On Wed, 12 Sep 2001 15:40:08 EDT, Don McMorris <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> said:
> all males between 18 and 40 will be drafted. At this time, as far as I =
Fred Brooks wrote a very informative book called "The Mythical Man Month".
One of the points he wrote about was "Adding manpower to a late software project
makes it later". The basic precept is that until the new manpower gets up
to speed, the old manpower is training not coding.
Similarly:
1) Who is going to *train* all these males? I think our trained military is
currently 2M people. Now, assuming a population of 300M, a life expectancy of
75 years, and a flat linear age distribution, this means there are some
(300,000,000 / 2) * ((40 - 17) / 75) or 45,900,000 males to be drafted.
Assuming we move ALL the current military to training, and assuming 1 drill
instructor per 15 males, that still leaves us 1 million drill instructors short.
Guess we'll have to rais it to 1 per 25. In the meantime, we have *NO* military
capability at ALL, because they're all drill instructors. I'll gloss over the
fact that only some 3-4% of that 2 million is actually TRAINED to be drill
instructors - you need an awful lot of cooks, truck drivers, and other support
staff (drill instructor is only ONE of the "212 ways to be an army of one" ;)
2) What happens to the 43,650,000 jobs vacated (assuming a 4.9% unemployment
rate, as reported in a recent newspaper)? Hint: at 4.9% unemployment, you can't
cover a 30% reduction in workforce. Also - there WONT be any training, so
productivity there will take an even BIGGER hit.
3) Compare 45.9M with the current population of California, and then ask yourself
where the boot camp goes. Remember that you have to put it inside the CURRENT
territorial limits of the US - you can't put it in the desert owned by the
country you're contemplating pounding into submission.
4) Compare 2 million *trained soldiers* to the *total population* of most
countries. Remember that in Desert Storm, we sent *part* of our 2M up against
what was at the time the *fourth* largest standing army in the world.
The biggest problem in Desert Storm was *moving* everything there and
staging it. We'll have a similar issue this time.
Once we figure out who's about to get pounded into the Stone Age.
And we don't need more troops to do it - we're just waiting for a road map.
Moral: Learn to do back-of-envelope calculations to sanity check numbers.
Use a calculator if you have to. Especially when posting to a technical forum.
Valdis Kletnieks
Operating Systems Analyst
Virginia Tech
