Iraq question

[_The Nehor]

Yeah, but does anyone want to know how much your life is worth in the government's eyes? I believe it's still in the neighborhood of 3.3 million each. Like it or not but as a society and as individuals we do not consider human life to be of infinite worth.

[_Angus McAwesome]

Angus I think you're right on the money on this one. In a way I wish we still had the draft and everybody had to fight, not just people who ended up on the bottom economically.

Actually, I'm very glad that we don't have the draft any more. The benefits from having an all volunteer professional military over a conscript draft-based military are simply to many to list. For example, with out all volunteer military we have a much higher quality of training and equipment standards per soldier then any conscript military on earth (and that's not jingoistic nationalist horn tooting. Compare the training standards and quality of equipment of just basic 11b Army Infantry to their counterparts in the PRC or Russia and you'll see some major differences. For example, the current standard line infantry rifle for the Russians is the AK-74M, which costs about $300. Just the rifle component for the M4 SOPMOD system we use is anywhere from $1800-$2400 depnding on the vendor. The average US Infantryman is going into battle with around $20k-$40k worth of basic issue gear, weapons, and ammo). The down side to our all volunteer military is that the price per soldier for training and equipment is much higher then a conscript military. Really the trade off is quality over quantity and to me quality wins.

You can that quality at work in the sheer lopsided kill/death ratios we've attained since dropping the draft. In Vietnam we had a kill/death ration of 4.1/1, so for every GI we lost we killed 4 NVA/VC troops. By comparison, during the first Gulf War we achieved kill/death rates of 55.8/1 or higher.

So yeah, while having the draft around so every young person can experience what the military is like and smack some discipline into them sounds nice on paper, the reality of warfighting says we're much better off with an all volunteer force.

Normally I would agree with fighting a war under the terms of the Geneva convention. I normally don't even agree with capital punishment (another instance where I disagree with many Republicans). When I look at what they did to Daniel Pearl, I have to think, if that were my brother (which as a fellow American he should be considered as such) I would stop at nothing to prevent that from happening. So torchering the enemy to find out where they were hiding him wouldn't bother me too much. I'd hope that my fellow Americans would do the same for me. Granted, Daniel Pearl was foolish to ever be there in the first place, but what if he were just an American POW like Jessica Lynch. I'd be doing everything I could to free him/her. As long as they're going to treat our captured soldiers like that, as far as I'm concerned, the Geneva convention goes out the window.

See, to me, while such actions on the part of our enemies are horrific and provoke a desire for bloody vengeance on a scale that'd make the Old Testament God blush, the rational part of me understands that while we could do such things and do it with relative impunity, to do so would run completely counter to our values as a nation and the values of our military. Like the old saying goes, "Two wrongs don't make a right", so I'd rather we don't lower ourselves to the other guy's level.

Yeah, but does anyone want to know how much your life is worth in the government's eyes? I believe it's still in the neighborhood of 3.3 million each. Like it or not but as a society and as individuals we do not consider human life to be of infinite worth.

You can figure out a rough estimate of the average dollar value of a citizen by taking their productive life span (i.e. the average number of years that a citizen will work), and multiply that number by the estimated per capita GDP of a that citizen's nation over the course of their productive lifespan.