#1
There is no compelling military need for this change, Army Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, said...AT THIS TIME.
So there is a compelling political need?
Will this evolve into taking control of the NG away from the Governors and providing DHS with a militant arm? Is it tied to pulling the NG from the Border Patrol attachment?
#3
About a hundred years ago Congress voted more funds for their state National Guards than the Regular Army creating a cultural fissure that still plays today. That was pulled again in the period after the first Gulf War when the standing Army was 'downsized' from over 750,000 to under 500,000 while the Guard was protected from similar cuts. Empire building.
The present confusion in the civilian mind and the true military mind respecting the purposes of armies and limits of warfare is attributable to many circumstances. Among them, no doubt, is the character of military history as it has commonly been written. Ordinary citizens are lacking in the raw experience of combat, or deficient in technical knowledge, and inclined to leave the compilation of military records to experts in such affairs. Writers on general history have tended to neglect the broader aspects of military issues; confining themselves to accounts of campaigns and battles, handled often in a cursory fashion, they have usually written on the wars of their respective countries in order to glorify their prowess, with little or no reference to the question whether these wars were conducted in the military way of high efficiency or in the militaristic way, which wastes blood and treasure.
Even more often, in recent times, general historians have neglected military affairs and restricted their reflections to what they are pleased to call the causes and consequences of wars; or they have even omitted them altogether. This neglect may be ascribed to many sources. The first is, perhaps, a recognition of the brutal fact that the old descriptions of campaigns are actually of so little value civilian and military alike. Another has been the growing emphasis on economic and social fields deemed normal and the distaste of economic and social historians for war, which appears so disturbing to the normal course of events. Although Adam Smith included a chapter on the subject of military defense in his Wealth of Nations as a regular part of the subject, modern economists concentrate on capital, wages, interest, rent, and other features of peaceful pursuits, largely forgetting war as a phase of all economy, ancient or modern. When the mention the subject of armies and military defense, these are commonly referred to as institutions and actions which interrupt the regular balance of economic life. And the third source of indifference is the effort of pacifists and peace advocates to exclude wars and military affairs from general histories, with the view to uprooting any military or militaristic tendencies from the public mind, on the curious assumption that by ignoring realties the realties themselves will disappear.
This lack of a general fund of widely disseminated military information is perilous to the maintenance of civilian power in government. The civilian mind, presumably concerned with the maintenance of peace and the shaping of policies by the limits of efficient military defense, can derive no instruction from acrimonious disputes between militarists, limitless in their demands, and pacifists, lost in utopian visions. Where the civilians fail to comprehend and guide military policy, the true military men, distinguished from the militarists, are also imperiled. For these the executioners of civilian will, dedicated to the preparation of defense and war with the utmost regard for efficiency, are dependent upon the former.
Again, and again, the military men have seen themselves hurled into war by ambitions, passions, and blunders of civilian governments, almost wholly uninformed as to the limits of their military potentials and almost recklessly indifferent to the military requirements of the wars they let loose. Aware that they may again be thrown by civilians into an unforeseen conflict, perhaps with a foe they have not envisaged, these realistic military men find themselves unable to do anything save demand all the men, guns, and supplies they can possibly wring from the civilians, in the hope that they may be prepared or half prepared for whatever may befall them. In so doing they inevitably find themselves associated with militaristic military men who demand all they can get merely for the sake of having it without reference to ends.
Vagts, Alfred, History of Militarism, rev. 1959, Free Press, NY, pp 33-34.
#3
And yet it is within memory when the sitting Donk Senator from NJ stepped down because of a scandal and by law there was insufficient time to replace him on the forthcoming November ballot insuring a Trunk win by default. Instead the NJ Supreme Court ruled that a 'compelling need' for choice existed and over ruled the written law to insure a Donk could save the seat. And they did.
#4
That was Rob't "The Torch" Torricelli and the reanimated corpse of Frank Lautenberg
Posted by: Frank G ||
01/05/2012 14:46 Comments ||
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#5
ME,ME, ME WANT, ME NO GET, ME SUE.
To be accurate, the Virginia GOP did change rules late in the eligibility process and with little or no advance notice. Legal, yes. Within their right to do so, sure. Not exactly cricket, tho.
#8
P2K - glad you are off 'the road'. Welcome back.
Posted by: Bobby ||
01/05/2012 21:39 Comments ||
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#9
"Instead the NJ Supreme Court ruled that a 'compelling need' for choice existed and over ruled the written law to insure a Donk could save the seat. And they did."
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
