I've read over the last few days about some antipathy growing to the NRA among gun owners. I think one of the reasons my family never connected with the NRA was the family's dislike of most things in the New Deal. It's a little known part of the failure that was socialism started early in FDR's first term. My grandfather led a battalion of the New Deal
Civilian Construction Corps when he was an Army captain before World War II. Those people accomplished a lot of things that the following generations dismissed as disruptive, anti-environment, etc. The current generation would look back, as if they could, and exclaim in outrage that they didn't file a single Environment Impact Statement or Study for a single one of those projects and there were over 100,000 of them. Still, some people might look with some alarm at the Army being put in charge of what were, essentially, on par with Stalin's construction of the White Canal.
For those that don't know it, discipline is both the cornerstone and the keystone of how one manages large and very large groups of 18-25 year old men. That's how one houses 1000 men under canvas in a wilderness all sharing the same goal and all striving to meet that goal. It's not 'counselling' or 'parenting', or 'sharing feelings.'
Since the UCMJ didn't apply to those young men I'm willing to bet that the older forms of discipline prevailed. There are people who don't really understand that some people, roughly 10% of any group, are more trouble than they're worth and they work very hard to make life unbearable for their fellows and their bosses. I wish my grandfather had kept his journals from that time. It would be interesting to see how it worked in practice and just how much leeway a commander was given to rid himself of the 10% who are 90% of the problem.
I don't know why it reminds me of the 'ruptured duck'. As I recall, the United States had something like 12,000,000 men under arms by August of 1945. That could be off because after VE day they were bringing home millions of men from Europe and demobilizing them while still fighting against Japan. It was an extraordinary accomplishment and not something we could replicate today.
Infantry losses back then were horrendous but what we call infantry today bears almost no resemblance to the infantryman of the last 6 or 7 wars. We've welded hi-tech to firepower and to endless training to produce something quite different and considerably more lethal.
It's been kind of interesting watching the lethality of both the Army and Air Force advance in leaps and bounds while the Navy's has actually slipped dramatically and rapidly behind our peers in Russia and China. There is still, even today, not one single Admiral who would venture a single critical word about the dismal and total failures that are the DD1000 class ships and the Littoral Combat Ship classes. It brings to mind the Emperor's new clothes story.
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| Two turkeys each alike equipped with 1 whole 57mm Gun and nothing else |
