are neighbors with Russia (and Sweden in the past). When your next door neighbor keeps seeing your country as "their property," you need means to push them back.
Yes, that's my point. They have been invaded, and therefore needed to defend themselves; they have not been the aggressor.
One of the many issues with this supposedly being for everyone is that rich folks like Donald Trump's dad will get a doctor to get them out of it. Rules for thee and not for me is basically their motto.
One of the benefits of it being some form of civil service and not specifically military service is that it eliminates large categories of medical exemptions from being relevant.
Civil servants are not sent to front lines commonly.
> And to agree with others on this thread, the folks who push for war should 100% be required to participate in them and lead from the front. Don't sell the rest of our lives while you hide in a nice air conditioned bunker.
It never happens because those in power use their power to avoid it, even if they bind the rest of us with rules they enforce. By saying they "should be required", you are promoting the idea that their desire for war is acceptable as long as they codify certain standards, which they are able to use their powers to personally circumvent.
> By saying they "should be required", you are promoting the idea that their desire for war is acceptable as long as they codify certain standards, which they are able to use their powers to personally circumvent.
I am not.
I absolutely read it as promoting war.
Well you are absolutely wrong.
Spoiler alert: military "service" is an oxymoron. No American has served me by joining the military and killing black, brown, and asian women and children
> No American has served me by joining the military and killing black, brown, and asian women and children
Oh? I would argue that most of us in the United States live in complete blissful ignore that our entire way of life is propped up by this.
Wars used to be paid for by raising taxes. Now we have no idea how much they cost. How many years in a row has the Pentagon failed it's audit? How many years (decades?) was the Iraq war funded through annual (unbudgeted) emergency measures? How many trillions in promised healthcare does America owe its veterans?
If the President had to make the case that taking on Iran would cost each American around $1000 on top of higher prices for fuel and food, how many would sign off on that?
So I guess I agree with Palantir. Be honest about the actual costs of war and chances are we will get into fewer.
> Be honest about the actual costs of war and chances are we will get into fewer.
This is a naive comment. The people deciding to send people to war do not concern themselves with the costs. The people concerned about the cost have no say in deciding to start military conflicts.
The most recent episode of the podcast “Search Engine” explored the cost of war and pretty much said exactly what you did. Besides the obvious war is bad, it’s so unfortunate we are passing on the cost to future generations. And for what?
The current administration can't even be honest about the fact that we're in a war, so there's no way they're gonna be honest about the costs.
> How many years in a row has the Pentagon failed it's audit?
The pentagon has NEVER been successfully audited.
All caps “NEVER” made me double check how many audits they’ve failed, and it’s only been since 2018 that the first “audit” occurred.
Eisenhower warned of the industrial military complex in his farewell address in 1961, 57 years prior.
> Wars used to be paid for by raising taxes
in the long term maybe, in the short term its mass debt of trillions
Inflation sort of is a tax, on those who do not hold appreciating assets. I.e. mostly people on the poorer side.
Unless you have popular support behind you, a draft is a great way to make your military less effective. You get a bunch of soldiers who don't want to be there, who may not do their job to the utmost either out of apathy or active malice. It also gives lots of people, who might otherwise passively disagree with your war, a great incentive to actively resist your war and your attempts to force them to fight in it.
It worked in WWII because of Pearl Harbor and the Axis being cartoon villains. Direct US involvement also only lasted 4-5 years. Vietnam demonstrated that an unpopular, long-term conflict is ill-suited to the draft.
This is very much anecdotal but the concept of fragging has gone mainstream in my social media feeds. Mostly gen z joking about ww3 when the Iran conflict kicked off
Even if folks don't kill their commanding officers, this attitude indicates that they are less than willing to just accept their fate (with the usual caveat that you made about anecdotes and also that social media in general isn't necessarily reflective of reality).
What is fragging?
> The premeditated murder of one's superior officer in a military unit
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/fragging
Situation: you are a poor draftee being led by some other kid who happens to have a college degree (an officer). There are several of you, and one of him. Your living conditions are terrible and you're often asked to do things that might get you killed, and all of the reasons you're told you have to do this sure smell like bullshit.
Solution: you make your officer (another kid) piss-pants scared that if he doesn't lie and say you all totally went on that combat patrol you were sent on (rather than hanging around in the woods somewhere relatively safe for a couple hours, then walking right back to base) he might go to bed and not wake up because someone tossed a hand grenade in his tent and killed him. Or if he confiscates your drugs or hooch. Or tries to enforce grooming standards. Or anything else that makes your life worse. Basically, make him deathly afraid of upsetting "his men" in any way.
Grenades were the threat/weapon of choice because one tossed into a tent was pretty damn certain to kill the person sleeping there; deploying a grenade is very quiet (up until the boom, of course); they're much smaller than a firearm (easier to conceal even than a service pistol); and the slight delay between throw and detonation gave time to get some distance. In practice, it turned out to be extremely hard to prove who had committed these murders, especially if others in the unit weren't inclined to be honest about things they'd seen and heard that night.
This was A Thing toward the later end of the Vietnam War, and contributed mightily to reduced effectiveness of US ground forces. Turns out when you threaten people with death for no good reason they get kinda pissed off and murdery.
"Fragging" comes from "fragmentation grenade", or "frag" for short.
>it turned out to be extremely hard to prove who had committed these murders
Particularly when the troops could say "Charlie must have snuck in and done it".
Soldiers on the same side deliberately killing one another.
OK, Lets put Alex Karp in the frontlines.
He's just overcompensating - can't even get his stock up no more!
oh what a shame.. I'm sure he can reach out to Elon to ask him how to inflate it
He can lead that way with that sword he's been showing off!
Bizarre for them to suggest this right after the US unilaterally launched the most unpopular war in modern history. A war with almost no tangible upside for US citizens, and a war many people think was started on the whims of another country.
What are they thinking lol
Having grown up in Norway, I did my conscription when I was 18. Not really a big deal - even though I was incredibly unmotivated in the beginning. Back in the old days (read: Cold War days) everyone had to serve, but then as Russia became less of a threat, so did military funding, and the number of conscripted. Today around 15%-20% will be conscripted.
But interestingly enough, for the past 10 years we've seen a trend here in Norway where conscription service is viewed almost as a prestigious thing - due to how selective the military can be.
When I served, everyone would be called in. It wasn't a prestigious thing to do, just something you pushed through. We had one guy in our platoon during boot camp that was so big and heavy, he could not get into any standard issue boots. He was completely unable to run. Eventually he was discharged for medical reasons - but these days someone like that wouldn't have gotten past the screening stage. They can pretty much pick and choose among the fittest and brightest.
I'd wager that being conscripted in Norwary carries a different level of risk of deployment than being conscripted in the US, given the fact that we've been essentially been nonstop involved in wars for my entire lifetime.
When you were conscripted did you fear you might be sent to Iraq or Afganistan? It just feels like given our history an American conscript will litearlly always have some active warzone to possibly be sent off to. Our contries and our armies are not the same. Is Norway today chomping at the bit to send its soldiers to Iran? Or, per Trump, "our next conquest" Cuba? I really don't think you can think of being drafted into the American army the same way you think of the compulsory service of countries like South Korea or your own.
Being conscripted in a defensive army is materially different than being conscripted into one that takes every opportunity to engage in conflicts across the globe.
I did my service right around the time GWOT started, and it was around this time that our military started to focus more on transitioning to a professional (we do have professional units) military aimed at fighting terrorism in the middle east(Afghanistan/ISAF) as part of our NATO duties.
By the time you were finishing up your service (6-12 months depending on where you were stationed), you'd get a presentation on "the road ahead" if you wanted to continue military life: military school/college, become a professional soldier, etc.
With that said, I think maybe 10%-15% of the guys in our platoon decided to go with the Afghanistan route. IIRC that meant transferring / trying out for the professional battalion (TMBN), training for some time, and then deployed.
I don't think sending all conscripted soldiers to some foreign war will yield good results. But I do think that by the end of their service, some will be hyped up and "thirsty" enough to just go for it.
The notion that the work done by "the engineering elite" at tech companies and research organizations aren't contributing to the national defense unless they're pressed into military service or working directly on weapons systems is absurd.
Who does he think invented, designed, and implemented the hardware and software underlying modern military technology?
Or for that matter, the tech that makes running any organization at the scale of the modern US military even possible.
Consider: with computer technology, the Defense Finance and Accounting Service employs over 12,000 people responsible for the Department of Defense's basic accounting functions like accounts payable, accounts receivable, and payroll.
Forget building bombs and drafting soldiers.
Without computer technology, you'd need to draft an army of clerical workers.
Of course they do. They make stalkerware at scale. Their products would be used to track down draft dodgers.
I thought we were supposed to have autonomous killer robots. What do we need a draft for?
The question isn't what do we need a draft for, we don't.
The question is: Who would profit from a draft? Answer: Panatir.
Meat for kill bots.
I'm in favor of mandatory public service (not exclusively military) but I also don't think a private company should be weighing in on such topics, since it's just a bunch of capital owners preaching about what everyone else should do.
Who will pay for it? We can't even pay for education or healthcare.
We can, we just choose not to because of how we prioritize accounting. I see no reason why a well-run program shouldn't pay for itself since people would be doing some work as well as getting trained. Obviously, I'm picturing this as part of a broad realignment of national priorities and governance mores, not as a drop-in solution that we could just put in place tomorrow.
Opening graph: "We should, as a society, seriously consider moving away from an all-volunteer force and only fight the next war if everyone shares in the risk and the cost," says military contractor and all-around surveillance-enabler Palantir.
If that's the case, then every war to be fought needs to have the say so of those that will be doing the fighting and not the solitary decision made by a delusional leader that had already circumvented the required process from Congress.
Robert Heinlein proposed something like that in his "lost" novel For Us, the Living: instead of declaring war, Congress would authorize a war referendum, in which only those eligible for military service could vote. The catch was, everyone voting "Yes" would thereby automatically sign themselves up in the military for the duration. If a further draft was needed, it would first be composed of those that didn't vote, and lastly those who voted "No."
(In the book, the "future" Congress had called war referenda on three occasions; each time, the vote was overwhelmingly "No," and historians believed those decisions were justified.)
It seems a good idea, but then I remember the history of World War I: the French and the German populations were very happy and willing to go to war (especially the French). A quick war that will settle it, they thought. And then they ended up in one of the worst meatgrinders of history.
Even if they had a referendum system such as the one proposed, I don't think that would make it a better decision. And given how people don't assume the consequences of their decisions, they would just find excuses later on - "we were manipulated, they lied to us" - but the damage will still be done.
Simpler: Leaders who engage in military engagements should face a public referendum 6 months/1 year later, with exactly 1 question: "Should [Leader] die?". Presidents in the US rarely get elected with less than 40% of the popular vote, and I reckon about 30% of people wouldn't vote to kill someone pretty much no matter what they did. Half of those people are your supporters, so really it's just a matter of avoiding your popularity plummeting to sub 35% because of your warmongering. By that math. By that math, Trump, W. Bush, and Truman would have gotten the gallows. Biden, Carter, and Nixon all fell below 35%, but didn't start any foreign wars.
Exactly. Enforce the war powers of congress and require a non-delegatable per-war approval.
Hell, require the approval of 3/4 of governors as well.
How about a random sample of registered voters too? It would be nice to have a cohort that cannot be bought and paid for.
At some level you have to trust a sustained strong majority of elected officials.
You could imagine requiring a referendum if the war goes past N years or something.
Having those sent to fight in a war being the ones to decide if the war should be fought was on of the major points in General Butler’s 1935 book War is a Racket
I used to think this is a good idea. However, the reality is when you join the military it should be reasonable assumption you are going to be sent somewhere to actually fight at some point.
My proposed alternative would be, when you sign up for the military, you are presented with a list of "regions" in which you are willing to be deployed in a combat role, with pay/benefits scaling accordingly the more regions (and more "in demand" regions) you are willing to be deployed. So you could potentially ahve a group that would not fight in the Middle East but would fight in the Pacific, etc. Of course you can't have too many declining service in too many reasons, but if it starts to get expensive to find recruits willing to fight in a given region thats a clear sign somethings amiss with popular sentiment.
Great example.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot
> Butler, a retired Marine Corps major general, testified under oath that wealthy businessmen were plotting to create a fascist veterans' organization with him as its leader and use it in a coup d'état to overthrow Roosevelt.
And also the us not prosecuting those people in 1935is sadly a precursor of j6 in the US.
what war? 'tis but a skirmish ... o.O
I was going to make a sarcastic comment about how everyone in Russia shared the risks and costs with Nicolas Romanov but then realized it was true. If politicians sending kids to kill and die shared the risk and cost of war then they wouldn't get to come home from Washington when the war is finished.
Whatever its other merits or demerits, reinstating the draft would cut back on needless wars. Abandoning the draft is what ended the anti-war movement, and to reinstate it would be to revive those protests. For this reason, if nothing else, it probably won't be reinstated.
What this has to do with the argument Palantir is apparently making, I have no idea. I can't make any sense of it.
Palantir is a more dangerous enemy of the USA (or any people of Earth) than, say, Iran.
There's no point in addressing their propaganda, but the idea that that a draft leads to everyone from every class of life having to be involved in war equally is so obviously untrue it's a joke.
I've read their tweet: https://x.com/PalantirTech/status/2045574398573453312
It's hard to take them seriously given the omission of the biggest catastrophe of the 2000s-2020s that underlies everything they do, i.e., wealth inequality, the creation of a parasitic ruling class that uses propaganda to control the political narrative (and seeking AI for even greater control with less support), and the destitution of the poor by the rich, from the manufactured opium epidemic, gig economy, financial crises, etc.
Their sundry list reminds me of the smarty boys in undergrad philosophy who pretend to be great philosophers before they have taken even one step into self-criticism and self-knowledge.
What even is that list lol? So edgy
Service guarantees citizenship!
Karp has a right to his opinion as bonkers as it may be but it is doubly bonkers to release this as company policy. Especially coupled with all the other bonkers things that went into this manifesto. Rearming Germany and Japan? Why does Palantir care about that? Toss in some unsubtle racism and you're really just staking your company position as aligned with a very narrow political niche. Seemingly at odds with the company's interest to provide services to whoever will pay.
Unless I'm mistaken Germany has US-owned nuclear weapons on it's soil at all times. There are some part of the German military that could use a serious rethinking because of a decay of operational capacity. But exactly what else would we be arming them with?
Aiding and abetting to a current genocide does that to the appetite for more corpses.
They are simply following along with the basically fascist direction of Trump, or maybe leading them.
> Rearming Germany and Japan? Why does Palantir care about that?
New markets to sell genocide tools to.
Big tech supercorp wants war efforts to increase
May as well be a post by Weyland-Yutani or Tyrell corp.
the absurdity to even entertain this dorks musings.
imagine if tim cook or satya came out and talked about how there needs to be a draft. people would say lol shut up nerd and move on.
some dorkus who heads a company that's just providing over reaching surveillance data to governments so they can do dumb data analytics should have no say in these affairs, and we should promptly discard what they have to say. peter thiel is a sociopath, karp is a dork, these people just want to be known as "the guy with the ideas" and they've crossed deep into the "what are you even saying right now" territory.
tbh we should jettison them into the sun they're kind of a scourge on civilization and clearly lake any real stakes that keep them grounded in the world.
Surely he means that himself and his billionaire buddies will be the first boots on the ground when we decide to plunder another country for oil again. No?
No he just wants to send our kids to die in the desert for Palantir’s profits.
Bilionaires talking about morals sound like Tony Soprano talking about morals.
And let's be clear: Palantir executives want "other" people to die in wars, not them or their children.
> Silicon Valley owes a moral debt to the country that made its rise possible
I would agree with that, but its debt is to the people of that country, not their current government. But instead, Palantir conspires to surveil and repress those people at the bidding of an elite, anti-democratic minority.
And would the leaders of Palantir still argue it had a moral debt to serve the government if it was a left-wing one, engaged in a process of wealth redistribution? No, they wouldn't. This supposed moral ideology is a facile sham.
Silicon Valley owes a moral debt to the country, and the country now has to serve.
What?
Silicon Valley could easily pay their moral debt by not evading taxes.
What does it mean for Palantir to want to reinstate the draft? And why is this newsworthy?
The movements and announcements of large tech companies tend to be newsworthy, whether it's "we made a new iPhone", "our new model is so good it's dangerous!" or "we should have a draft to support new American imperialism"
I understand why your first two examples would be newsworthy – they are 1) about technical products that 2) are produced by the company that is making the announcement. But what does Palantir have to do with the draft? Isn't this comment on the same level as, I dunno, Elon Musk tweeting that families should have at least 3 kids?
I never liked activist for-profit companies. Not "woke SV", not the new "anti-woke", well, everything in the US.
IMO companies should focus on profits and activing within the law, and we shouldn't expect them to go beyond that. If their behaviour seems socially net negative then the law, or it's enforcement should change.
But activist corporations, especially big ones, are a weird chimera where they have a loudspeaker for opinions that are neither representative (it's an owners/C-suite persons PoV, or marketing) nor high quality from a journalistic PoV, yet somehow dressed up as a noble civic duty. SV was so big on allyship and diversity, until Trump said too much woke, and they put it all in the bin, alongside their crumpled backbone. There is no virtue in corporate activism and hypocritical opportunism only.
It feels so off that late-middle-age CEO Karp and his military contractor AI company should be even taking a side in a debate about the state compelling young people (men?) to do something they wouldn't do of their own volition.
"We should, as a society, seriously consider moving away from an all-volunteer force and only fight the next war if everyone shares in the risk and the cost,"
OK, sure, but only if we agree that a war should be fought. No more fighting a war because six rich guys in a back room decide we need unobtanium. Or because one rich guy doesn't like some other rich guy's religious values.
> This Big Tech Firm Wants To Reinstate the Draft
I still cannot help but look at Palantir as a company that just sends $ to the "oligarchs". I still wonder what real value Palantir provides the US Gov.
After reading the article, are they looking for cheap tech labor. Is that because no one in tech wants to join the military due to pay ?
> I still wonder what real value Palantir provides the US Gov.
Their "product" has always been some hacky database joins behind a web app with a dark mode interface that makes the baby brains at DOD feel like they're in a 90s hacker movie
Different deployments of Palantir Foundry exist in the US gov't/military and do provide real data science/analytics value.
> After reading the article, are they looking for cheap tech labor. Is that because no one in tech wants to join the military due to pay ?
Cyber in the military has abysmal retention because of the pay. You can get an immediate ~$50k pay raise doing the same work as soon as you leave the military.
Palantir is CIA-founded
Even though the title of the Reason article is "Palantir Wants to Reinstate the Draft", suggesting that point 6 is what the Reason editorial staff found most striking about their manifesto, the actual text of what Palantir wrote about conscription is:
> 6. National service should be a universal duty. We should, as a society, seriously consider moving away from an all-volunteer force and only fight the next war if everyone shares in the risk and the cost.
which is actually more of a hedge than most of their other points. "National service should be a universal duty" is vague enough to be compatible with a few different concrete policies. And "seriously consider" moving away from an all-volunteer force is rather different from a specific recommendation to literally re-instate the draft! I suspect that the people inside Palantir responsible for this copy are close enough to the actual military that they're aware of the good arguments for why an all-volunteer military is more effective at achieving its goals than one with a bunch of draftees who really don't want to be there.
And because Palantir frames this point as a way to make "everyone share[...] in the risk and the cost" of wars, there's actually quite a lot of measured agreement even here in this HN thread full of people who dislike Palantir in general. Making everyone share in the risk and the cost of wars does have emotional resonance that makes people a bit less reflexively opposed to bringing back the draft than they might otherwise be.
Anyway, I'm against mandatory national service. The US military works well as an all-volunteer force, the US government is perfectly capable of hiring people at a wage to do other types of national service work, and I don't think it's actually socially desirable to force every US citizen to do some amount of mandatory, low-quality work to make them feel connected to the rest of society or whatever other vague benefit people think it would have on the citizenry at large. I'm also skeptical that mandatory service would involve enough young people actually entering combat roles against their will, to incentivize meaningful change to how the US uses its military in the world.
Alex Karp needs an army.
I think the proper counter move is to seize all assets of oligarchs and distribute it among The People. That way those Vietnam 2.0 loving guys won't get any say in anything anymore.
I like to think that Eisenhower would punch Karp in the face if he met him today.
To those HNers working at Palantir - and there's bound to be a few - what's your deal?
You do realize what sort of company you work for, right? Is it cognitive dissonance or are you really a paranoid right winger that's fully on board with Palantir's efforts to enable authoritarian governments akin to 1984's Big Brother?
I'm curious. Please feel free to explain how you go to work every day and do what you do. Fair warning, the rest of us are pretty disgusted with you.
Money can paper over a lot of moral dilemmas - everyone has a price, whether or not we're necessarily aware of it. I refuse to interview with any company in the "defense," space, but I'm sure if someone threw enough money at me I might entertain it.
For true believers though, which I'm sure exist there, I do wonder much the same things.
> everyone has a price
False. People with integrity exist who have moral absolute boundaries.
They are fascists that like money
The Nazi government would not have gotten this far without the help of industrialists and oligarchy.
The CEO of Palantir, Alex Karp, has extensive ties to the Israeli government and is a self-avowed Jewish-supremacist. Peter Thiel was also featured extensively in the Epstein Files, and the two collaborated on creating Palantir to serve Israeli interests.
Doesn’t ycombinator and hacker news have links with this company? Makes it hard to maintain the hacker ethos when this entire site seems so closely linked with such forces.
Y Combinator does not, to my knowledge, and Hacker News certainly does not.
The hacker aesthetic has always been largely reactionary and hyperfocused on the individual and individual freedoms. See also the politics of "generation X"
In modern, heavily statist / semi-authoritarian world, being pro individual freedoms is revolutionary in itself.
The saddest thing of our age is that "reactionary" and "individual freedom" is equated to authoritarian movements that are anything but.
The hacker aesthetic has always been anarchist in nature, until the rich Californians decided that a hacker is an entrepreneur that participates into the game of capitalism. To be fair, even the concept of libertarianism was an offshoot of anarchism, until the Americans decided that it means right-wing party politics of the rich elite. Words don't mean anything any more, any concept that can equated to its opposite if it rewards one with internet points.
"Right wing politics dominated by the rich" is the natural endpoint of libertarianism, so that makes sense. Whether they're "real" libertarians or not, the elite techies leading the charge are people with politics like Karp, Andreessen, Musk, etc.
Libertarianism is abused by capital in the same exact way that conservatism and progressivism are - by getting primed with easy feel-good answers that are ultimately disempowering and self-defeating. In the case of libertarianism, this is so-called "right-" libertarianism that actively rejects qualitative judgements of freedom and coercion while hyper-emphasizing an axiomatic framework that can be used to justify authoritarianism as long as the logical preconditions have been met.
I'm in complete agreement with your defense of "individual freedom". But how is "reactionary" anything but an authoritarian movement? I'd say those two are basically synonyms regardless of whether we're talking about "reactionary mass media" or the political philosophy laid out by Yarvin where he took ownership of the term. Do you have another definition in mind?
as a counter, it is exactly the hacker ethos to take something and use it not as expected by those that made it so that it can be used for their own purpose
Between idiotic tech bros who wouldn't know a war if it bit them on the butt promoting a draft because they don't think they'd be drafted and HN having links with Palantir/Karp I think I'm done with this site.
This article has a strong slant. If we can look past that, we should consider the claim: everyone having skin in the game is more democratic and leads to a better aligned government.
Perhaps this would lead to more peace.
But everyone won’t have skin in the game. We’ve played this game before. The uber wealthy and politically connected kids will either get outright deferments, or cushy positions that never have them sniffing any danger beyond carpal tunnel.
It’s no different than the republicans that are violently against abortion and then you find out they’ve funded multiple for their mistresses. They’re perfectly fine with a law banning it because they know it will never apply to them.
They certainly don't have skin in the game now, either!
Right, in the minds of millions right now there's literally no reason to fight for this country. This country certainly ignores their existence and refuses to honor most forms of basic rights as health, education, and shelter. It really only cares if you mess up your tax return.
Bone spurs
"Perhaps" you say even though humanity hasn't had a long history of conscription and it has never created peace.
Agree - the key is that everyone MUST include people in power.
It's not how conscription is ever implemented in practice.
Of course it's not. Once upon a time quite long ago kings and generals got on the field. But as we industrialized leadership moved to "the back."
See concepts like Auftragstaktik, command intent, mission command.
Not even that long ago, nobility died at higher rates than normal people in ww1 and ww2. Many lines were killed during them. I still know of nobles in my own country in the army. Generals died in WW2 at a decent rate as well.
Nobility lost most relevance now so I'm sure it's different now, owning a castle or a weird last name doesn't make you rich or powerful.
But it’s how it will be sold to us. It’s sure a lot warmer in the abbatoir for some reason. And they give some of us cigarettes. Bill says they even feed him.
But they never do
"When the rich wage war it's the poor who die"