SwamP_ThinG

Well, it may be that way in your country, but it's not that way over here.

Not all "volunteers" are (or become) "career men" by any means. The vast majority of them do their initial tour (3, 4, 6 years) and then leave the service. Many of these "prior service's" then join the Guard or Reserve after leaving active duty, and can enjoy the best of both worlds. In the Guard or Reserve they maintain (and expand upon) their proficiency and skills during their monthly weekend-long drills, and once each year each unit also goes back to full active duty for at least two weeks. Guard and Reserve personnel also go back on active duty (TDY - temporary full-time active duty) when they wish (or need) to go to school to learn new skills, train on new equipment, or when they need to complete some required leadership course in order to advance to the next higher promotional level. All these schools and courses are run by the regular full-time military. They are all the very same schools and courses the active duty guys attend. You live in the same barracks as active-duty troops, you train under the same instructors, eat in the same mess halls, etc. When you are doing these things you are active duty.

Just about all the "ordinance" a guy is ever going to learn about in his military tour is taught to him during Basic Training and Advanced Individual Training (in the first 6 to 12 months of their service). You can leave the service for ten years, come back, and literally find that virtually nothing worth mentioning has really changed significantly. It does not take very long at all to get back up to speed, if you aren't already.

And draftees are not there for "just a few months" either. The minimum time a draftee will have to serve here in the US is 2 years -- 2 years full time. It may be longer; that's up to the government.

The military gets these new guys and puts them all (volunteers and draftees alike - there honestly is no difference to the military) through the same training all together, and when that's done they usually place them all into units (as replacements) together. The military life of a draftee is EXACTLY the same as the military life of a volunteer. There is absolutely no difference between them, except (perhaps) for the eventual length of their tours.

It's true that a lot of draftees really are not too crazy about being there, or they'd have voluntarily joined the military themselves. But you also have to understand just how big a factor plain old human nature plays in all of this. A human-bonding sort of thing occurs in the ranks, beginning from their very first day together. It's an incredibly strong and incredibly enduring sort of bonding. Volunteers and draftees alike all share the same trials and hardships together, and they become brothers, in a very real sense. They begin to get to know each other, and to care about each other, and of course their lives and fates are all intricately tied together for the duration. They will live and/or die together. Trust me: whether you volunteered or were drafted, it soon makes no difference. None at all. They are all equals as soldiers. And that includes being equally skilled and equally motivated to succeed. Trust me on this, too: after exposure to combat even the "volunteers" quickly realize that they really "don't want to be there" either, so everybody pretty much is in the same boat on that, and they all behave accordingly.

A draftee realizes very, very quickly that simply staying alive in the future means getting just as serious about being as professional a soldier as the volunteer standing next to them is. All complaining, clowning around and trying to find some "way out" is obviously pointless and certainly counterproductive, and they quickly realize that it may cost them their lives. They get real serious real fast, in other words. They set aside their feelings about being drafted (at least for the time being) and get down to the business at hand, just as if they'd been born into it.

You keep saying this, and I keep telling you that it just ain't so, but you don't seem to be listening. This is not true in our military, anyway. Maybe it is in yours. Here the training is all exactly the same for everybody. Draftees and volunteers are all mixed together from the start, they trained together, and they will all fight together. There is no difference between the two.

And whether draftees or volunteers, they are all eventually taken under the wings of the more experienced soldiers, just like a hen gathers in her little chicks. The "vets" teach them everything that they really need to know, that they may not have already learned in their training. Draftee or volunteer, it's all exactly the same. They all have to rely upon each other to survive. It's in every man's best interests to ensure that the man next to him (draftee or volunteer) knows everything that he knows. It's a mutual survival society. Nobody is excluded in any way. Nobody excludes themselves, not if they want to live.

They all start out equally inexperienced, and they all get the same experience together.

Lastly -- the friendly fire incident issue. Listen and learn. There are a couple very specific reasons (or causes) for most of these incidents, and it has absolutely nothing to do with a soldier being a draftee or a Guardsman or a Reservist or a volunteer or a career professional.

One reason that these incidents seem to have increased over the past couple of decades is simply because of all the high-technology "improvements" within our military here in the US, which in turn has caused a fundamental change in the way every American soldier fights these days.

We have all become "night fighters", now, for one thing. We much prefer fighting at night to fighting in the daytime. This is true of pilots, tank commanders and individual soldiers. Everybody. We all love the night-time fighting now. This is because we possess extremely sophisticated "night vision" devices. Both "light intensification" and "thermal imaging" systems are standard in all our military equipment, and for each individual soldier. "We rule the night", as they say, because we can see - and everybody else is pretty much blind at night. It makes a world of difference in how (and when) you choose to fight. And in how well you do.

But it comes with a downside, of course. Even these high-tech vision enhancement devices and scopes don't allow you to see perfectly. For one thing color is lost when you use these devices, and that can be a big "clue" when you're trying to identify faraway uniforms or vehicles. The other problem is that these things can allow you to see (and thus kill) things that are very, very far away. Incredibly far away. Too far away to really see the sort of detail you need to positively identify something. Often one becomes a target on a modern battlefield just by being in a place or area you shouldn't be in. We don't always know what our targets actually are, they are so far off, but we do know they are there, and that they shouldn't be there, and we also know that we can definitely hit and kill them, so often we do.

Another other big factor has been vehicle identification. There are so many types of vehicles on the battlefield these days that that's just become an unavoidable problem. There really is no sure cure for it but experience, perhaps, and even that can only carry you so far, unfortuantely.

The last factor is simply that always-dangerous combination of having both a vast selection of different offensive options for one target (air, naval, and ground forces combined) combined with the incredible speed at which modern warfare is fought. The Germans may have invented the Blitzkreig, but the American military has taken that concept to an entirely new level. The battlefields of today are just whole orders of magnitude more dangerous and dynamic than the battlefields of past wars ever were.