Redstate

By streiff Posted in War — Comments (18) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

The universe is filled to the gills with bad ideas. Some ideas are bad because they just won’t work. Some ideas are bad simply on their own merits. What these types of bad ideas have in common is that they just won’t die. Today Max Boot (who I generally think reasonable) and Michael O’Hanlon (who does have really, really great hair) join forces to promote an idea that won’t work, is genuinely bad, and, like other bad ideas, just won’t die.

Read on.

America is a land of immigrants. Their spirit of resolve, adventure, hard work and devotion to an idea bigger than themselves has made this country great. Whatever one thinks of the immigration debate today, particularly the problem of illegal immigrants, foreigners have played a central role in the building of America. Many have done so as soldiers, among them Baron von Steuben and the Marquis de Lafayette in the War of Independence.

Now is the time to consider a new chapter in the annals of American immigration. By inviting foreigners to join the U.S. armed forces in exchange for a promise of citizenship after a four-year tour of duty, we could continue to attract some of the world's most enterprising, selfless and talented individuals.

Nice sentiment to be sure. Once one leaves aside the fact that Lafayette, von Steuben, Kosciusko, Pulaski, Lee, de Kalb, and others flocked to the Americas because of the professional opportunity offered one finds a very thin gruel here. Large numbers of recent immigrants served in our Civil War, on both sides, some with distinction and some not so much.

It is difficult to see what the problem is that Boot and O’Hanlon wish to accomplish by this measure. In what passes for their thesis statement:

Not only would immigrants provide a valuable influx of highly motivated soldiers, they would also address one of America's key deficiencies in the battle against Islamist extremists: our lack of knowledge of the languages and mores in the lands where terrorists reside. Newly arrived Americans can help us avoid trampling on local sensitivities and thereby creating more enemies than we eliminate.

Skeptics might point out that in the just-concluded fiscal year, the military met most of its recruiting and retention goals. But this was done only by relaxing age and aptitude restrictions, allowing in more individuals with criminal records, and greatly increasing the number of recruiters and advertising dollars. Although we generally support what has been done to date, the logic of these measures cannot be pushed much further.

Skeptics would actually point out a lot more. They would point out that there is no guarantee that the immigrant population attracted to military service would be English fluent. That there is no guarantee they would be medically qualified. That they would not have a criminal record or were free of connection to the very jihadist organizations we were recruiting them to combat. And there is no guarantee they could either complete basic training or their initial enlistment and calls into question exactly what we would do with a soldier from, say Saudi Arabia, who had completed a combat tour in Iraq and was discharged for disciplinary reasons prior to completing his enlistment. Would we give him a green card? Make him a citizen? Or deport him to Saudi Arabia?

Skeptics would also point out that the relaxed age limits accounted for less than 400 enlistment contracts, that the aptitude standards remain higher than they were during the Reagan years, and that a lot of the people Boot and O’Hanlon would recommend enlisting, illegal aliens, are de facto felons and ineligible to enlist even with a waiver.

Skeptics would also point out that advertising and recruiters actually produce recruits where pie-in-the-sky schemes don’t.

Some might object to our proposal on moral grounds, arguing that it is wrong to rely on "mercenaries" and to use such incentives to get prospective immigrants to fight. We disagree. For one thing, we already rely on tens of thousands of real mercenaries: the security contractors the U.S. government employs from Colombia to Iraq to make up for lack of troops. Immigrants who enrolled in our armed forces would be more valuable because they would be under military discipline and motivated by more than just a paycheck.

Some might object to a profoundly dishonest line of argumentation.

Those men, like those in Blackwater Consulting and DynCorp, are not mercenaries under any definition recognized anywhere. The key words being “the security contractors the U.S. government employs.” They are employed by the US government. Sort of like US troops in that respect. They don’t make up for a “lack of troops.” The men employed by the security contractors do not tend to be 17-21 year old high school grads. They tend to be retired military, or military officers and non-commissioned officers with ten or more years of service. They have highly specialized skills you aren’t going to find in a Middle Eastern, or now European, souk. They operate in areas, like Columbia, which cannot accept the presence of US troops for reasons of sovereignty or national pride or because of regional politics. Recruiting foreign troops will do nothing to make security contractors unnecessary.

Despite growing anti-Americanism, U.S. citizenship is still one of the world's most precious commodities, so there should be no shortage of volunteers. Since proficiency in English would presumably be important for those joining the armed forces, we might focus on South Asia, anglophone Africa, and parts of Latin America, Europe and East Asia (the Philippines would be a natural recruiting ground) where English is common as a second language. These regions have more than 2 billion people, tens of millions of whom reach military age each year.

Once one assumes away the diplomatic dimension of raiding nations for their young men to fight in our wars, this idea seems like a winner. Do we think countries would allow the US to actively recruit on their soil? And if we can’t recruit in the open and pre-screen applicants how would this system possibly work?

The problem would not be the size of the likely applicant pool so much as our ability to vet individuals for their abilities, their dependability and their commitment. Screening would have to be done to ensure that would-be terrorists did not gain access to the armed forces through this program. That might complicate the process of recruiting from certain countries, especially in the Middle East, but it would hardly put a huge dent in the likely applicant pool.

Ever the masters of understatement, these two. It would seem to me that the difficulty of screening Middle Eastern applicants would basically rule out recruiting from the Middle East. And if we can’t recruit from the Middle East then the purpose of this scheme is called into question.

Foreign legions were fashionable for a couple of centuries. At one time there were several Irish regiments serving in France, Spain, and Austria. The Swiss served in France and the Papal States. The French and Spanish Foreign Legions still survive, though the Spanish Foreign Legion is only nominally so. The reason they have fallen from disfavor is that as warfare has advanced the need for mere cannon fodder has receded. At one time a French speaking officer giving orders to boys fresh from Connaught was not a problem so long as they understood enough French to know when to march and fire in unison. This is no longer the case and hasn’t been the case for 40 years.

I am not a proponent of the draft but the draft is merely the wrong idea. Using military service as a path of immigration seems to me to not only reprehensible on its merits but unworkable and inefficient on its face. This is a truly bad idea.