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Military pay might pay for itself

I was just reading this article over on NRO and had a bit of an epiphany.
Why not immediately double the pay of all military personnel?
A few restrictions, though. While we would accept the current obligations of those in the service as valid, any new recruit or any re-up would be a ten-year obligation; period, end of subject, only way out is to get killed or become permanently disabled or do something stupid that earns you a dishonorable. But after 10 years you could retire on half pension; after 20, full pension.
And at the same time we do this, welfare gets cut to subsistence levels. The message: Serve your country and make a decent living. Choose to sit on your duff, and you can just get by while you’re looking for a job.
If we’re really committed to a strong national defense and a years-long war on terror, we need recruits. And they should be paid enough to make joining up worthwhile. In turn they should be willing to serve for a longer period. And let’s face it, under this plan joining at 18 and reupping once gets you to 38 and a full pension; technically you could sit on your butt for the rest of your life. (Few probably would.)
I would have joined up 25 years ago for a deal like that. Instead I’m still a wage slave at 43. Ah well.

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No Gore in ’04

Says Fox.
I love some of the quotes.

“Gore was instrumental in helping to create the longest period of economic growth in our nation’s history, creating millions of new jobs, and turning record deficits into surpluses. He has served as a leader on environmental issues and in international affairs, working with passion and conviction to tackle the toughest challenges we face.” — Sen. John Edwards, D-N.C., who expects to make a decision soon on whether he will run.

Not even Clinton was instrumental in creating the longest period of economic growth in the nation’s history. It was created by Ronaldus Magnus in the 1980’s and the Clinton bozos simply rode it till the steam ran out. If Edwards can’t even get his economic history straight, he’ll make a lousy president. Which he would anyway; he’s a Democrat from the South.
And I won’t even talk about Gore’s “blame the humans” Luddite approach to environmentalism.

“From his trailblazing work on the environment and technology as a member of Congress to his extraordinary accomplishments as vice president in the areas of foreign affairs and economic security, Al has defined himself as someone who identifies problems before anyone else and offers solutions while others are still mulling the question.– Missouri Rep. Dick Gephardt, who associates say is “very, very likely” to run for president.

The problem with Gore’s answers is that he comes up with them so quickly, they’re still half-baked and still in the wrapper. Gore is not all that smart, and he is not a trailblazer by any stretch of the imagination. He does like to take credit for other people’s ideas and achievements, though: “I invented the Internet.”

“Al Gore was the best vice president America ever had. He would have been a fine president had history taken a different course two years ago.” — Former President Clinton.

Part I: Doubtful, and unproven. Part II: Probably better than you, you filthy scumbucket.

“While Al Gore will not be a candidate in 2004, I know we can count on both of them to speak out on the issues they have fought so hard for and care so deeply about.” — Democratic national chairman Terry McAuliffe.

I know this is out of context but both of whom? (And if both are Algore, which of the 50 different personalities are we talking about?)

“I have the greatest respect for Al Gore, for his many years of dedicated service to our nation, and for his decision, which I am sure was not an easy one,” said Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y

“Plus, it gets him out of my way…”

“I think it opens the field. … Everybody has a chance and that’s an exciting time for us as Democrats.” — Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif.

And probably a belly-laughing time for those of us on the conservative side of the fence.

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Barbarism is its own response

An interesting article (via LGF) on what’s being called “fourth generation warfare” talks about things that we’ve really known since the Civil War.
The report in question was written in 1989. It defines “fourth generation warfare” like this:

According to these tacticians, the purpose of their analysis was to predict the next generation of combat U.S. forces would encounter — the so-called “fourth generation.” As they saw it, this type of warfare has “a goal of collapsing the enemy internally rather than physically destroying him. Targets will include such things as the population’s support for the war and the enemy’s culture.” The authors predicted that armies of the future would “be widely dispersed and largely undefined; the distinction between war and peace will be blurred to the vanishing point. It will be nonlinear, possibly to the point of having no definable battlefields or fronts.”
If this description of fourth-generation warfare seems familiar it is because that is how al-Qaeda and other Islamic terrorist groups conduct business against Israel, the United States and other Western nations.

It also seems familiar if you have read anything at all about the campaigns of Grant and Sherman.

Lind says that effectively combating fourth-generation warfare will present conflicts for American culture. The 1989 report states: “If we bomb an enemy city, the pictures of enemy civilian dead brought into every living room in the country on the evening news can easily turn what may have been a military success — assuming we also hit the military target — into a serious defeat.” Lind says that as the war continues, and U.S. forces pursue terrorist forces, Americans must get used to casualties among the civilians in whose midst the terrorist jihadists and their supporters will hide. Lind says Muslims who support terrorist attacks know and expect that. “As we weep even over their casualties,” he says, “they will be cheering over ours.”

The problem here is that we need to quit weeping over them at all. It’s amazing how relevant our Civil War is to the war on terrorism, because at least a couple of our generals understood immediately how to defeat the South: Pound on them repeatedly until they are utterly vanquished and tired of war. And don’t worry too much about what happens to them in the process; they started it and we’re going to finish it. Shelby Foote, in his wonderful trilogy, has put a lot of this in perspective:

“If the North design to conquer the South [wrote Tecumseh Sherman in 1862], we must begin at Kentucky and reconquer the country from there as we did from the Indians. It was this conviction then as plainly as now that made men think I was insane. A good many flatterers now want to make me a prophet.”
Prophet or not, he could speak like one in an early October letter to his senator brother: “I rather think you now agree with me that this is no common war…. You must now see that I was right in not seeking prominence at the outset. I knew and know yet that the northern people have to unlearn all their experience of the past thirty years and be born again before they will see the truth.” None of it had been easy thus far, nor was it going to be easy in the future. The prow of the ship might pierce the wave, yet once it was clear of the vessel’s stern the wave was whole again: “Though our armies pass across and through the land, the war closes in behind and leaves the same enemy behind…. I don’t see the end,” he concluded, “or the beginning of the end, but suppose we must prevail and persist or perish.” He saw only one solution, an outgrowth of his statement to his wife that the Federal armies would have to “reconquer the country . . . as we did from the Indians.” What was required from here on was harshness. “We cannot change the hearts of the people of the South,” he told his friend and superior Grant; “but we can make war so terrible that they will realize the fact that however brave and gallant and devoted their country, still they are mortal and should exhaust all peaceful remedies before they fly to war.”

A colonel from Massachusetts was even more direct and blunt as to what he saw as the only solution to the problem:

“Vindicating the majesty of an insulted Government, by extirpating all rebels, and fumigating their nests with the brimstone of unmitigated Hell, I conceive to be the holy purpose of our further efforts,” a Massachusetts colonel wrote home to his governor from Beaufort, South Carolina, and being within fifty airline miles of the very birthplace of rebellion, he added: “I hope I shall . . . do something . . . in ‘The Great Fumigation,’ before the sulphur gives out.” Just what it was that he proposed to do, with regard to those he called “our Southern brethren,” he had announced while waiting at Annapolis for the ship that brought him down the coast. “Do we fight them to avenge . . . insult? No! The thing we seek is permanent dominion. And what instance is there of permanent dominion without changing, revolutionizing, absorbing, the institutions, life and manners of the conquered peoples? . . . They think we mean to take their Slaves. Bah! We must take their ports, their mines, their water power, the very soil they plough, and develop them by the hands of our artisan armies. . . . We are to be a regenerating, colonizing power or we are to be whipped. Schoolmasters, with howitzers, must instruct our Southern brethren that they are a set of d—-d fools in everything that relates to . . . modern civilization. . . . This army must not come back. Settlement, migration must put the seal on battle, or we gain nothing.”
(All quotes from Shelby Foote’s The Civil War: A Narrative, Fort Sumter to Perryville, pp. 800-801)

This last is a bit too Roman for my taste (and very non-American, although at the same time I understand the man’s frustration), but I wonder what Reconstruction would have been like if we had followed a plan like that? (Probably an even bigger failure than it was, but then Lincoln didn’t plan on getting assassinated.)
Anyway, it’s clear that as far back as 1862, we knew what to do about a threat like al-Qaeda: Stomp on it like a bug and fumigate its nest. The defeat of barbarians requires acts that may themselves seem barbaric; but the alternative is too terrible to contemplate. Rome ultimately took the alternative way; we don’t have to follow in their footsteps.