Ukraine sacks army recruitment chiefs in anti-graft shakeup
www.reuters.com
President Volodymyr Zelenskiy broadened his battle against graft on Friday, firing all the heads of Ukraine's regional army recruitment centres as the war with Russia enters a critical stage.
  • flipht@kbin.social
    16·
    11 months ago

    Lack of a draft is almost directly and solely responsible for the current quagmire of the US military - when we had a draft, normal people were pulled and had to serve with other normal people. They had real lives to go back to. They had family and friends who would listen to them and write their representatives to complain if the use of those human resources was inappropriate. Seeing body bags flying home and a televised razing of a foreign jungle turned a lot of people off from war. And they made their voices heard.

    Now, the only people being asked to pay attention are career military professionals. They often do not have a job or life outside of the military to tie them to normal life. They’ve also gotten smarter about where they fly corpses in, so the news can’t provide a solid day-by-day count of the wasted lives. These folks aren’t pushing back against the worst excesses of the military, because their college benefit or their pension require them to shut up and just do what they’re told.

    There’s a great documentary called Sir! No, Sir! about the vibrant protest movement from within the military, driven mostly by draftees during Vietnam.

    I don’t disagree with your initial reasoning, but there’s a different take that says that what we have allowed is for the worst of us to control the policy for all of us, with nearly no external oversight.

    • bouh@lemmy.world
      1·
      11 months ago

      This is a difficult problem to solve for a society though. The army is needed, because it’s what allows your country to exist. In time of peace, draft is really not optimal, because people are taken a year of their life for absolutely nothing. But the army need to keep its structure alive and functioning, or there’ll be nothing when it’s needed.

      The army of professionals is a good solution, and they do a hard job to keep an important piece of the state alive when no one cares about it.

      Ultimately I think it’s better if poor people make the core of the army because it means ultimately the safety of the nation is in their hands. Still, culture of the military men should be better taken care of, and elitism of the command structure should be fought.