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.
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.