A Swedish bureaucrat’s thoughts on U.S. soldiers
Sweden’s non-socialist parties have proposed scrapping the mandatory military service. I’m not sure how I feel about that myself (mandatory service has its pros and cons) but the bureaucrats who administer it obviously want to keep it. Here’s my translation of daily newspaper Svenska Dagbladet‘s (which literally means the Swedish daily) quoting the director of the draft bureaucracy (link in Swedish):
Look at the U.S. Without a draft we’ll end up with the leftovers and have to compete over young people with business and college. The American forces in Iraq have had several problems and that’s because many with economic and social problems have joined the military.
It is doubtless true that the U.S. Army has been forced to lower its standards in order to meet its expanded recruiting targets, and obviously there has always been a tendency to encourage young trouble makers to join the military before they lose themselves to a life of crime, but it is ridiculous to think that an army of draftees would have been better disciplined or have had fewer soldiers with troubling personal issues. Anything to keep one’s job, I guess.
