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.

Ok, i think i was misunderstood in a few issues, so here goes:
@Muspell
First of all, there weren´t 236 friendly fire incidents. There were 236 casualties of incidents, period. The numbers are all thrown together, friendly fire and accidents alike. Although important, the friendly fire incidents are not the main issue. It´s all the other accidents, incidents, or whatever you call them. It´s the traffic accidents, the shoot yourself in the foot incidents, the drive into rivers incidents, the crash chopper into chopper accidents, and a whole miriade of other instances. There have been over 700 fatal casualties, in over a year in Iraq. And of those 700, a third are accidents?? Don´t you see the point? The US troops are way more lethal on themselfs than the enemy!!

@Ranger
Well, it seems we have diferent realities.
Our draft time has been extended and diminished so many times that we can´t keep track. The latest was 4 months of service, and now it has disapeered alltogether. The draft was revogued. Only volunteer service for us now.

As it could be less. Like you said, it´s up for the government.
However, i think we need to make a distinction here, between wartime draft and peacetime draft.
The "volunteers" that mean, are the ones who join the army and stay for a career. That´s what i meant as "volunteers". Excuse me if i don´t have the right vocabulary to make myself understood 100%.Sometimes the word i´m looking for keeps iluding me.
The comparison i was trying to make is between career guys and draftees, wether volunteers or not. The career guy is there for years and years, for life even, while the draftee is there for the short term. In general. There are exceptions, as i pointed out earlier.

You don´t really expect me to believe a guy who takes two weeks a year of training is just as prepared as a guy who practically lives in the Army, do you?
And remember, we are talking mostly Infantry here.No draftee will get his hands on an Apache chopper or a Tank. But let´s forget about that for now.
How about you explain me why the casualty numbers for non-battle related incidents is so high in Iraq? Take a look at the numbers and type of incidents involved, and tell me it has nothing to do with training. Because that´s what i´m trying to understand here!

And let me throw in another question:
Could it be that the US military is so desperate to maintain their quotas that they are accepting people that they wouldn´t normaly accept? Like instable guys, guys with poorer eye sight, shorter than normal, taller than normal, fatter than normal, less inteligent than normal? And how about guys whose dominance of the english language is subpar? We´ve seen how they are letting non-americans in. People without US citizenship, from Latin America and other places.

__________________
"Quincitilius Varus, give me back my legions!"
Emperor Augustus of Rome.

Yeah. Sorry if I sounded like I was trying to dismiss your point. It's probable that subpar training, low discipline and an overly high amount of fresh troops might be the reason. I suppose the problem I, at least, was having with the argument was that it would imply that with better training, the friendly fire incidents could be reduced almost to zero. That's not the case. They're put into a situation where there are many possibilities for things to go terminally wrong, and no amount of training will remove that. You can always reduce it, by being cautious. But you can also increase casualties by being catious. So the point is that accidents may just as well happen from negligence as from a calculated risk, and the point where the one merge into the other is not always material.

Not taking this into account and more or less dismissing the presence or the reason for "accidents" other than by crediting them to the unfortunate few braindead soliders in the army, that sounds to me like painting an image of the miltary operations which is not very accurate. It could rather be used, and it is used by many politicians, as an argument for going to war in itself, sustained by the army's percieved invincibility, in the light of that the training is so good, the best, and so on. I suppose I'm being a little sensitive about this, I mean I know you don't excactly support going to war. But when you know people who has been maimed in such conflicts simply by being there at the wrong moment, it's easy to scowl a little at others who don't have the same reluctance for condoning military operations as "necessary" and so on. Or at the ones who think that such incidents happen because these people were morons who didn't know their business. I'm sure you understand.

@ SwamP_ThinG:

Your English is fine. Really. I understand what you're saying 99.99% of the time, I think. Don't worry about that. If I spoke your native language as well as you speak mine I'd be bragging about it. You're doing just fine.

In the US the draft has never been for less than 2 full years, so far as I know. During WWI, WWII and Korea you got drafted for the duration of the conflict. During the Vietnam war it was for 2 years. You spent 18 months of that time in the combat zone. The rest was prep time.

Likewise, we have never had a "peacetime draft" here in the US, not that I've ever heard of. Certainly not in the past century, anyway.

The draftees here don't do any weekend drills or two weeks of annual training. They do a full two years of regular active duty -- all in one shot.

Only the Guards and Reservists do monthly drills and annual training. And 70%-80% of them are former active duty "volunteer" soldiers who have already spent several years in the service.

I will use myself as an example here, to illustrate to you what I'm talking about.

I volunteered for military service (and combat duty in Vietnam) right after I graduated from High School. My draft number was 8 (out of 365) so I would have been drafted if I had not volunteered anyway.

I went through Basic Training (8 weeks) and Advanced Individual Training (16 weeks) and then Airborne School (5 weeks) and the Ranger School (16 weeks at that time). Counting transition times that added up to a full year of nothing but highly specialized military training right from the start.

Then I got posted to Vietnam for 18 months. The first couple of months of that time in Vietnam were devoted to additional "in-country" Ranger training. After my first tour I extended for another 18 months. In my first four years of military service I spent 3 years of that time in actual combat.

During the following years I went to just about every military school you can name. I was always scheduled for some school or another, all the time. I also got a BA degree during that time, and later a Masters degree, all compliments of the military.

I retired from the military after 20 years of active duty and went back into civilian life. I also joined a local National Guard unit in my home town a short time later. We have several Guard and Reserve units in the city where I live, and I chose to join an Armor unit. Tanks. M1A1 tanks. I could have stayed in the Special Forces but I'd have had to commute to another state once a month (for my drills) to do so, and it seemed more hassle than it was worth, so I decided to become a tank commander instead.

Upon enlisting in the Guard I had to go through the same Advanced Individual Training that all US tank crews go through. I was sent down to Ft. Knox on active duty for 4 months to complete that and some related training. A while later I did a full active duty reclassification (M1 to M1A1/M1A2) course - that took another month of active duty. Then I was sent to the Tank Commanders Course - another month of active duty. I also had to complete my Advanced Course for promotion. That was another 8 weeks of active duty time. Later I went to the Master Gunner course - 2 more months of intensive training.

In my Guard unit we spent most weekend drills out on the firing ranges, working with our tanks and crews. We travelled to the NTC at Ft. Irwin for two weeks every summer to train and to compete against our "sister-battalion", which is a full-time active duty armor unit. We beat them in gunnery and tactical competition at the Desert Warfare Training Center nearly every year.

When Desert Shield began my Guard unit was not slated to be deployed, so I requested and was granted transfer to a full-time active duty armor unit, and I was deployed to the Gulf War with the regular Army. That deployment lasted a year. Upon completion I returned to my Guard unit, along with the 38 other guys from my Guard unit that deployed on active duty with me.

Now, there are about 175 guys in my Guard unit. Most of them have as much military experience as I have. We are not noobies, by any means. Many guys have even more "time in service" than I do. Many have as much combat experience as I do. Several even have more combat experience than I do. I think that in our entire unit we only have about a dozen "kids" that are new to the military, and even they have all the training, and the exact same training, that all the active duty regulars in the military have. They all trained together in the very same schools. In the Guard we have a regular "training cycle" that mirrors the training schedule of our active-duty sister unit.

If you look at the differences between the Guard unit and our active duty sister-battalion this is what you'll find:

They do a lot of "post support" duty that we don't have to do. That's mostly guard duty, maintenance, and standing around in lines waiting, for various reasons.

That's it. That's the only major difference.

The number of man-hours (or man-years) of actual hands-on (and combat) experience in the average Guard or Reserve unit is often greater than the number for full-time active duty miltary units. That's a fact.

I think you really blow your own perceptions of the "experience gap" out of proportion. Whether you're infantry, armor, or something else altogether, once you learn a skill and become proficient at it, it does not take that much time or effort to remain proficient. It's rather like learning to ride a bike; once you learn how to you never really forget. We train more than enough to keep our skills sharp. And we go on training right up to the moment of actual combat, and beyond. It truly just becomes second nature after a while. Ingrained.

So far as "draftees" are concerned, they train right alongside the non-draftees, and they go on to serve with them, so there is absolutely no difference at all in their skill levels. None. Zero. Zip. Nada. They are exactly the same in every way, so far as skill and proficiency goes.

Draftees [here] can and often do become tank commanders, etc. Those positions are given out based upon ability, and are not based upon whether you are a draftee or not. Same-same with promotions, etc. If a draftee wants to become a fighter pilot - or anything that takes a long training cycle - all they have to do is ask to be changed from draftee status to full active duty status, and they have to agree to serve the slightly longer enlistment term. Many do just that.

No. Plain and simple answer: no. You must be fluent in English - able to speak, read and write at the level of a high school graduate. You must be able to pass the same physical tests that everybody else passes. All tests, both educational, mental and physical, are standard in the US military. If you cannot pass them you cannot get in. Period. You must be a high school graduate. You cannot have any sort of criminal record. Our military makes absolutely no exceptions in this regard. None at all. A lot of volunteers get turned away for this very reason. They are extremely hard-assed about this stuff in our military.

I have known guys that were in excellent physical shape, and were mentally as sharp as a tack, and yet they were still rejected for military service because their "body-fat calculation" was considered too high, and they were unable to bring it down enough (the military uses both the caliper "pinch test" and also full body submersion tests to calculate exact body-fat to weight ratios). It did not matter that they could pass every physical test - they could not meet the standards and that was that - they were out.

That's taken directly from here:

http://www.knox.army.mil/school/16ca...areer%20Course

The reason for the "accidents" you mention is just as I posted earlier. The modern battlefield is far more dangerous and dynamic now than it has ever been in any previous wars. Call it one of the costs of progress.

This is exactly what i mean.In this case, the draftee has went further and extended his tour, either by contract or whatever you have over there. This is where i take him out of the "draftee" category, and place him in the "long haul" category.The Army wouldn´t spend billions of dollars training individuals just to see them return civilian life after a couple of years.What i call a draftee is the guy who gets drafted, serves his time, and leaves. Wich is why i said it would be best to distinguish between wartime draft and peacetime draft. Wartime draft when you have a major conflict, stressing the manpower availability, like WWII and Vietnam.
So, out of those "short term" draftees, how many do you think are equally prepared for the battlefield as say a guy with your own experience? And since the US doesn´t have a draft now, and this is highly hipotetical, maybe i should make another example:
Would you say that i´m equally as prepared for the battlefield, as one who chose the military career, and knowing that i served only a short term?
I will answer that, and say a big NO. Even if i were to frequent weekend refreshing courses, i would still be light years away from the proeficiency of the regulars, that get to train all year round. And suppose we were to have another war, like our African wars. Would i be as prepared as they were? Never. Due to the short term nature of a draftee´s training program, there is just no way the instructors can expect to teach you everything you need to know, not even to come close of a "regular"´s experience.
Judging from what you told me, you spent years and years on and off schools and training programs. How can you expect a draftee to condense all that training into a 2 year term? It´s not possible. The draftee would miss out on essential pieces of the program, because that´s all the time he has for.

Have you seen the CNN page with the US casualties and how they were killed? Check it out. You can chalk some of them to "modern battlefield dinamics", but not all of them. How do you explain the rest?

"Committed suicide by shooting himself in Kut, Iraq, on November 19, 2003"

"Died from a non-hostile gunshot wound in Baqubah, Iraq, on October 26, 2003"

"Died of a non-hostile gunshot wound in Baghdad, Iraq, on December 12, 2003"

"Died of a non-hostile gunshot wound in Baghdad, Iraq, on March 9, 2004"

"Killed when two 101st Airborne Division UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters collided in mid-air over Mosul, Iraq, on November 15, 2003"

"Died of non-combat related injuries at Forward Operating Base St. Mere, Iraq, on October 28, 2003"

"Killed March 16, 2004, when the barrel of the .50 caliber weapon mounted on his tank struck him in Al Asad, Iraq"?????

"Died of injuries sustained in a fire during a small-arms fire exercise. The fire began when a bullet ricocheted and ignited a fire in the building in Baghdad, Iraq on August 21, 2003"??

"Died during physical training in Baghdad, Iraq, on December 18, 2003"

"Died in Camp Arifjan, Kuwait, from a non-hostile gunshot wound on November 12, 2003"

"Died from a non-hostile gunshot wound in Baghdad, Iraq, on November 4, 2003"

"Killed when a rocket-propelled grenade launcher he was firing for familiarization malfunctioned at firing range near Kut, Iraq, on April 22, 2003"

"Killed in a vehicle accident on May 19, 2003, in Iraq"

"Killed in a non-hostile vehicle accident during convoy operations east of Ash Shahin, Iraq, on April 3, 2003"

"Died of a non-combat related cause on July 8, 2003, in Camp Wolf, Kuwait"

I took these out of the first page alone. There are countless more.
http://edition.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2003/iraq/forces/casualties/

PS:Please note that i haven´t repeated myself.If it looks that there are many similar incidents, it´s because they really happened, not because i repeated quotes.

__________________
"Quincitilius Varus, give me back my legions!"
Emperor Augustus of Rome.

Are we comparing apples to apples, or apples to oranges here?

First let me just say that nobody can ever really be "prepared" for what they might find or what might possibly occur on any given battlefield. You simply can't be; war is chaotic by it's very nature. Every battlefield is different, and you just have to "learn as you go". There is no guarantee that any of the lessons of the past will even apply in a new situation. Maybe they do. Maybe they don't.

When I first joined the military I had zero experience too. When I first joined the military I was trained with the draftees. There were far more draftees than volunteers at that time. We all trained together. Even though I went on to two other schools before going to Vietman, most of the other guys (the other volunteers) did not. They (volunteers and the draftees alike) were all trained together and they all shipped off to Vietman together. How can you claim that one group had more experience than the other? They all had exactly the same experience, or you could also correctly say that none had any experience. Either way, they were exactly the same, experience wise.

Yes. I chose a military career and yet on my first day in combat I had absolutely no combat experience either. All I had was a few months of training that was exactly the same training you also would have received as a short-term draftee. As a "volunteer" just beginning my military career I was just as inexperienced as the newly arrived "draftee" standing next to me. In fact all the draftees that had arrived before me were much more experienced than I was. They were also much more experienced than the older sergeants and officers (who had been in the service much longer than the draftees had been) that had just arrived in Vietman, too. Since we had not had a real war since Korea virtually none of these older "experienced career professionals" had ever seen combat before either. The "experienced draftees" we encountered when we first arrived in Vietnam taught us all how to stay alive, and how to fight.

People come and go from the military all the time. The number of guys that stay in the service (and thus accumulate more knowledge and experience) is relatively small, but we don't actually need a large number to stay in. We only have a limited number of slots for Generals or for Sergeant Majors, after all. One experienced Platoon Sergeant is in charge of 30 (or more) subordinate soldiers, so, obviously, we need subordinate (less experienced) soldiers 30 times more than we need experienced Platoon Sergeants, don't we? And we do not, in fact, have anywhere near as many experienced platoon sergeants as we have inexperienced subordinate soldiers. That's just common sense. We only need a few of the one, but a lot of the other.

At any given moment the composition of our military is always the same: a small number of experienced people commanding a very large number of inexperienced people. It does not matter if the inexperienced people are draftees or volunteers - they all get exactly the same training, so they are all at the same proficiency level to begin with.

A short-term draftee that has already been in combat is far more experienced (at combat) than a career soldier who has been in the service for 20 years but has never been in combat at all. Right? It's all relative. Compare apples to apples, and oranges to oranges.

That's not really true either. For one thing the regulars don't get much more actual training than the Reserves and Guard soldiers normally do. The daily life of a full-time soldier is made up of many activities. They have to make their beds every morning, clean their latrines, perform guard duty and attend classes on such vital subjects as Sexual Harassment. They do equipment inventories, they write and submit reports, they prepare classes, and they practice marching in formation. They work on their vehicles and they clean their weapons, even if they're already squeeky clean. Their days are chock full of such activities; activities that really have nothing to do with getting better at fighting or combat, or with maintaining proficiency in their Military Occupational Specialty (MOS). It's just "busy work" meant to keep them occupied and out of trouble, for the most part. And a lot of them get sick to death of doing the same things over and over again. They begin to hate it and not take it seriously after a while. They really only do it because they have to. They have no choice. But the Guardsman or Reservist, on the other hand, does have a choice, and he chooses to do these things himself, and he chooses to devote every single minute of his drill time (and yearly active duty training) to sharpening his MOS and combat related skills. They actually do this eagerly. Once you weed out all the active-duty "busy-work" I think that overall the amount of actual MOS or combat related training is about the same for everybody, be they active duty, Guard or Reserve.

When I was technically just another part-time "weekend warrior" Guardsman returned to active duty and stationed in Iraq with the regular Army, would you say that my "combat effectiveness" was any less than that of a regular active-duty Marine that was in the military for a full career, and had been in the service for 20 years, but had never even seen combat before?

Who would you rather come up against in a firefight in Falluja? Me - a "weekend warrior" with nearly 25 years of experience, and nearly a quarter of it in combat zones? Or the full-time Marine regular with 20 years in the service and no combat experience at all? By your arguement you claim that the Marine would naturally be the much more formidable adversary. And you'd be dead wrong, too.

Everything else being equal (and it is) draftees are every bit as good as volunteer soldiers, and experienced Guard and Reserve soldiers are every bit as good as full-time career soldiers. Many times the draftee or the Guard/Reserve soldiers may actually be the better soldier.

At the very least it would be extremely dangerous for you to "assume" anything to the contrary, if you were on the opposing side in a firefight.

As to the "accidents" thing -- hey, that's just the way it is. We are a high-tech force. We are a very fast-moving force. We are a combined arms force. Accidents happen. It's a very dangerous job. Soldiers are not protected by OSHA rules and regulations. They handle dangerous weapons and vehicles all day long, every day, in very dangerous and unpredictable environments. Shit happens. It's to be expected. People need to be careful. And they are, but shit still happens. It's unavoidable, and it comes with the job.

Apples to apples then:

There were two guys, aged 18.
One volunteered to serve, the other was drafted.
Both did the boot camp together. Both served under the same unit.
The draftee finished his tour 2 years later and leaves.
The volunteer stays for 5 more years under contract.
The draftee goe into the Territorial Reserves.
The "regular" goes into advanced weapons training, close quarters, and explosives, or whatever.
The draftee goes to the local pub and drinks a six-pack.He gains weight, maybe gets out of shape.
The "regular" trains all day with his weapon. Runs the course twice a day.Is as fit as a Triathlon athlete.He spends 80% of the year dserving kitchen duty, and other shit.But the remaining 20% that he has left he uses it to train, war-games, exercises,stay fit, learns to march, whatever. He practices in the firing range, gets to be a crackshot at it.
The draftee practices once a year, fires a few rounds.

A couple of years after, a war erupts. Both never seen combat before, but both are called in. They fight the insurgents in Fallujah.
Wich one is better trained and prepared for battle?
They come across an IED (Improvised Explosive device). Both are called to disarm the device.
Wich one manages to disarm the device without blowing himself up? One has explosive training, the other has whatever the drill sargeant managed to teach him in such short time. Wich one has better chance of sucess?

Get my point now?
The draftee had his training condensed.Because he is there for a "short" period, there is no time for him to go through every piece of training, every program, every class. He has to compromise. He leaves the army having learned some 40% or less(hypotetical) of all there was to learn.
You are right. The battle field of today is dinamical, filled with threats from all sides. No one can expect to be prepared for ALL eventualities. But the more you train possible scenarios, the more you know of what you might find in that battlefield, the more chances you have of coming out alive.

Another thing, regarding the "accidents". Do you really think 1/3 one third of the total casualties in a war is an acceptable number to chalk for "battlefield dynamics"? well then! If it were, then every Army on this earth would have to hire 1/3 more people just to cope with those offwar "acceptable" losses.If there were 236 fatal casualties, we can imagine there were ten times as much incidents and injureds. And that is too high a number to have in a state-of-the-art Army.
You should also note that most of these accidents did not happen in the battlefield, per se. They took place in Kuwait, the Gulf, and in areas where the only shots you hear are from US firing ranges. Therefore there isn´t the "under fire stress" factor to account with.

Well, then he isn´t a "draftee" anymore, is he? He becomes a "regular", even if he was drafted to get in. I doubt a draftee would get to become a tank commander during his 2 year term. Aren´t tank commanders sargeants (at least)? Don´t they need to go to Sargeant course first? Can´t be done in a draftee´s 2 year term. Or can it?

Are you telling me that those fat guys that we see on TV are not really fat? Maybe it´s the being on TV that makes everyone look fatter, i don´t know.

When you have a lot of people to choose from, like in draft time, maybe you can have such high standards. But i propose to you that the Army has since become more flexible on that issue. Special forces criteria might be inflexible, but maintenance units and other low key units may not be.
Just look at that maintenance unit that got ambushed in Nassiriyah. There were guys with glasses, meaning less than 20-20 vision, and there were at least 2 with overweight problems, like the black girl, Shoshona i think she was called.
Anyone that examines every footage that came out of Iraq will find quite a few soldiers with a few pounds too many. It´s a fact. No way around it...

__________________
"Quincitilius Varus, give me back my legions!"
Emperor Augustus of Rome.

I can see your points, but I just don't see, based on my own experience, that they are really terribly valid points in actual real-life practice. My experience tells me otherwise. A part of your doubt stems from the fact that you obviously don't really understand just how we do things over here. That's not your fault. No other military force on the planet is quite like the US military. We have refined our training to the point that these integrated Guard and Reserve units are just as effective and just as professional as our regular active duty forces. It has not been easy, but as you can plainly see, we have done it and it obviously works very well for us. It works so well that we have complete faith in that 50% of our military forces that are the Guard and Reserve components. They have never let us down. Nobody here as any complaints at all on that score. If it was really a problem we'd be talking about it ourselves, and we're not. That should tell you all you really need to know about that, I think.

I don't see the accident rate as terribly unusual. Not for a combat zone with 130,000+ men serving in it. Most of the accidents are not life-threatening. They're just accidents. Most of those guys get treated and return to duty.

How many accidents do you think occur in an average civilian city of 130,000 people every day? I think the number might surprise you. Hospitals and emergency rooms see a constant stream of people 24 hours a day, and these people are not even in a dangerous war zone.

Likewise, if you were to go in to Womack Army Hospital at Ft. Bragg, NC, here in the US - the stateside home of the 82nd Airborne Division - you'd see an awful lot of accidents come in every day too. Soldiering is just a very dangerous job, even during peacetime.

Lastly, on the physical fitness thing: the military conducts constant physical fitness evaluations of all it's troops. Units do PT (Physical Training) every single day. The only time they don't is when other missions temporarily take priority.

You have to be able to pass the standard AFPFT (armed forces physical fitness test) every six months at the very least, or upon demand. You have to take the test again in order to go to any school, or to transfer duty stations, or to be deployed overseas. If you can't run two miles in under 13 minutes, and do the required number of sit-up's, push-up's, etc, within the required time limits you are put on immediate remedial training until you can, or until they kick you out (you get a little time to try to correct the problem - but not very much time). There are no exceptions for anybody.

We do not have a different set of standards for Special Forces than we do for cooks. We have only one standard, and everybody is expected to meet it, or they are out.

The same standard applies to all Guard and Reserve troops. Every drill weekend includes PT - and if somebody is having a problem with it, it is instantly obvious, and it's addressed immediately. You cannot stay in the Guard or Reserves if you cannot pass the standard PT test on demand. There are no exceptions whatsoever. They never become more "flexible" on this subject - they are as totally hard-assed as they can possibly be about it. It doesn't matter what you do in the military, or what component you are with. It's the same rigid standard for everybody.

Not staying in top physical shape is the easiest and the fastest way to get kicked right out of the Guard or Reserve. The active duty guys have to do PT every day. In the Guard and Reserve it's left up to the individual to stay in proper physical shape. Either way, every soldier know the consequences are exactly the same if you don't: you're history.

20-20 vision is not required in our military. It never has been required, ever, except for pilots back in the old days. We issue corrective lenses if people need them. Prescription lenses are even built right into each soldier's gas mask, if they require them. Have you noticed all thos wrap-around "sunglasses" that guys wear over there? Many of them are prescription lenses in flexible frames. They are made of a special highly impact, shatter and scratch resistant material and they have an unbelievably good "field of view" that you can't even find in civilian eyewear. They're great. The military can also permanently correct your vision using the new laser surgery techniques that are so popular in the civilian world, if you wish. Some guys like to use the special extended wear contacts, as well. All of these methods can give you better than 20-20 vision, so this is not seen as an issue or a problem of any sort.

That black girl you mentioned, Shoshona, obviously passed all her pre-deployment PT tests, and she obviously could have passed them any time anybody demanded that she prove she could, or she would not have been there. She had to pass that PT test just to be allowed to deploy with her unit. Everybody over there did. It may surprise you that a girl like that could run at least an average 6 1/2 minute mile over a two mile long course, but she could, obviously. Same-same push-up's, sit-up's, etc. Never judge a book by it's cover, I guess, hey?

But then i guess that blows the "body fat" theory out the water, doesn´t it?
You said earlier:

In this case, Shoshona has a big ammount of body fat, clearly visible even at naked eye (unless you think it´s all muscles under there, LOL), that would have had her thrown out had those "body fat calculation" tests been performed on her. And if the test WERE in fact performed, i propose to you that they weren´t all that demanding after all. Maybe they raised the limit a few pounds.
And i also think it´s a pretty natural thing. According to the latest figures, over 50% of the US population is overweight. . If the US Army was so picky with aplicant´s weight, there wouldn´t be enough people that fitted their high standards to maintain the army quotas.
Maybe they were all that fussy and picky back then when you went through it, but it seems the reality has changed a bit.
During the best part of the 20th century, the US army had the "luxury" to pick the "prime beef" off the draft listings. But now that the draft is a thing of the past, they compromise.

Here, read these articles:
http://www.sirc.org/articles/too_fat.shtml

"Too fat to die?
A recent article in the Times, US troops are losing the battle of the bulge, revealed that being overweight is not just the preserve of the couch potato. According to the article, the Times had seen a report, commissioned by the Pentagon that:

"is expected to say that 53.9 per cent of US military personnel over the age of 20 would be classified as too fat to fight under federal obesity standards. A fifth of those aged under 20 would also fail the fat test."

http://www.hackworth.com/26nov01.html

"The Corps, which has never lost sight that its primary mission is to fight, remains superbly trained and disciplined -- true to its time-honored slogan "We don't promise a rose garden." When, under Clinton, the Army lowered its standards to Boy Scout summer-camp level in order to increase enlistment, the Corps responded by making boot training longer and tougher.

Hello, is there a brain at the top somewhere beneath that snazzy Black Beret being modeled at most U.S. airports by too many overweight Army National Guard troops?"

http://www.wramc.amedd.army.mil/brigade/bravo_weight.htm
The point here is, why would the Army need a weight control program, if it doesn´t have overweight personnel? The answer is, well, they do.

So, you see Ranger, things seem to have changed a bit since back then when you went through it. If half of your army is overweight, i would say they have a real problem on their hands, wouldn´t you? And the lack of physical fitness will seriouslly impair their combat capability (at least in the Infantry ranks).
:rolleyes:

"So what is the US Army to do? Increase training? Closely monitor soldiers' diet? Close down the McDonalds outlets opened on US service bases across the globe originally intended to encourage new recruits? No. Just move the goal posts."

Well, that clears it!!


PS:
By the way, there´s a lot of "fatness" going around in the military, western world wide. Even Germany has a problem, just like every western country, fruits of McDonald´s and Pizza Hut sucess:
http://www.ananova.com/News/story/sm_347233.html

__________________
"Quincitilius Varus, give me back my legions!"
Emperor Augustus of Rome.

Here´s another article, regarding US military overweight problems:

http://www.keepmedia.com/ShowItemDetails.do?itemID=291743&extID=10032&oliID =213

"The IOM report underscores why the military is worried: Fully 60 percent of the men and 40 percent of the women in the Army have a body mass index (BMI) at or above 25, making them officially overweight according to government standards. So do 69 percent of Navy men and 46 percent of Navy women."

It´s not just a problem, it´s a HUGE problem!


No wonder they say they are loosing the battle of the "bulge"!!

__________________
"Quincitilius Varus, give me back my legions!"
Emperor Augustus of Rome.