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Rumsfeld's totally trashed the Vietnam
veterans in his remarks. He said they gave no lasting value to the armed
services of the United States. He said they were poorly trained too.
Quote from Donald Rumsfeld at the Defense Department
Briefing (01/07/2003)
"We're not going to reimplement a draft. There is no need
for
it at all. The disadvantages of using compulsion to bring into the armed forces the men and women needed are notable. The disadvantages to the individuals so brought in are notable. If you think back to when we had the draft, people were brought in; they were paid some fraction of what they could make in the civilian manpower market because they were without choices. Big categories were exempted -- people that were in college, people that were teaching, people that were married. It varied from time to time, but there were all kinds of exemptions. And what was left was sucked into the intake, trained for a period of months, and then went out, adding no value, no advantage, really, to the United States armed services over any sustained period of time, because the churning that took place, it took enormous amount of effort in terms of training, and then they were gone." Rumsfeld is essentially saying we spent all that good money training these rejects - you know, the people not good enough to get letters from their family doctors or spots in the already full National Guard by virtue of family ties - and then they just got killed or got out as soon as their time was up. After receiving all that expensive training, they should've been more grateful to our government and made careers out the military. Defense Department Briefing
Transcript
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