Shannon Larratt is Zentastic

I read an interview with a soldier in Iraq recently who was talking about US military collapse in five years due to the use of National Guard, IRR, stop-loss troops, and so on. For those living under a rock, stop-loss is when you force a person to serve after they've quit, past their normal contract, against their will (that is, a draft, but limited to former soldiers). National Guard and IRR and so on are people who are in the military, but are not supposed to be called for these things except in utter national-security or disaster relief emergencies. So let's think about the math of this for a moment.

Diagram is not even vaguely to scale!

(A) Required troop level to sustain current conflicts.
(B) Available troop levels without a draft.
(C) Full time volunteer military.
(D) Troops available via National Guard and Reserves.
(E) Troops available via stop-loss.

The blue shaded area represents an excess of troops (ie. more than are needed, which is good), whereas the grey shaded area represents a shortage of troops (ie. less than are needed, which is very bad).

What I'm trying to show with that diagram is that when you rely on National Guard and Reserves to make up your military and then compound it by using stop-loss orders, you create an artificial plateau, which then drops dangerously quickly. Those of you who've looked at the peak oil charts should understand this risk. This isn't a Republican or Democrat issue. Kerry will have to face this as well. Nothing short of either a large scale draft or a radical rethinking of American empire and American foreign policy can change this inevitable problem.

I'd also like to comment on number re the elections. When you're building a race car, every ounce counts. An ounce may not seem like a lot when you're talking about a car that weighs a few thousand pounds, but races are close enough that a few ounces make the difference. The same is true in almost all elite sports competitions — the margins are that slim. It was the same in the 2000 US election, with the final outcome being decided by margins in the hundreds of people. This might seem odd as well, but think of the race car — the deciding variable is equally small.

What that means as well is that if you pick the right areas to do it in, if you can disenfranchise just a few hundred or a few thousand voters, you can win the US election. Maybe not morally, but, as determined by the Supreme Court, it is “legal”. In Vegas for example the RNC funded a voter registration company which employed three hundred people collecting registrations. Turns out though that the company's mandate was exclusively Republican voters, and shredded registrations obtained from Democrats. Other areas of the US are having similar problems with RNC sponsored anti-voting efforts (more).

To be very clear about this: The Republican party is officially funding efforts to ensure that Democrats will be blocked from voting through highly questionable means.

I realize there are Republicans out there who believe that this is how democracy works, and that this is part of determining which party is “stronger”, but this is not right. Additionally, there's also the Republican intimidation of black voters by having the FDLE raiding elderly voters homes and terrorizing them, purging people who are “potential” felons from the voter lists, banning Native Americans from voting, blocking black college students from voting, threatening of black voters in Philadelphia, distribution of flyers in poor communities with the wrong election date on them, and so on (more). Let me even quote Republican Representative John Pappageorge (more):