June 16^th

Today I’ll look at our volunteer defense forces. Consider that if you are eighteen or nineteen years old, a recent high school graduate and live in a southern state you face an unemployment rate of thirty percent. If you are employed it will likely be in an unskilled job at an hourly rate barely above the minimum wage…and even that job might be less than forty hours a week with no benefits. Your savior is a services recruiter.

Here is what you get: to begin with you get out of the house and out from under nagging parents who are replaced by nagging drill sergeants. But now you have a job and there is no chance of being “let go.” You are getting your room, board and about 2 thousand dollars a month in wages. Moreover you are guaranteed a pay increase if you do as you’re told and stay out of trouble. Medical and dental care is free. Eventually you’ll be sent to a school, which one will depend on your test scores, and the skills you learn there might be useful when you’re enlistment period is up. Of course there will probably be a very nice bonus to persuade you to re-enlist and if you have met a delightful someone one on of your month long, yearly, vacations with pay there are increased benefits for married service people.

After three years you might decide that the educational opportunities for ex-service people are just too good to neglect. They are quite generous. Here’s what you get: You enlisted after 9/11 so you’ll get a month of school for each month of your service. That’s 36 months of school. Because the school year is just nine months long, that comes to four years of college. Your tuition will be paid directly to the college in an amount depending on what your state charges as tuition for its in-state students. You’ll also get a monthly check for living expenses and money for your books and supplies.

If you decide you’d rather not take advantage of this educational opportunity because your service training has produced a good paying job, the government will let you pass this educational benefit on to a family member. Of course you don’t have to use the benefit to attend a four year college you might prefer to take flying lessons. Other options are also possible.

As long as we have a large pool of unemployed high school graduates we have no need of a draft to produce an adequate regular army, navy, or air force. To be blunt about it we now have an army largely, but not entirely,  of mercenaries paid for largely by money borrowed from China. I worry about a military class forming, or perhaps it has already formed, in this country.

Seventy years ago today, as a very recent high school graduate, I left home for active duty in the Army Air Corps; that was a very different kind of army and no one joined it to get the available benefits. Times have changed.