Planesdragon's Journal: First wacked idea of the new year

As I was talking with an Army Veteran friend of mine last night (in lieu of our wednesday night RPG game, naturally) I had an off-hand idea that I think deserves entry into my list of "good ideas if they could get past that wacky implementation phase."

Demilitarize the army.

By this, I don't mean throw down our guns and say "we'll never fight a war again!" Rather, I say let's turn our large, land-occupying force into something that's not intended to level countries. Either dramatically reduce the extant conventional force's numbers and create something new, or repurpose our oldest and most-maligned military branch to be a non-military "peacekeeping force."

The primary reason I think this is a good idea is to prevent any future prison torture scandals, or anything else of the kind. The new force would be closer to a massive police force that is loaned out to other countries as needed than a highly funded brute squad.

And, since it wouldn't be a military force, it could act domestically if needs be. We need to guard the mexican border for a month? Send in a few divisions of the Peacekeeping army.

The rest of the offensive military -- which would be all of the special forces and Marine Corps, and most of the Navy and Air Force -- would be a "kill it and leave" group designed purely to attack and destroy nations, armies, and giant lizards from outer space. They could drop any need to exercise respect towards the enemies of our country, and focus on executing the wars we send them on with all needed effeciecy.

And, once this stealthy fire-from-heaven shot-in-the-dark force does its work and we conqer the next country to find itself under a tyrant, we send in a different force whose every person trained and studied and views themselves as a keeper of the peace and not a killer of men.

The new force would be the left hand of American international power, intended to aid those in need be the need caused by the war-fighting right hand or some other disaster.

well

[stoolpigeon]

"Only one military organization can hold and gain ground in war-a ground army supported by tactical aviation with supply lines guarded by the navy."
- General Omar Bradley 1951

Defense, not offense

[Marxist Hacker 42]

Works for me- it is after all exactly what I said earlier that a culture of life would do instead.

Peacekeeping army

[nizo]

Wow, just the name alone is worth it. I can see it now, we can invade countries to keep the peace :-)

Re:

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Peacekeeping army

[bryanthompson]

The UN, being the most ineffective force in the world and definitely least successful, sounds like the perfect one to model our military after... if we're looking for approval from weak, closed-minded countries. If we want to win and strike fear in our enemies that sure as hell isn't going to do it.

Re:Peacekeeping army

[the_mad_poster]

Which enemies are we striking fear into? The ones in Iran that are ignoring our demands, or the ones in North Korea that are... uh... ignoring our demands? Maybe questionables like Pakistan who keep telling us to go piss up a rope when it comes to interrogating scientists who may have given REAL terrorists (as opposed to the imaginary ones Bush chased into Iraq) REAL weapons (as opposed to the imaginary ones Bush....)?

Yea, fear. They're sure running scared, huh?

And which countries are weak and close-minde

Re:Peacekeeping army

[Planesdragon]

And isn't this already implemented by the UN?

Yes, badly. In fact, doing the sort of thing the UN gets stuck with would exactly be the point.

Already a failed idea

[TheConfusedOne]

The idea of a "kill it and leave" force has already failed in Iraq. The fact is that we ran in there and they ran away rather than stand there and let us kill them (darn rude of them actually).

If we've learned anything from the "insurgents" (ironically led by a foreigner) is that real military actions require patience, stedfastness, and "boots on the ground".

Well

[SuiteSisterMary]

History, I'm afraid, points out a few flaws in that reasoning.

1: You DO NOT turn your military into a police force. The military doens't know how to be police. The military knows how to occupy land, and how to kill people.

The military *does* know, however, how to render Aid to Civil Powers; they are, at that point, to be used as muscle and transportation and logistics.

2: Your military culture will not prevent an Abu Girhab from happening. It might encourage it, it might even demand it, and it proba

two immediate problems:

[eglamkowski]

1) much of the ground troops in Iraq are National Guards, who are pretty much exactly what you describe anyways - trained just as much to do civilian support work as to actually fight.

2) police culture in the USA isn't always all that great, and when you get high levels of corruption, it can be worse than not having a police force. And regarding prisoner abuse, are you aware of the prison culture we have here? Indeed, it may very well have been the nature of the prison culture we have that lead to what h

Something like that

[peacefinder]

For various reasons others have stated, it probably wouldn't be a good idea to convert the whole army to such a thing. But I've had a similar idea for a while. Out with it now, I guess.

What I think would work is to explicitly create a peacekeeping force distinct from the warfighting branches of the military. Ideally, it would be an all-volunteer elite force recruited from within the military. Members of any military branch could apply to join. It would have to be clear that their work is possibly more dang