Macron has less chance of reintroducing conscription than he has of transforming house cats into prides of lions.
Wars are really ugly
They’re dirty an’ they’re cold
I don’t want nobody
To shoot me in the fox hole.
So sang Frank Zappa, the father of comedy rock, in his classic I don’t wanna be drafted song, which goes on to exclaim
Roller skates in disco is a lot of fun
I’m too young’n stupid to operate a gun.
Let’s just back up and see what funny man Zappa is saying in his song. He is proclaiming that wars are not only ugly, dirty, brutal affairs but that he is too young and stupid to be a useful soldier. Let’s leave to one side that Zappa was very bright and say that, during America’s Vietnamese turkey shoot, Uncle Sam enlisted hundreds of thousands of McNamara Morons, good, home lovin’ Yankee boys who were little better than imbeciles and who ended up as easy meat for the Vietcong and the North Vietnamese Army because they lacked the necessary skill sets to be effective combatants.
America’s anti (Vietnam) war movement was, in large part, a cynical move by America’s middle class to dodge the draft, meaning that the Americans had to beef up their numbers by enlisting the half retarded to meet their quotas. After all, Clinton, Bush and Rumsfeld and Cheney had, in Cheney’s words, far more important things going on in their lives than to end up face down in a Vietnamese paddy field.
The Wehrmacht had the same problem with the defence of Berlin, where it was also a matter of all hands on deck, or at least all hands who could not squirm out of it. Their problem was that their deck was shattered and most of their Volkssturrm last saw action in the 1870 Franco Prussian war. Far from helping the faltering German war effort, most of those old timers were in the way and they got mown down in droves.
Much the same, of course, applies, in Zelensky’s Ukrainian Reich, where they are trawling the hospices and old folks’ homes for grand papas and grand mamas to throw into the way of the Russians.
Still, because hope springs eternal and all that, Macron, Sunak and the West’s other jokers are thinking of upping their army numbers to take on Putin, as well as Xi, North Korea, Iran and anyone else who fancies their chances against Macron’s morons.
Though one has to go back to the Children’s Crusades to come across anything so stupid in the annals of military affairs, as Macron and his mates are serious about this, try not to laugh at them.
NATO’s military, like all others, essentially needs two non-mutually exclusive groups of volunteers. The first of these may be epitomised by NFL footballer Pat Tilman, a horse of a man, who gave up a glittering football career to join the Green Berets and be almost immediately executed by some very dubious friendly fire in Afghanistan. The second main type is the computer literate video gamer, who can program drones to help kill Uncle Sam’s many enemies.
The sordid manner of Tilman’s execution did little for recruitment and the computer literate have better things to do than to die for Hunter Biden and his under aged Ukrainian prostitutes. Why, they ask, should they get their heads blown off them in Kiev, while Hunter gets himself blown off in Kentucky?
A good question and one that cannot be fobbed off by recourse to patriotism and crappy John Wayne movies about The Green Berets or Tom Cruise going all born on the 4th of July on us in Top Gun. That propaganda does not work any more.
Take the case of Britain, America’s loyal lapdog. Outside of rural Yorkshire and the West Country, recruitment numbers are through the floor. In cities like Birmingham and London, where there are very significant minority communities, recruiters are wasting their time as the fish ain’t biting, no matter how many stupid ads they show to encourage Muslims to join the ranks.
Much the same applies in Yankeeland, where transgenders raised by dope smoking lesbian parents seem to be the target audience. God knows what John Wayne or Audie Murphy think of that, but it ain’t working as transgenders raised by lesbian parents don’t want to buy into any of that. They would much prefer to braid their hair and pierce their private parts.
Which brings us to the recruiter’s traditional stomping grounds of the Appalachians and the Ozarks, as well as England’s equivalent mining territories. The problem there is that unemployment and drug abuse in particular have eroded those once fertile fields.
Though the only recourse seems to be to reintroduce the draft, that will be a very uphill battle to get the next generation of Clintons, Bushes, Rumsfelds and Cheneys to sign up.
NATO is not alone with this problem. Though China has it too, there it has distinguishing Chinese characteristics. First off, China’s one child policy means that most Chinese parents are loath to have their little prince join the CPLA, where they might end up stopping a hostile bullet. Next, as many of the postings are to remote Himalayan areas facing off with the Indians, most young Chinese don’t want to suffer years of isolation and boredom there, not least when their tech savvy contemporaries are dancing their blues away in the night clubs of Beijing and Shanghai.
To tackle all of this, China’s bosses are re-interpreting Confucius, who over emphasised scholarship at the expense of mastery at war, which is still considered a blue collar occupation in the Middle Kingdom. The Chinese are now marketing an army career as being along the lines of wén wŭi shuāng quán, where one is both a scholar and a soldier. And, as regards the boredom of really remote postings, we just need remember that the best U Boat captains, those with the greatest kill counts, were also excellent at keeping up the morale of the men who served under them and under the waves for months at a time. Not only should the Chinese be able to tackle that problem but, as their bloated army is being streamlined and their navy beefed up, the Chinese are in much better shape, physically and mentally, to face the challenges ahead than are their adversaries in the land of Super Size Me.
The Russian recruitment ads, as seen here and here, stress the rough and tumble rather than their capacity to make their armed forces a home away from home for molly coddled transgenders with dope smoking lesbian parents. As the Russians have also been fighting NATO in Ukraine for over two years now, they have a fair idea of what needs to be done to shape up before shipping out.
But what of Macron’s morons, of those who are going to face Russia from the north of Finland, right down to the Caucasus? The Brits have this thing in boot camp called the tab, the tactical advance to battle, where the recruits have to go on reasonably gruelling marches with a full pack that would almost break a donkey’s back.
The problem with that is most modern Brits are afraid of a rain puddle, never mind traipsing like a sick ox over the British countryside, where members of their elite regiments have died on training exercises.
Although Blighty still has plenty of tough eggs, as a people they have gone soft. Though they still have their Poppy Days and their Remembrance Days, the British, as a cohesive community of integrated communities, is no more. Though they can still cheer for their football teams, the link between footballer and follower is no more. When England won the World Cup in 1966, Sir Geoff Hurst, who scored the decisive hat trick in the final, got up the next day, washed his Ford Anglia and mowed his lawn. Those Coronation Street days are gone, never to return.
The English no longer play games the way they used to when Hurst and his East End West Ham buddies were nippers. Now, somewhat like the ancient Romans in their Colosseum, they pay mini-fortunes to watch them, evidence of their wealth, their decadence, their sloth, their sedentary lifestyles and a major reason for their chronic obesity, which make them unfit to fight for King, country or anything else.
Even the arch imperialist Rudyard Kipling, who got all cut up when he lost a son in the Great War, said as much 100 years ago when, in his 1923 preface to Land and sea tales for boys and girls, he wrote that “Nations have passed away and left no traces, And History gives the naked cause of it– One single, simple reason in all cases; They fell because their peoples were not fit”.
All very well for this brat of the British Empire but the days of expecting Tommy Atkins to get in uniform, fix his bayonet and hit the parade ground in numbers are as quaintly obsolete as are Kipling’s tales of the Raj.
As for France, forget about it. Macron has less chance of reintroducing conscription than he has of transforming house cats into prides of lions.
Although the French Foreign Legion would seem to be an exception to the rule, they are mostly foreigners commanded by French officers. Although there are masses of East Europeans, Africans and South Americans willing to be such guns for hire, the experience from Ukraine is in retaining the loyalty, never mind the lives, of the large number of foreign mercenaries needed. Outside of the Vatican’s tiny and well remunerated Swiss Guards, mercenaries are a mercurial lot that NATO cannot depend upon.
These are the issues our leaders in Albion and America grapple with. They just can’t get good servants to act as cannon fodder any more. Hell, even the shepherds of Yemen can lick their navies without breaking a sweat. Never mind. They have a solution, albeit one that is as bad as tossing Macron’s morons into the furnace.
That solution is to appoint General Seán Clancy, chief of the staff of the Irish defence forces, to head the European Union’s land, sea and air forces, a gig which makes this bum, who has never seen combat, a four star general and thus on a par with George Washington, Ulysses S Grant, Sherman, Sheridan, Pershing, McArthur, Eisenhower, Patton and the handful of other Yanks who got awarded those braids.
From Clancy at the top to those transgender grunts who were raised by loving lesbians further down the food chain, NATO and the morons like Moron who run them, have lost the run of themselves and heaven help those charged with washing out their soiled underwear when the rubber hits the road and the Russians and Iranians choose to make mincemeat of them.
Der Friedensstifter 