- Joined
- Oct 17, 2006
- Messages
- 59,365
- Reaction score
- 27,049
- Gender
- Male
- Political Leaning
- Undisclosed
You're right. It's based upon my first-hand experience in the modern military. Much more reliable than arcane historical analysis.
Really? What kind of experience did you have that would make you any sort of reliable person of general morale? Did you conduct research on the rest of the armed forces? See their social dynamics? No. Historical evidence is a lot more reliable than your "first-hand" and biased experience in this matter.
How do you know the Marines adapted well to desegregation? Can you show that more people didn't die because of increased unit friction?
For one thing, we're not in a desperate World War anymore, which means we can play the numbers game a little tighter with the troops' lives. The Generals didn't have that luxury in WWII with desegregation. The amount of people who would die as a result of unit friction was mathematically offset by the infusion of black soldiers. It's not as much of a numbers game, anymore.
This is really a ridiculously ignorant argument. The history of black soldiers during WWII proves that the military under stressful situations the military simply will not disintegrate in the manner you picture it. Much less with something as socially trivial as openly gay soldiers serving.
During WWII more people volunteered for the military than at any other point in American history with the exception of the Civil War and the Independence War. That said, the fact that the majority of socially conservative men within the military stayed and the volunteering rate only went up as the war rolled into 1944 and 1945 shows that radical change is nowhere near the issue you make it out to be.
This is supported by the sheer number of people involved with the military at the time :
Today's U.S. forces number somewhere around 1.5-2 million. In the early 1940s it grew to 11 million people. A small minority of which were black soldiers. How "desperate" were we for soldiers? Not all that desperate. More people were joining every year that the war went on. Your argument simply isn't based on historical evidence.
What does military policy have to do with social conservatism? Are you saying I'm a social conservative? If my position isn't grounded in reality, then what is it grounded in?
No. I am saying your position is that of social conservatives. What do you not understand about that? It is not grounded in reality because it is not supported by any examples or historical evidence. Just on your own biased and sociologically inept understanding of the military. Regardless of how long you've served your personal experience is worthless in this matter because it does not concern the few hundred servicemen you might have met in your service. It concerns a few hundred thousand. You were never involved in policy making, research or can provide an accurate picture of how the military as a whole will react.
Obviously, if this were a matter of what individual units might think of the change, then your opinion would be reasonable. However it is not. It is a matter of how the military as a whole will react to social changes. So far we've seen that it reacts quite well even during the most stressful situations.