I don't understand ANY argument for conscription. Of all the laws on the books that are still "acceptable" in modernity from even the "progressive" crowd, the one that perplexes me the most is conscription.
For me, it's just so simple: If a government needs to force people to fight for the government then the government has no right to exist. A legitimate government should be able to raise a fully volunteer army because all the citizens the government represents wants to fight to defend this government.
Just think about it for a moment. Supposedly some evil enemy is coming to rape your women and kill all the men or enslave everyone by taking their rights away. Everyone should want to defend against that, no? If someone doesn't volunteer to fight against that then clearly they've decided that rape and death is better than... rape and death? Or, perhaps they've decided they can still live without dying for a country and they'd rather this conclusion.
How can anyone justify using force to force something to go to war and die against their will?
I hate the concept of conscription so much I think anyone who suggests it should be hanged, tbh. You want people to fight for you? Offer them an incentive then.
It wasn't just that, imagine you have to go to war in some foreign country miles away, no direct threat to your home for 2 years. Now imagine you get told to take some hill, why? Doesn't matter, do it resulting in casualties. Then not long after, you abandon said hill despite your losses leaving the enemy to reclaim it once more then days later you have to take it again.
Between this and the massive Tet offensive which showed they had easily infiltrated south to do it and you can imagine a lot of conscripted soldiers thinking some of the officers leading them cared more about a promotion than their lives so 'removing' them gets them to live and go back home..
It literally was, they conscripted black racialists and white leftist radicals who tried fragging their white NCOs. It’s amazing how the leftist violence of the 60s and 70s just disappears in everyone’s brain when it comes to Vietnam.
You just described half the wars Americans fought throughout American history with no fragging issue. Magically it didn’t happen in Korea a decade earlier either.
Again made up conjecture. The reality is violent leftists got conscripted and they did what shitlibs have been doing since the late 50s.
Korea wasn't seen as pointless at all. We were in open combat with communist China and the South was worthy of receiving our support.
With Vietnam, it was pretty obvious we were propping up a dictator and the Chinese stayed over the border and were untouchable. How do you defend a country that doesn't really want to be defended, with an untouchable supply line? You can't, it's impossible. Basically everyone figured this out. So we lost for the same reason we lost Afghanistan.
That’s fair. Vietnam was nothing new for America as defending dictators from communism was pretty status quo since the 50s, but Vietnam was also the only large scale war the US fought to protect said dictators.
If that's so, that more leans more on they were conscription everyone NOT connected enough to avoid the draft into the meat grinder of Vietnam with no real care for filters than any concerted effort to get leftists into the US military....kinda like under Biden...
Again, soft military leadership after it was diversified. No one is arguing the war was run by idiots, but the fragging was not due just war being war. Vietnam was no where near a “meat grinder” it had one of the lowest casualty rates per year of any war America fought it simply dragged out 8 years and even then was only 20k more than the Korean War which lasted 3 years. Boomer propaganda around Vietnam made mountains out of mole hills compared to every other war around that time period.
I'd say it was more a psychological loss as the gross incompetence in higher command during Vietnam removed the prestige of why you don't fuck with America which led to more conflicts worldwide.
Just like how under Biden we got saddled with the Ukrainian-Russia war, there seems to be less conflict after America's successful strike in Venezuela.
What you're describing has little to do with the draft and much more to do with the incompetence of civilian oversight of the military. Which began a little while before then, post Korean War.
Ahaus is correct in saying that the changes to military structure, priorities and command style were the true cause of the losses of the Vietnam War. The war was being conducted by the head of Ford Motors for crying out loud dude.
From Ahaus post I saw nothing that indicated it was civilian oversight that was the problem other than military command became soft and more on the drunk and drug addiction which if you hear how the vietcong fought, yeah I can understand the need for an escape when you're forced into this environment for 2 years.
I'd say the biggest issue was the lack of a clear goal in Vietnam compared to Korea and THEN involving conscript civilians. With Korea it was clear, you also had a defined geographical border thanks to it being a peninsula. Vietnam, the 3 countries bordering it were supporting them, they had no set way to 'win' the war and some of the weapons the US used like agent Orange affected their own troops.
Vietnam was such a clusterfuck that it effectively made conscription in a non WW3 setting unviable, you can't use Russian/Chinese meat grinder tactics in a war not threatening US main land and not expect consequences.
Yep, that's the part I'm talking about.
They did not fight in any novel or indefatigable way, try to understand. The Vietnam war was not some uniquely traumatizing event in human history compared to every other war of our past. Ditto the most recent crop of wars against the mud slimes, I'd add, and I was part of those.
What changed in those two is command incompetence, and unfitness of the citizenry. We already know that many of the average military age men of the time were basically just hippies. Only the modern generation is more fundamentally unfit men than they were. Self obsessed, self indulgent, self centered, useless.
But that could have been overcome if not for the same "hearts and minds" nonsense that the Bush administration later peddled in Afghanistan and Iraq.
We were invading them, we should have acted like it. But we didn't. In both wars, then and just recently, we didn't actually act like we were prosecuting a war on the enemy.
Just a point of argument. The Tet offensive was one of the most disastrous military campaigns in history, it was a defeat across all fronts and basically wiped out the North Vietnamese army in a single night. It was a "victory" purely because the media at home lied about it.
Yes but that was point I was making, under COMPETENT leadership, the soldiers would have seen the victory as a victory.
But because of incompetent to the point of malice leadership, they saw it as just another nail in that the war is a lost cause and only wanting to go back home.