It's not really how we fight anymore. Buuuut if you want to see protests to rival the 70s, try doing a general draft again.
The US Military will never do another draft. The issue with the draft is that it instantly galvanizes opinions of every single American. Right now with a volunteer army, most Americans don't have an immediate family member that's deployed abroad. But if you institute the draft, they will.
Everyone will have a brother, husband, son, father, uncle, cousin, nephew, etc that has been drafted. And there's really nothing like a close personal connection to drive people to be upset and show it publicly. An unpopular war would become an impossible war very fast with the near-instantaneous speed of communication the internet allows. It would allow angry people to organize in very large groups very fast. The protests would be massive and unending.
Hypothetically speaking, what in your opinion would be the odds nowadays for those who oppose the draft and those who comply with the pro-war narrative?
How much would such a situation escalate domestically?
Towards the end, drafted troops would refuse to go on patrol, attack their officers with grenades (nearly 500 were killed this way during the war), and refuse deployment while still in the US. 50,000 troops deserted.
The lesson the military learned from Vietnam is that drafts are counterproductive. The civilian protests helped set the tenor in Washington, but it was the collapse of morale within the military itself that ended the war.
There’s definitely other life out there, but given a basic understanding of space and light speed travel, there is a zero chance we’ve made contact with non Earth life. The government has a direct benefit in claiming aliens or UFOs when testing their super military tech so our enemies are mislead on our militaries capabilities.
Like when trump posted a classified satellite image. Our population and all other governments had no idea we were capable of such clear satellite surveillance.
On the contrary, I’d recommend looking up the Fermi paradox. It exists because if we assume that ftl is impossible, both in a literal and effective sense, a civilization with the capability of long-range subluminal travel would still have the ability to colonize the galaxy within a few million years.
Now, you might be tempted to think, “okay, so a few million years from now is when we’ll start seeing them”, but that’s assuming they took as long as we did to evolve intelligence. If I’m not mistaken, there’s some speculation that dinosaurs were a significant contributor to delaying the rise of mammals, and those were around for over 100 million years. What if a civilization skipped the “oppressed by giant lizard-birds” stage? The result is that they’d potentially be millions of years ahead of us technologically.
Also, because I regularly see this question pop up in any conversation involving aliens,
“why would they come to our world? They’ve probably got everything they want!”
Why does a human want to explore the ocean? Why does a human want to explore space? Curiosity. Maybe they want to see it for themselves instead of looking at pictures that their friends posted on Spacebook. Maybe we’re small and adorable to them. There are plenty of reasons why they might check our world out that don’t involve conquest, genocide, slavery or other symptoms of rampant capitalism and authoritarianism.
No? If you think that’s actually an option, then you need to go outside and touch grass; and I mean that seriously. If you really think that looking at something from so far away that it literally takes light years to reach you is a suitable replacement for being there in person, then you desperately need to touch grass.
If an alien wanted to visit the Earth, they would actually die hundreds to thousands of years before they would ever get here.
It’s simply just not worth the trip, when only your thousandth generation descendants would actually survive to make it.
Now, if aliens actually had warp drive technology, millions of years in the future from our technology, they probably aren’t even going to bother visiting us because we’re so archaic.
Thanks this is my last meta post about this all. I’m going to try to ignore the discussion and votes and binge read it next Friday at work during scrum meetings. I like the idea of “community run” meaning community run.
Pretty done on meta discussions we need more Barbenheimer shit posts like this:
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