Even before that, I feel like the abolition of conscription has changed the stock of American soldiers (who used to be prime-age males from all walks of life), to a much younger cohort where misfits and lower classes were overrepresented.

I think perception of American military strength rests somewhat on the image of the square-jawed, rugged soldier, which was very much a staple of combat propaganda, but used to be more like an embellishment of the truth, rather than outright fiction.

Video games of the 2000s-2010s, like the CoD series, have usually cast this WW2-Vietnam era image onto the GWOT era, with the heroic characters fighting in the middle-east this time. It was kind of surreal to see actual authentic footage of awkward gangly teens wearing the same uniforms.

The “poverty draft” narrative is old and tired and not true. The stats are 60% are from middle class, about 20% poor and 20% wealthy.

The future of warfare is robotic warfare, specifically large volumes of cheap attritionable autonomous munitions.

Human soldiers are legacy technology that do not fare well against drones, for evidence (obligatory NSFW tag): Check reddit /r/CombatFootage/

Human soldiers are still used extensively on the battlefield - but are in the process of being replaced by machines.

> The future of warfare is robotic warfare, specifically large volumes of cheap attritionable autonomous munitions

The robots are made to kill people on the other side until you hopefully win, otherwise political disagreements could be settled via best of 3 CoD games - or chess if you're more traditional. Recruitment of humans is still required for fodder.

We have heard this so many times. The future was mechanized warfare, or missiles, or aircraft, or stealth jets. It seems that now in Russia/Ukraine, pretty much all forms of mechanized warfare have been rendered irrelevant and you can't achieve military objectives no matter how many bombing runs you conduct with your planes. And those planes are not safe either. Same goes for Iran. You still need the guys to go in.

Another way to view those conflicts is that (horrible as it is to say) neither side has anywhere near enough missiles to completely disable their opponents.

As a thought exercise, imagine if ukraine had 100k missiles ready in a silo.

> ...neither side has anywhere near enough missiles to completely disable their opponents.

Try the US/Iran war for size then.

I'm not sure what you mean by "completely disable their opponents" - there may not be a country on earth with enough munitions to do this against a competent and resilient adversary - the Vietnam war comes to mind where the US still lost after dropping triple the bombs (by tonnage) of what the entire allied forces dropped during WWII across all theaters

My understanding is that Russia despite falling far from its USSR days, still had multiple times more capacity to make Iskander-s, than the US can make ATACMS (and Iskanders are way better too). The PrSM, the US based successor is just about to enter volume production, and will be years till they can be made by the hundreds.

At least that was the case before Ukraine started blowing up Russian factories. And for the rest of Europe, their capacities are somehow even worse.

And in any case, Russian missiles were a drop in the bucket compared to drones.

So building high performance missiles in a volume needed for sustained conflict is not something any military has managed to do so far.

(Not shilling for any side, just my honest opinion, plz dont dogpile on this, I don't care about any side's national greatness)

"As a thought exercise, imagine if ukraine had 100k missiles ready in a silo."

Imagine if they had air superiority. For some reason people ignore this when analyzing the war in Ukraine. Drones are great for denial (defense). So far they are shit at assaults (offense). Also, drones don't do well in environments with military aircraft. We just don't see that in Ukraine because they are very few aircraft in the skies. The Russians haven't flown into Ukrainian airspace in over 3 years now. They launch their missiles and glide bombs from their side of the border.

Russian autocrats agree. 1.5M Russian casualties in the last 5 years(!) with an unprecedented fatality ratio, but sure, you still need the guys to go in.

All these fancy weapons are called "force multipliers". And multiplying zero is still zero.

You still need people to occupy the place, take control of objectives, interact with the population, etc... Otherwise, you are just making craters.

An advanced army with appropriate support can make a soldier 10x more effective, but you still need a soldier to begin with.

The meat robot still has a long way to go

Not to downplay the reality of the situation here, but being not qualified in this case just means not being able to walk into a recruiting office and sign a contract without a waiver. The military processes tens of thousands of waivers every year for past legal infractions, tattoo policy exemptions, medical history stuff, etc. Anyone currently taking something like ADHD medication who isn't willing to stop receiving treatment for the condition is ineligible for instance.

It's kind of asinine that one can be demonstrably stable over a long term and do all sorts of things operationally in the intelligence community, but could not even become a 92G (culinary specialist) in the Army.

In high school (in the 90s) I was badgered by military recruiter phone calls. I’m not sure why they were fixated on me, but I had several military in my family (including my mother) and I was a good athlete so maybe that was a part of it. I don’t know. Finally, out of frustration I told one of the recruiters that I was gay (which is not true) and he quickly responded “the modern military takes all kinds” and then I followed up with “and I have asthma.” (which IS true) Click. They never called back after that.

My freshman year cross country course record still stands, 34 years later. I’ve always thought how strange it was that the merest whiff of asthma was disqualifying.

Did you mean: > Only 12% of American male youth who are __not__ qualified for the military __are__ in college?

Without reading your citations, your argument threw me for a loop.

I don't think so. I think what was meant was what was literally said: that 88% of youth qualified for the military are in college.

66% of youth are not qualified for the military or college, leaving a remainder of 34% that are qualified for the military, college, or both.

X% of youth qualified for college but not the military (qualified for college here meaning attending college, I think.), leaving (34-X)%.

Of those, 88% attend college .88(34-X)%,

leaving .12(34-X)% eligible for recruitment. Which ends up a successful recruiting number like 63.5K, which is from one of the references.

I could be wrong, but it could make sense.

But also, 2/3rds of 34% also leaves a remainder of about 12% (which is a bit coincidental), so maybe what was meant to be said was that only 12% of (all American youth) are (qualified) and not (in college), rather than only 12% of (the qualified) are not (in college.)

Why don’t governments pay for free GLPs for everyone overweight? They overrepay for themselves by reducing medical care.

It's much more effective to address the obesity problem on the front end.

We have fast food and junk food advertising targeting kids. Kids are driven to school instead of walking or biking. School lunches are optimized to be cheap not nutritious. Pediatricians have to tap dance around weight. When the Obama Administration tried to push for healthier lunches there was pushback from the right over government bad, from industry over higher costs, and from school districts over costs. Healthier food for kids could not win a durable political coalition!

Why not both? Because we’ve been “addressing on the front end” for a while without results. Making places walkable and getting (especially already obese) kids onto healthy food are things we should be doing, but need more support and take longer than a drug, which admittedly has side effects but seems healthier than waiting.

And Obama’s healthier lunches received pushback because they had some stupid requirements, like reducing salt intake, and poor implementation: maybe not Obama’s fault, but should’ve been addressed, IME students were forced to take a fruit or vegetable they would just throw away, and sometimes the “fruit” were these gross bananas that were simultaneously green and brown/mushy. They also received pushback from kids themselves and their parents.

> We have fast food and junk food advertising targeting kids.

The government is also heavily subsidizing corn, which made corn syrup the cheapest sweetener.

> It's much more effective to address the obesity problem on the front end.

Is it? GLPs cost literally pennies to manufacture in bulk. The government could easily justify a trillion to just buy the rights and give it away for free and still come out ahead on healthcare cost savings.

Everything your suggesting sounds like a lot of work by comparison.

GLPs require some good dietician advice to be given and followed to be effective, otherwise you are just trading off obesity for an eating disorder. You really have to do both, provide the high protein + high fiber food alternatives and the GLP to make cheating less likely.

Have you taken them? Because I see this “you still need virtue^Wdiscipline” refrain a lot, but it doesn’t match my experience or that of many others I know who use GLP-1s.

For me, I lost 50 lbs not exercising and not actively managing my diet. I felt better and all my biomarkers got better (blood pressure, cholesterol, etc.). Later, I started to exercise and cleaned up my diet because I wanted to. Healthy food just tastes better now, and moving my body is satisfying rather than tiring. They are the closest thing to magic I’ve ever experienced.

I'm talking from direct experience here. Although I'm over 50 (years, not lbs) so that definitely can make my experience different from yours (assuming you are younger, but that's just an assumption, my health/body could also be different).

Also, constipation and muscle loss are real issues. Protein and exercise will help with muscle loss (well, I haven't really started weight training yet, just aerobic), but you need to up your water and fiber intake or you could be in for a very hard time. I'm glad that this didn't happen to you, and that you didn't have to take an emergency trip to the drug store to figure out what an enema was (and how to use it, ouch).

I'm in the same age range. Never had those issues (with GLP-1s, anyway) and I'm sorry to hear you did. Fiber is good regardless :)

On each ramp I had constipation issues, but they seem to have mellowed as I got used to the dose. The dietician has been really useful, I recommend that anyone who wants to get started with this look into a video consult (no need to attend in person), insurances generally cover the dietician faster than they will your GLP dosage, and they are good at providing solutions to balance out your diet long term if you can't figure it out on your own.

That's not even vaguely true a low dose is effective enough at reducing hungry enough to get slow and steady weight loss and require zero planning or effort on the users part.

The only time you need a dietician is if you want a high enough dose you barely want to eat at all.

I can't imagine the military wants a fighting force dependent on a consistent supply of GLP-1s to the front lines.

Hell, let's just reduce the Medicare eligibility age (alllll the way down) so everyone can afford the care they need or would benefit from.

Medicare is currently something like 14% of the budget and covers 20% of the population.

The least healthiest 20% of the population. Old people use much more medical care.

Personal healthcare spending is estimated to have been 4.5T in 2024. [1] Total revenue was 4.9T that year. [2]

[1] https://nchsdata.cdc.gov/dqs?topic=personal-healthcare-spend...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_United_States_federal_bud...

to be fair if everyone was paying 10-20k less in private healthcare thorough their employer you could tax that amount

There is no value for a government in long-term thinking, if the electorate only votes on short term issues.

This may be true, but I think the electorate would go fucking bananas for free GLP-1s.

Why only GLP? Same logic can be applied to all preventive care

True, but GLPs in particular are obvious.

Because the political will doesn't exist. Because being fat is portrayed as a moral failing. Because the Protestant work ethic's[1] virtue of self-discipline extended to health and eating. I guess it's kinda strange to carry the mantle of the protestants without being protestant one's self, yet it happens.

1. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/249628161_The_moral...

Kind of hard to feel sorry for the richest country in the world when they refuse to spend enough money to take care of their people enough to even meet basic national security standards.

Taking care of them was historically about calorie and nutrientmaxxing. Subsidized calories have worked too well, worldwide, and there's no response to it within the current Overton window.

Being fat is a moral failing though? It’s also not portrayed that way, see the entire body positivity/healthy at every size movement.

What do you think that was in response to?

Half the country being fat and not wanting to take responsibility?

Right. Fat acceptance was created in response to the sentiment that you're expressing - that it is a moral failing (responsibility).

Taking responsibility for the tremendous surge in highly-calorific, ultra-processed food over the last forty years or so?

And these calories are in the water supply? No, the fat people choose to buy and eat that food. I'm on a 700C deficit right now, it's not very fun, but it works because I have the discipline to not order a pizza.

It can be, but so can existing as an ordinary citizen and not devoting your life to activism, abstaining from everything but the most sustainable resources. Some people lose or maintain weight with zero effort, while some have significantly lower TDEEs and experience actual Minnesota-starvation effects, so I disagree. At least make the moral failing not doing the basics, like planned meals with whole foods and some amount of exercise, so it’s fair.

Anyways regardless, morality is irrelevant here. The rest of society would be better off if these people lost weight, and I doubt forcing them would go well, but voluntary GLPs would.

Ironically that GLP-1 blocker prescription would potentially make you ineligible. You have to take that pill for the rest of your life, and the military generally doesn't want to deploy combat troops dependent on a consistent supply of non-life saving medications.

I really have no idea how we (the US) would stand up a meaningful sized army today if a larger war were to break out. Between obesity and the widespread use of psychological medications a huge swath of the population is ineligible to serve.

Ramp up Adderall production and drug em into soldiers

Sure, then we just need to ensure that any forward fighting force has reliable access to Adderall. Seems reasonable for modern warfare, after all it seems like the Nazis may have been delivering heroine to their front lines.