Buy all our playsets and toys

La Bonita Terrible asked me the other day why Israel's military kicks the whole region's ass all day. I said 1) Israel was created in the aftermath of the Holocaust under the general idea that Jews the world over would converge on the Jewish state for reasons of self-defense. They learned to make war because their country's origin myth is based around the idea that everyone wants to kill them. 2) as an oil-less Mideast pariah state in the 70s, they realized they could make some much needed cash by selling weapons and military advice to other pariah states 3) they've got lots of experience because they've been fighting guerillas since forever. a lot of boring stuff which boiled down to "because they're always using their military, so the military has lots of experience."

(Take a second to pity my wife for the drudgery she shoulders while feigning interest in my interests, and then continue reading.)

I mention 'cause there are some two dozen new books offering an American soldiers' eye view of the WoT. And they all seem to be full of guys like this:

"We're the damn Spartans," explains Maj. Kevin Holiday of Tampa, "physical warriors with college degrees." A civil engineer with three kids, he is a National Guardsman with an attitude.
--Robert Kaplan's Imperial Grunts

This image is, by most reports, an accurate pic of many of the men and women who are already signed up. But what about the people being recruited now?

The Army is reaching out to a slice of America’s youth long ineligible to serve: non-high school graduates who don’t have a General Equivalency Diploma.
-- Army Times

Army enlistment numbers reportedly haven't been this low in decades, and there are similar stories out there about desperate recruiters trying everything to get Marines to sign up.

These books coming out now talk about the dissonance between the images of carnage in Iraq we see and the admirable productivity, effectiveness, and determination of American troops. But the armed forces that Kaplan et al began writing about two years ago aren't the armed forces today. And it certainly isn't the one that'll be in 2 years if standards continue to drop along with enlistment rates.

Yes, constant deployment in the Middle East could have an Israel-esque effect: constant counter-insurgency experience could create a better average soldier.

Or we could be burning the wick at each end even as the culture is flooded by these (again, mostly true) images of helmeted liberal arts majors. Meanwhile, on the inside of the newspaper, there are constant reports of guys sick of doing their second or third tour. If they pack it in and are replaced by troops of lower caliber, the difference between Kaplan's grunts and the grunts of '08 could be as wide as the difference between, oh, The Shining and this.

Oof. There had to be a shorter way to say all that.