Warning: rant

Webb has gotten the new GI Bill passed with a veto proof margin, which rocks, but Bush was threatening to veto it. I do not understand how simply providing our soldiers with the same benefit the GI Bill has historically offered is controversial. We owe so much to the people who are risking their lives and I can tell you, from personal experience, that we do not treat our enlisted soldiers the way they should be treated. The least we can do is give them an education.

It is especially annoying to me that the argument against this bill is that it will encourage soldiers to leave after their first term. This same attitude in the military leads to it being extraordinarily difficult for enlisted men to attend school, despite being told that the military is one-hundred percent behind the idea. There are two really big problems with this. The first is that it paints the men and women serving this country in as deadbeats who are just waiting to take advantage of the system instead of admitting the real problem: they aren't stupid. If you were continually mislead about what benefits you were going to have and how easy it would be to become educated and advance inside the Army in your first term, why would you believe it was going to get better in later terms. The way to keep soldiers in the military is to treat them well. Most of them love this country and even love the military, but as long as we are giving them historically long deployments and treating them like crap, they are not going to want to stay in the military.

The second problem has to do with the idea of the military as voluntary. Saying that our enlisted men will all leave the Army if we give them a chance to do anything else is essentially saying that our enlisted military is populated by people who have no where else to go, which stretches the idea of a volunteer military. Though it is sometimes true and I think it is a current problem with the military that needs to be dealt with (see lowering of standards for recruits) as social ladder, if we are making policy solely on that fact we need to take a very long and hard look at our military.

Also, can I just say how incredibly offensive I find it that we are willing to spend billions of dollars on fancy planes that have proven to have severely limited usefulness or just lose money because of corrupt contractors while not providing the men and women who risk death for this country with the very basics of what we should owe them.