Back on February 4th, I commented both on the Daily KOS and here how I agreed with William Arkin of the Washington Post that our Army is more "mercenary" than it is volunteer. This caused huge outrage. Because people hated the word mercenary, no one every studied the statement, they just went nuts over the word.
But, alas, it appears that this statement was more true than even I imagined.
The word and the statement were well crafted to call out the point that this Country has to page HUGE dollars to get people to go to Iraq and Afghanistan. There is not an "all volunteer" force but rather the work of Adam Smith is at play. If you count the number of contractors we rely on in the war zones the numbers only get worse as they are paid far higher than our soldiers to do essentially the same work.
The military and the MILBLOGS would have you think that people are lined up at the recruiting stations ready to give their first born for an opportunity to go defend our nation. This is simply not the case.
We now have even more data to support this claim.
According to many press reports and nicely summarized here at Wired, the Army is now spending close to $1bl on bonuses which is up THREEFOLD since the beginning of the war. Simple economics tells you that when you cannot get people to do work you want them to do, you keep raising the money until you hit an equilibrium point. The Army apparently has to continue to raise it year after year as the equilibrium point moves higher and higher.
So, the Army would have you believe that they are "hitting" their targets and they lead you to believe it is because of this swell of patriotic support for Bush's war policies. However, what we really find out is that it is just simple economics. Why do people go into coal mines when we know it is so dangerous? Money. Simple as that. No one has a "patriotic" feeling about mining coal. It is just that at some point (known as the equilibrium point) the benefits (i.e., the amount of money paid) outweigh the risks for some people.
Today's war is no different. The Army has had to up the ante to a pretty high price to find the point where, for some people, the reward outweighs the risk. And, my guess is that this point will go higher and higher which, by the way, is PRECISELY what Bin Laden wanted. He wanted to "bleed our economy dry" not win on the battlefield. He is successfully pursuing this objective thanks to the pig head in the White House.
So to all you military (mostly the cocky milbloggers) who think you are our "next greatest generation". Think again. The greatest generation didn't need $1bl in sign on / reenlistment bonuses to go to war (yes, I know there was a draft but there were also lines of people going to sign up not asking for one extra penny). No, our generation just proves one thing:
Adam Smith was right.
Cross posted at my Blog: The Command T.O.C.