“Do you know what the recruiting numbers are at the Army, the Navy, and the Air Force? They can’t reach their quotas each month. They can’t find enough people to join.”
Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) wants to turn illegal aliens into American soldiers, citing poor recruitment numbers seen in the Army, Navy, and Air Force.
Durbin made his comments during a recent Senate speech that was loaded with compassion for “undocumented” people who want a chance to serve the country:
Senator Dick Durbin wants to make it possible for illegal immigrants to join the US military: “Do you know what the recruiting numbers are at the Army, the Navy, and the Air Force? They can’t reach their quotas each month. They can’t find enough people to join.” pic.twitter.com/UWuGSfrSkF
— TheBlaze (@theblaze) December 4, 2023
“What troubles me about the debate now about the southern border is one half of the immigration situation. Yes, we need order at the border. Yes, we need to have changes in the laws that reflect the reality of the overwhelming numbers from all over the world who are coming to our shores and our border. But, there’s also an incredible demand for legal immigration into this country even now. The presiding officer, my colleague from the state of Illinois has legislation which addresses one aspect of that.
Her bill, and I hope that I describe it accurately, says that if you are an undocumented person in this country and you can pass the physical and required background test and the like, you can serve in our military. And if you do it honorably, we will make you citizens of the United States.
Do you know what the recruiting numbers are at the Army, the Navy, and the Air Force? They can’t reach their quotas each month. They can’t find enough people to join.
There are those who are undocumented who want the chance to serve and risk their lives for this country. Should we give them the chance? I think we should.”
Durbin’s remark comes after a highly disturbing essay from the US Army War College’s academic journal that made the case to reinstitute the draft.
The essay predicted future battles would be wars of attrition that would see thirty-six hundred casualties a day.
Zachary Yost from the Mises Institute reports:
The context for this supposed need to reinstate conscription is the estimate that were the US to enter into a large-scale conflict, every day it would likely suffer thirty-six hundred casualties and require eight hundred replacements, again per day. The report notes that over the course of twenty years in Iraq and Afghanistan, the US suffered fifty thousand casualties, a number which would likely be reached in merely two weeks of large-scale intensive combat.
The military is already facing an enormous recruiting shortfall. Last year the army alone fell short of its goal by fifteen thousand soldiers and is on track to be short an additional twenty thousand this year. On top of that, the report notes that the Individual Ready Reserve, which is composed of former service personnel who do not actively train and drill but may be called back into active service in the event they are needed, has dropped from seven hundred thousand in 1973 to seventy-six thousand now.
Prior to the Ukraine war, the fad theory in military planning was the idea of “hybrid warfare,” where the idea of giant state armies clashing on the battlefield requiring and consuming vast amounts of men and material was viewed as out of date as massed cavalry charges. Instead, these theorists argued that even when states did fight, it would be via proxies and special operations and would look more like the past twenty years of battling nonstate actors in the hills of Afghanistan. In a recent essay in the Journal of Security Studies, realist scholar Patrick Porter documents the rise of this theory and the fact that it is obviously garbage given the return of industrial wars of attrition.
As military planners have woken up from the fevered dream of imagining that modern war consisted of chasing the Taliban through the hills with complete and overwhelming airpower, they have similarly started to wake up to the idea that industrial war has vast manpower requirements and that seemingly the only way to fill these requirements is by forcing young people into the ranks. That has certainly been the only way Ukraine has been able to maintain its forces, although it has required increasingly draconian measures to do so as conscripts face attrition rates of 80 to 90 percent by Ukraine’s own admission.
Obviously, the reintroduction of conscription is an extremely disturbing prospect given America’s propensity for getting involved in meaningless wars that accomplish nothing other than empowering our enemies, killing and maiming our soldiers, and wasting vast resources.
Online critics of Durbin tore into him:
https://t.co/1NbhGmyOrd pic.twitter.com/xriua054WW
— James Woods (@RealJamesWoods) December 4, 2023
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