http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/front/4419980....News comes as president, Congress take up plans to expand Army, Marines
By ERIC ROSENBERG
Copyright 2006 Hearst News Service
WASHINGTON — The Selective Service System is planning a test run of the military draft machinery for the first time since 1998.
As part of the exercise, the agency is expected to conduct a mock draft and convene an "appeals board" to handle draftees who claim status as conscientious objectors.
The test announcement comes as President Bush and Congress take up plans to expand the overall size of the Army and Marine Corps and train thousands more additional forces. Both services have been stretched thin by extended deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan, though President Bush and Defense Secretary Robert Gates have said they oppose bringing back the draft.
Meanwhile, the secretary for Veterans Affairs said Thursday that "society would benefit" if the U.S. were to bring back the draft and that it shouldn't have any loopholes. VA Secretary Jim Nicholson later issued a statement saying he does not support reinstituting a draft.
The draft ended in 1973 as the American commitment in Vietnam waned, beginning the era of the all-volunteer force. Registration for the draft was suspended in 1975 but was resumed in 1980 by President Carter after the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. About 13.5 million men, ages 18 to 25, currently are registered with the agency.
The Arlington, Va.-based Selective Service System updated guidance manuals for local draft boards and appeals boards around the country. The agency now is exploring public service options for any draftees who would claim conscientious objector status. The agency has opened discussions with the U.S. Public Health Service, the Corporation for Community and National Service and religious and charitable organizations with the goal of finding non-military positions for conscientious objectors.
More at link...
Caliphate, Bush's timeline, and the 500 year war.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboa... Caliphate, Bush's timeline, and the 500 year war.
Edited on Wed Dec-20-06 04:34 AM by CarbonDate
As a few of you may know, I'm an active duty NCO in the USAF. I don't like to bring that up much, since it might seem that I'm trying to argue from authority rather than making my point through analysis of facts. But in this case, it's a crucial detail to what I'm writing about today.
Yesterday we had an "all hands call" here at Andersen AFB for junior NCOs (E-5 & E-6) to be briefed by the senior enlisted advisor of USSTRATCOM, Command Master Chief William N. Nissen and the senior enlisted advisor of USPACOM, Command Sergeant Major William T. Kinney (USMC) about long term strategy. Cool, I thought. Maybe I might learn something here.
Boy did I, but not the way I expected. The first half with CMCPO Nissen was informative, if a bit dry. He talked about how DoD structure worked in times of war vs. times of peace and what the functions of braches are vs. the functions of combatant commands. It was interesting, but I was getting a bit drowsy toward the end of it.
The second half was a different story. CSM Kinney got up and spoke, and his speech could not have been more blatantly partisan if he'd been wearing a GOP button. He mentioned "uneducated liberals", talked about Democrats as "quitters" and said that the enemy had influenced the election in their favor this past November. He said that people who voted for Democrats were voting from emotion vice intellect and that we needed to "educate" our loved ones back home or people we ran into in the airport about the nature of our enemy. He had a number of doozies, like referring to Saudi Arabia as a "moderate Muslim country", referring to people telling Israel to give up Jerusalem, and stating that the Iraq War is nothing like the Vietnam War because "when we left Vietnam, it ended! This is gonna keep going!" I still don't know what a "state-sponsored country" is, and I snickered out loud when he at his Freudian slip when he said that the terrorists had already gotten rid of a secular government in "Iraq... er, Iran".
He talked about how the Taliban said that we may have all the weapons, but they have all the time. That struck me as obvious, since it's sort of their fucking country and we're going to have to leave some day. Then he went into the Caliphate and how this apparently is the greatest threat to mankind since Nazi Germany. The Caliphate is a pipe dream of some Islamists to form a unified Muslim nation and institute Islamic law over half the eastern hemisphere. Frankly, most of the countries covered are already Muslim nations, and if it gets them to stop blowing each other (and us) up, I'm all for it. But that presumes that these Islamists have the means of carrying their dream out, which they don't. Philosophical views aside, most Muslims (like most Americans) simply want to be left the fuck alone to live their lives and only engage in terrorism under extreme duress or desperation. It hardly seems like the sort of thing around which we should be forming our long-term foreign policy and military strategy.
And how long term is it? Sgt Maj Kinney told us about the "Long War", which is what the Bush Administration now calls the Global War on Terror (GWOT). They've never offered a timeline in the past, but they apparently do have one. Sgt Maj Kinney let it slip with this one:
"We're entering into a 500 year war here, people."
Let that sink in for a bit. It took me almost a day before I said, "Wait, what!?" I initially ignored the remark because so much else of what he said was just complete bullshit, but he said this in the context of talking about how this was going to be a long war that Americans don't have the patience for because it's not the kind of short war that our MTV generation (and Sun Tzu, if you've ever read Art of War; he wrote, "No country has ever profited from protracted warfare." But I digress.) prefer. He was saying that we have to have the "will" to outlast them. On top of that, he's in a very influential position as the senior enlisted advisor for PACOM.
So it's not that the administration doesn't have a timeline. They do. It's just that they don't want to tell anybody what it is:
500 years.
I'm going to write some letters. I suggest you do the same.
http://www.rawstory.com/news/2006/Source_says_outs...In a recent appearance in Baghdad, Gates made remarks that are discouraging to some military and intelligence officials. "We need to make damned sure," said Gates, "that the neighbors understand that we're going to be here for a long time � here being the Persian Gulf."
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