Miller believes a standardized test at the high school level, called the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery, should be administered to all students to help funnel potential recruits into positions within the military, based on their skills and intellect levels.
Let me take a wild guess which people would get “funneled into positions” as officers, and who would end up as fodder infantry.
People going officer usually already know they’re going officer either because they’re in ROTC/JROTC or already have a plan for college. The poors are generally the ones that end up enlisted because they have fewer options. This is already the case.
So your wild guess would have probably been spot on. Required service just means they’ll have extra poors.
I was in the nuclear power program in the Navy. They’re some of the smartest people I’ve ever worked with. It was the first time I was the dumbest guy in the room and, let me tell you, that’ll humble you very quickly. So they’re definitely not trying to make the smartest people officers because, while the officers there were fine, they had nothing on some of these guys.
Oh, sure - I knew I was going to get that technically wrong. I was trying to use the least number of words to express that it would be quite simple to use this kind of thing to put the “right” people in charge of decision-making, and the “wrong” people into deadly combat situations, or at the very least, into positions lowly enough that they can be systematically conditioned to stifle their own political will.
“Right” and “wrong” above can certainly mean stupid shit like “skin color” or “ethnicity,” but I was actually thinking about it in terms of political ideology. Dead people can’t vote.
Everyone in my school had to take the ASVAB. It was a complete waste of time. Hell, I just filled in bubbles at random because I had no interest in dying in Iraq and didn’t care if I passed the test. Unfortunately, I passed the test and got so many calls from recruiters for years.
Let me take a wild guess which people would get “funneled into positions” as officers, and who would end up as
fodderinfantry.People going officer usually already know they’re going officer either because they’re in ROTC/JROTC or already have a plan for college. The poors are generally the ones that end up enlisted because they have fewer options. This is already the case.
So your wild guess would have probably been spot on. Required service just means they’ll have extra poors.
I was in the nuclear power program in the Navy. They’re some of the smartest people I’ve ever worked with. It was the first time I was the dumbest guy in the room and, let me tell you, that’ll humble you very quickly. So they’re definitely not trying to make the smartest people officers because, while the officers there were fine, they had nothing on some of these guys.
Oh, sure - I knew I was going to get that technically wrong. I was trying to use the least number of words to express that it would be quite simple to use this kind of thing to put the “right” people in charge of decision-making, and the “wrong” people into deadly combat situations, or at the very least, into positions lowly enough that they can be systematically conditioned to stifle their own political will.
“Right” and “wrong” above can certainly mean stupid shit like “skin color” or “ethnicity,” but I was actually thinking about it in terms of political ideology. Dead people can’t vote.
I can’t imagine.
Everyone in my school had to take the ASVAB. It was a complete waste of time. Hell, I just filled in bubbles at random because I had no interest in dying in Iraq and didn’t care if I passed the test. Unfortunately, I passed the test and got so many calls from recruiters for years.