Paul Kane on Reforming the Military
I’m of the opinion that Gates’ supposid sweeping reforms aren’t nearly enough (indeed, they barely scratch the surface), so I read Kane’s piece in the NYT today.
He wants to: distribute the Air Force among the other services, ditch “up or out,” and a national ‘service program’ without deferment.
The first one makes sense – though large chunks of each branch of military should be outsourced to private contractors – in fact everyone but highly trained shooters. The second also makes sense – the Israeli concept is great and there’s no good reason we don’t have MBA’s join the military as O-5’s.
The third however, is a waste of time and resources – it’s an attempt to ‘surge’ the state – and that is destined for failure. In the worst case, we would have just distributed dangerous skill sets to an entire generation of angry young men.
-Shlok
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