>a famous diatribe about the state of the military
You thinking of this?
><http://chss.montclair.edu/english/furr/Vietnam/heinl.html>
>
>
>THE COLLAPSE OF THE ARMED FORCES
>
>By Col. Robert D. Heinl, Jr.
>North American Newspaper Alliance
>Armed Forces Journal, 7 June, 1971
An excerpt:
>Non-Volunteer Force?
>
>If 45% of his sailors shipped over after their first enlistment,
>Admiral Zumwalt would be all smiles. With only 13% doing so, he is
>growing sideburns to enhance the Navy's appeal to youth.
>
>Among the Army's volunteer (non-draftee) soldiers on their first
>hitch, the figures are much the same: less than 14% re-up.
>
>The Air Force is slightly, but not much, better off: 16% of its
>first-termers stay on.
>
>Moreover - and this is the heart of the Army's dilemma - only 4 % of
>the voluntary enlistees now choose service in combat arms (infantry,
>armor, artillery) and of those only 2.5% opt for infantry. Today's
>soldiers, it seems, volunteer readily enough for the tail of the
>Army, but not for its teeth.
>
>For all services, the combined retention rate this past year is
>about half what it was in 1966, and the lowest since the bad times
>of similar low morale and national disenchantment after Korea.
>
>Both Army and navy are responding to their manpower problems in
>measures intended to seduce recruits and reenlistees: disciplinary
>permissiveness, abolition of reveille and KP, fewer inspections,
>longer haircuts - essentially cosmetic changes aimed at softening
>(and blurring) traditional military and naval images.
>
>Amid such changes (not unlike the Army's 1946 Doolittle Board
>coincidences intended in their similar postwar day to sweeten life
>for the privates), those which are not cosmetic at all may well
>exert profound and deleterious effects on the leadership, command
>authority and discipline of the services.
The rest is really really worth reading for reasons why the ruling class wouldn't want to return to a draft.
Doug