Article is from late last year, but I can’t imagine its gotten much better for them since

  • mendiCAN [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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    1 minute ago

    Gil Barndollar is a former Marine officer and a current scholar of U.S. foreign policy and national security.

    gil’s been trying to get the draft reinstated for a long time.

    i actually surprised myself by getting to the end of this piece. took a long time since i was shaking my head in disagreement every other line lol

  • TheDeed [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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    14 seconds ago

    Thankfully they have banned trans people from joining the military, and they’ve even started kicking out long time trans soldiers with a dishonorable discharge.

    I started freaking out about a draft but then I remembered I’m 34 and trans so seems unlikely, unless they get very desperate. If they do I’m fragging my CO

  • blobjim [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    6 hours ago

    Obviously nobody is doing a ground invasion of Iran. It’s so annoying seeing people frame it this way. As has been mentioned all over already, they’re going to do the air bombing campaign of Libya, Gaza, Vietnam, Korea, etc.

    They don’t need to do some meticulous ground invasion if their goal is just to reduce a society to rubble. They’ll just drop bombs and fire missiles until people are dying of water-borne diseases.

    • Dirt_Owl [comrade/them, they/them]@hexbear.netOP
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      6 hours ago

      We’ll see. There are a lot of factors to consider, not just troops obviously. We’ll have to wait and see if it has any real lasting impact.

      It’s still interesting to note how low the morale of US citizens is.

      • ScoffingLizard@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        2 hours ago

        I’d say dying by nuke doesn’t sound like a bad deal right now, honestly. Better than internment camp or wasting away as an elderly person in an isolationist society with no medical care or safety net after working constantly to make others rich. The problem is worldwide, too. It’s not just the US.

  • Belly_Beanis [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    7 hours ago

    The US wasn’t ready for Iraq and Afghanistan, either. I remember a general on TV saying we’d need 4 million troops to occupy Iraq. We had 4 million troops total stationed across the globe. Still, Bush decided to open up a second front.

  • xiaohongshu [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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    9 hours ago

    A problem easily solved by having a recession.

    This was what happened during the build up to WWII in Nazi Germany and Japan.

    In fact, Europe is already doing so with their militarization budget. In China, anecdotally, I am already seeing more and more military recruitment ads. Not surprising given the high rate of youth unemployment in China right now.

    We are going to see more and more military build ups across the world as the global economy enters a recessionary phase.

  • two dudes in glasses in the pic lol if I’m going to war I’m not doing it with my fucking glasses on

    I know contacts will fuck you with chemical weapons in your eyes but tbh you’re fucked then anyway and I need my peripheral vision and for my vision to not fall off my face

    • Carl [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      8 hours ago

      In basic they don’t let you use contacts, they issue everyone who needs them identical glasses with identical sports straps.

      If wartime I would recommend shatterproof eye protection, comes in shaded and unshaded, prescription and non-prescription. There’s a reason why “operator” dudes all kind of end up looking the same, it’s cuz that’s what works.

        • KuroXppi [they/them]@hexbear.net
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          6 hours ago

          As a long-time glasses wearer I don’t imagine they’d be 100% identical, that would be near useless for most wearers who weren’t like, -1 myopic if that were the only glasses provided.

          Anyone with astigmatism or a higher prescription (probably starting at -3 and stronger) would be probably better off not wearing glasses at all than wearing mis-prescribed glasses, and at that point their eyesight would be too poor for standard activity.

          Frames also need to increase in thickness as the prescription increases, because the lenses get proportionality thicker too. A thin frame will either be too narrow/weak to hold the lenses, and the overhanging glass is a physical hazard

            • KuroXppi [they/them]@hexbear.net
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              6 hours ago

              Yeh definitely worth asking and tbf I don’t have any special insight into how the military would do it other than the fact that I’ve walked around with glass in front of my eyes for most of my life.

              I’m guessing maybe they’d have standardised frames and lenses that go up in gradations of 0.5 or 1, and can easily be swapped out. They probably wouldn’t allow for astigmatism because that’s different for each person so the correction may be off for some wearers, but so long as the degree prescription is okay they probably make do.

    • Zuzak [fae/faer, she/her]@hexbear.net
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      12 hours ago

      Literally the first line of the article:

      Coverage of the wars in Ukraine and Gaza is mostly dominated by talk of weapons.

      It goes on to address this perspective and make an argument why troops are important. Did you actually read it before coming to that conclusion?

    • PKMKII [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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      12 hours ago

      It depends what kind of war. Drone warfare is great if the opposition is a non-state actor or a weak state where obliterating them at a distance and letting someone else deal with the clean up is on the table. Against a state on relatively equal footing that has the capacity to deal with drones and would require a proper occupation in order to defeat, it’s not that useful.

      That’s what happened in Ukraine, a lot of the weaponry the U.S. sent over that was good at taking out ISIS didn’t fare so well against the proper Russian army.