Article

2006-12-27 Fifth Column

Military considers recruiting foreigners

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Posted by .com 2006-12-27 06:06|| || Front Page|| [6 views since 2007-05-07] Top

#1 Recruit foreigners for a percentage of the spoils. The looting is much better in Riyadh than the Congo.

Posted by ed 2006-12-27 07:59|| 2006-12-27 07:59|| Front Page Top

#2 Actually, I think it is a superb idea to recruit foreigners for a LOT of the bullshit missions that our citizen-soldiers are wasted on.

When Madelyn Albright was Secretary of State, her solution to any international problem anywhere was to send a small handful of US soldiers there, with no clear mission, without support, and without any idea what their mission was or when it would be over. One of the first major orders of the Bush administration was to issue recall orders to tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of these soldiers spread all over the planet.

Well, for pennies on the dollar, the US should create an offshore foreign legion, which the buffoons in Washington could use as their little tin soldiers and leave our soldiers alone.

Trained as light infantry on some leased Caribbean island (important, so they would be under Gitmo rules, away from the influence of US leftist attorneys), foreigners would line up just for the chance to get in.

I'm sure we could recruit thousands of Ghurkas alone, and some of the highest quality foreign fighters available.

We could have part of them for just humanitarian missions, so they would just be lightly armed and be medical heavy. However, the combat side would be ferocious enough so that nobody in their right mind would attack them.

And all their officers would have to be US forces regulars.

We could pay them what amounts to minimum wage, with few of the other perks given to our soldiers, but with a big jump in pay for combat situations, especially if they are sent in to augment our personnel in some mission.

We could send them on all the UN missions and crap like that. Send them on peacekeeping missions to Africa, and crap like that. You see the value.

Posted by Anonymoose 2006-12-27 09:03|| 2006-12-27 09:03|| Front Page Top

#3 If it was up to the Globe, we wouldn't have a military. They would use the money instead to make sure every home gets a mandatory copy of "Heather Has Two Mommies"...

Posted by tu3031 2006-12-27 10:42|| 2006-12-27 10:42|| Front Page Top

#4 "Heather Has Two Mommies"...

tu3031... er huh, would it be too much of an inconvenience to forward an old man a copy? Whahahahaa.

Posted by Besoeker 2006-12-27 10:48|| 2006-12-27 10:48|| Front Page Top

#5 Point of order, the U.S. has always allowed allies to serve in our military. I attended technical training with an Aussie and Canadian that were serving in our Air Force. During the Vietnam Conflict there were thousands of Canadian, Brits, and Aussies that served in the U.S. military. Also remember we had a draft back then, so it wasn't becuase we lacked man power.

Posted by Cyber Sarge 2006-12-27 11:28|| 2006-12-27 11:28|| Front Page Top

#6 Substantiating RB Stories:

There you go again, .com: messing up perfectly good truthiness with inconvenient facts.

Posted by xbalanke 2006-12-27 11:40|| 2006-12-27 11:40|| Front Page Top

#7 Lol, xbalanke. When they lies in the very first sentence I sees all red... I 'spects dinner, flowers, candy, etc. before someone tries to stick me. I'm sorta picky that way.

Posted by .com 2006-12-27 11:48|| 2006-12-27 11:48|| Front Page Top

#8 It might work out. Many Yankee turned out to be fair soliders after a couple of years.

Posted by A Powell Hill">A Powell Hill 2006-12-27 14:40|| 2006-12-27 14:40|| Front Page Top

#9 tu3031... er huh, would it be too much of an inconvenience to forward an old man a copy? Whahahahaa.

Besoeker, knowing how P.C. many school districts are, I'm not thinking Heather's two mommies are exactly .com's standard fare. Think more along the lines of Hitlery and Rosie O'Donnell. Of course, it's for the chilluns(tm).

Posted by BA 2006-12-27 15:46|| 2006-12-27 15:46|| Front Page Top

#10 yep: less hot girl on girl - more flannel shirts, short butch hair cuts, Snap-On Tools, and wallet chains. You DON'T wanna see the illustrations

Posted by Frank G">Frank G 2006-12-27 16:26|| 2006-12-27 16:26|| Front Page Top

#11 It is a long-standing tradition for non-citizens to serve in the US armed forces. The great Rick Rescorla, hero of Ia Drang Valley and the World Trade Center, was not a US citizen when he served as a junior officer in Vietnam.

Abraham Lincoln could not have waged the Civil War without the hordes of Irish and German immigrants, many of them just off the boat, who filled the ranks of the northeastern volunteer regiments.
The Irish or German frontier soldier is so much a fixture of Hollywood westerns for a very good reason: There were thousands of them in real life.
The sole survivor of Custer's detachment at Little Big Horn, the messenger Giovanni Martini, was a recent arrival who barely spoke English.

As I have mentioned a time or two here, I first came to the US in 1969, and contrived to stay through the admittedly imprudent device of enlisting in the US Army. At the time, the Army was losing 200 soldiers a week in Vietnam and they were glad to see me. There were five other non-citizens in my basic training platoon of 42, 3 Mexicans, a Dominican, and a Czech refugee who had sneaked into Austria and made his way to the West.
I completed my own tour in Vietnam two years before I took the oath of citizenship.

I do not regret one day of it, nor one day since.

Stars and Stripes Forever.

Posted by Atomic Conspiracy 2006-12-27 19:08|| http://www.nuclearspace.com]">[http://www.nuclearspace.com] 2006-12-27 19:08|| Front Page Top

#12 AC :-)

Posted by Frank G">Frank G 2006-12-27 19:43|| 2006-12-27 19:43|| Front Page Top

#13 ...The thing that bothers me is that this nonsense is being mooted when there are plenty of able Americans who can't get BACK in or in in the first place.
For instance, me. I retired as a USAF E5 in 1998. I'm a diabetic, but there is NO reason I couldn't fill a non-frontline slot in order to let somebody else go. In addition, I've got a BA and an AS, both with honors - I could run a bomb dump or maintenance flight here as an officer, and again let somebody else get to the frontline.

Mike

Posted by Mike Kozlowski 2006-12-27 20:00|| 2006-12-27 20:00|| Front Page Top

#14 Despite its reputation for toughness, the French Foreign Legion and other units was not enuff to stave off the Germans andor loss of its empire around the globe. The Japanese Navy was hard-pressed throughout WW2 to replace its highly trained cadres of pre-war naval pilots after their loss at Midway. As for the USA + WOT, b y most accounts US mil recruiters are turning away large numbers of qualified, non-US citizens.

Posted by JosephMendiola 2006-12-27 22:11|| 2006-12-27 22:11|| Front Page Top

#15 This thing bothers me for good reason. While many an immigrant or foreigner has served honorably and well in the US armed forces, it has been, by and large, due to their volunteering and not their being recruited.

Recruiting of foreign citizens into the US armed forces smacks of Rome recruiting barbarians to defend its frontiers towards the end of the Empire's days. The Romans neither could nor wanted to fund the recruitment and training of additional legions to defend its far-flung borders so they started paying off barbarian tribes and mercenaries to do their fightiung for them.

That worked out real well for the Empire - for a time - until the barbarians figured out they could make just as much money by raiding and taking Rome's money (Byzantium, it could be said, also tried this and it worked well for them for about 2 centuries or so as I recall (the recruitment of foreign fighters, not the raiding and bribe-taking though they did that too).

This is, to me at least, a sign of an empire in decline.

Posted by FOTSGreg">FOTSGreg 2006-12-27 22:43|| www.fire-on-the-suns.com]">[www.fire-on-the-suns.com] 2006-12-27 22:43|| Front Page Top

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