Federal Judge Rules Male-Only Draft Unconstitutional

[clearspira]

Your views are based on a world that no longer exists.

So is the concept of a draft - hence the "this is all theoretical musing" disclaimer at the top of my post.

If China or Russia declares war lets see how theoretical the draft is. And yes, unlikely. But by no means impossible.

What would all those drafted people do? Untrained, unfit people wouldn't be any use to a modern army.

You don't just get drafted to the front line. You get drafted to munitions factories, logistics, infrastructure, maintenance etc. Untrained, unfit people can still work a production line or hump boxes about.

[clearspira]

Your views are based on a world that no longer exists.

So is the concept of a draft - hence the "this is all theoretical musing" disclaimer at the top of my post.

If China or Russia declares war lets see how theoretical the draft is. And yes, unlikely. But by no means impossible.

Completely, because a war with either power ends in about an hour, along with civilization as we know it.

Neither side wants to use nuclear weapons. Governments will be quite happy to watch a few hundred million proletariat get shelled to oblivion before pushing the button.

[Riedquat]

You don't just get drafted to the front line. You get drafted to munitions factories, logistics, infrastructure, maintenance etc. Untrained, unfit people can still work a production line or hump boxes about.

That's mostly done by machines these days. There's still a bit of manual production line drudgery true (and probably more that requires some technical skill) but to make use of a sudden rush of people you've got to have the extra production facilities available and unused. The demand for unskilled labour isn't all that high.

[Darth Wedgius]

You don't just get drafted to the front line. You get drafted to munitions factories, logistics, infrastructure, maintenance etc. Untrained, unfit people can still work a production line or hump boxes about.

That's mostly done by machines these days. There's still a bit of manual production line drudgery true (and probably more that requires some technical skill) but to make use of a sudden rush of people you've got to have the extra production facilities available and unused. The demand for unskilled labour isn't all that high.

A lot of that is done by automation and that'll likely increase in the long run, but if you have to ramp up production and distribution in a hurry, the flexible, adaptive, mobile base-line human being told to insert this part into that frame and connect the wires is far more readily available than custom robots. Just the logistics alone of getting enough whatever to wherever to fight a war is really, really easily underestimated.

[LittleRaven]

Neither side wants to use nuclear weapons. Governments will be quite happy to watch a few hundred million proletariat get shelled to oblivion before pushing the button.

That's doesn't matter, though. As far as the big brains at the Pentagon are concerned, the proletariat is irrelevant when it comes to the next World War. They're considered only slightly less static than mountains.

The military analysts are pretty certain that the next truly global conflict will be fast. A lot of them think it will be SO FAST that people won't really know what happened until it's over. A combination of cyber-warfare crippling infrastructure, drone strikes by autonomous machines, and tactical and strategic missile strikes are what they see as the most likely outcome of such a conflict. They don't even think that the bulk of active-duty military personnel will be directly involved - human reaction times are simply too slow to matter. It certainly won't be like WW II, where things drag on for years and you have time to draft millions of people and train them to be useful.

There simply is no predicted scenario in which a draft is useful in a modern military conflict. We've moved past the days where bodies make a difference. What matters is how up to date your cyber-warfare teams are, how many satellites you have, how fast your automatic defenses and offenses can spin up.

[Yukaphile]

Well, I hear we've already repelled a few Russian attacks, so there is hope. And if they'd had the power, they would have crippled Europe by now, leaving it free for them to move in and seize. They have not. Of course, Trump being a direct proxy of Putin and trying to sabotage our infrastructure to make it easier for them to destroy us is a problem.

[jadenova]

Them the breaks if you want to be treated like an equal.

[Yukaphile]

Yup.

[Fuzzy Necromancer]

The military analysts are pretty certain that the next truly global conflict will be fast. A lot of them think it will be SO FAST that people won't really know what happened until it's over. A combination of cyber-warfare crippling infrastructure, drone strikes by autonomous machines,

I gotta pull you up right there. Drone strikes are NOT autonomous, and anything resembling an autonomous killing machine is still in the very dodgey experimental stages, and mostly employed for border defense rather than targeted attack.

[LittleRaven]

I gotta pull you up right there. Drone strikes are NOT autonomous, and anything resembling an autonomous killing machine is still in the very dodgey experimental stages, and mostly employed for border defense rather than targeted attack.

I think you misunderstand me. I'm aware of what we have right now, (at least, as aware as anyone with my security clearance can be) and you are absolutely correct in your assessment, but virtually no military analysts thinks a war between major powers is going to break out right now, because there's no way to even theoretically win one. Pretty much every scenario you run ends up with everyone dead and the world destroyed.

So their scenarios are generally placed a little bit in the future, where we presumably DO have autonomous drones that work at least reasonably well. A war is much more likely to break out if someone thinks it can actually be won, and someone is much more likely to think that if they have good reason to believe they can completely cripple their enemy before much of a counterstrike can be attempted. ATM, autonomous drones play a pretty important role in most of those scenarios.

At least, they did the last time I researched this stuff. It's been a while. For all I know we're onto tailors genetic bioweapons by now.