03 JAN 2012 by ideonexus
No One Will Join the Military to Fight the Zombies
Even if the coffers hadn’t been empty, if we’d had all the money to make all the uniforms we needed to implement Phase Two, who do you think we could have conned into filling them? This goes to the heart of America’s war weariness. As if the “traditional” horrors weren’t bad enough—the dead, the disfigured, the psychologically destroyed—now you had a whole new breed of difficulties, “The Betrayed.” We were a volunteer army, and look what happened to our volunteers. How man...The volunteer military cannot find personnel after endless wars in the Middle East and the Government betraying soldiers by overextending their commitments prevents volunteers from being willing to sign up.
01 JAN 2012 by ideonexus
The Military is Good For Space Exploration
The experience of space exploration gives no unique philosophy; to some extent, each group tends to see its own philosophical view reflected, and not always by the soundest logic: Nikita Khrushchev stressed that in the space flight of Yuri Gagarin no angels or other supernatural beings were detected; and, in almost perfect counterpoint, the Apollo 8 astronauts read from lunar orbit the Babylonian cosmogony enshrined in Genesis, Chapter 1, as if to reassure their American audience that the exp...The competition against other militaries unites them against the public. Space flight would move them into a peacetime occupation.