Actually, RussianCowboy, I'm surprised they haven't thought of that yet!

Or, have they?

I can imagine long lines of Indian graduate students and Mexican illegal immigrants in the recruting offices

I wonder how much a military recruiter makes these days?

Maybe they should opt for flipping hamburgers...who knows maybe there's more money in doing that right now.

Giving illegal aliens citizenship upon completing a dour of duty? Sounds like a bunch of mercenaries to me. Anyone remember the Roman empire where near the end most of the "Roman" armies were made of Germanic mercenaries paid by the super rich elites to keep the status quo going? There weren't enough real Romans left to defend the empire, others were to corrupt by luxury to care, and the new immigrant "Romans" didn't have a real attachment to Rome. This all is starting to sound very familiar.

All the Illegal Mexicans have to do is return to Mexico and join up. This should not be hard as the bus ride home will be free with a single phone call. We are already recruiting from outside our borders... but that is drying up.

Join the Army!

If I'm not mistaken, they've done that for many years. The Navy recruited Filipinos and offered them citizenship. They usually end up living here in San Diego. I work with a bunch of guys that were born in the Philippines, joined the navy, and moved to California when they got out.

U.S. Armed Forces "wreck it and run" management

Under Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, the U.S. armed forces have also been taken over by "wreck it and run" management. When Rumsfeld leaves office, what will his successor inherit?

* A volunteer military without volunteers. The Army missed its active-duty recruiting goal in April by almost half. The reason, obviously, is the war in Iraq. Parents don't want to be the first one on their block to have their kid come home in a box.

* The world's largest pile of wrecked and worn-out military equipment. I'm talking about basic stuff here: trucks, Humvees, personnel carriers, crew-served weapons, etc. This is gear the Rumsfeld Pentagon hates to spend money on, because it does not represent "transformation" to the hi-tech, video-game warfare it wrongly sees as the future. So far, deploying units have made up their deficiencies by robbing units that are not deploying, often National Guard outfits. But that stock has about run out, and some of the stripped units are now facing deployment themselves, minus their gear.

As far as I understand, the US Navy recruits only those noncitizens who have immigrant/permanent resident/parole status. I am talking about the illegals or people on temporary visas. Those are not yet being recruited, but there are 10 to 20 mln. of them in the US.

Read it and weep.

Rummy is only following the example of all his CEO friends in western corporations. Soldiers like employees are just regarded as expendable trash. Who need them when the next gizmo from ACME miltary systems will make them redundant. Technology is the neocon wet dream.

Problem is the experience in Iraq is that without the US boots on the ground insurgents armed with car bombs, basic rifles and RPGs seem not to be too intimidated by the Pentagon's techno fixes. Put simply the US appears to be unable to control large swathes of western Iraq.

The sapping of the strength of the US militaries conventional forces is deeply worrying because it means any major conflict is likely to go nuclear far quicker than might have been the case in the past

Whatever the reason for the "war" and if it was necessary or not, apparently we didn't learn any lessons from Vietnam, or even from the Mogadishu, Somalia "Black Hawk Down" incident. Fighting an all-out devastate-the-other-side-and-their-country war, like WWII, is comparatively "easy." The "side" with the most powerful army and greatest resources will "win." Iraq is the kind of door-to-door, insurgent, terrorist mess in an unforgiving environment that turns into an absolute debacle of a military quagmire.

Seems to be the recurring lesson of Vietnam, the Russo-Afgan war, etc. If you are willing to take some losses, asymetrical warfare works. Sort of makes you wonder if military forces will soon be going to way of the dinosaur. If it's really this expensive and difficult to invade a little country like Iraq and take their oil, maybe they will have to abandon it altogether and come up with a different approach. Mobs of lawyers or accountants perhaps.

Look for articles by William S. Lind on antiwar.com and other sources. He's a retired general who writes frequently about the idea of Fourth Generation War, which states that going forward war is no longer a monopoly controlled by states and fought among states. The state vs. state phase of the Iraq War lasted about 6 weeks. Most US casualties have come after the fall of Saddam. Wars will take the form of states falling apart and factions fighting each other, or of states intervening in a civil conflict to change conditions to their liking.

The Iraq insurgents like the Afghans during the Soviet invasion have no desire to take on the US head-to-head. The casualty count will still be 5 or 10 times in our favor thanks to our superior weapons and training, but that's not the point: it's not a situation where we can kill X number of insurgents, declare victory, and go home. Whoever is behind the attacks is trying to bankrupt us -- we're spending millions per casualty inflicted while they're spending a few hundred per casualty inflicted. We'll kill more of them than they'll kill of us, but we can't sustain it.

I remember during the 80's it was quite fashionable to make cheesy Vietnam war movies. Remember Rambo?

Anyways I'm looking forward to the chessy hollywood Iraq movies that will be made 20 years from now.

You think they'll still be making movies in 20 years?

OHMMMMYYYY,

This one we do disagree on.

Of course they will be making movies in twenty years, sorry. But if they are not. THen life on this planet will be something none of you will wish to think about.

entertainment has been around since mankind began. Movies are modern mans method of communicating to the masses.

I'm a DP (director of photography) etc. (

But movies and ways to escape the mundane world will be here no matter what the outcome.

Underground or above ground, people will make movies as long as there is acces to the equipment.

And that has done nothing but get bigger in the last 20 years. Much to the demise of the art of lighting, sert procedure and numerous other things, but that is another story.

Its so easy, that anyone can do it. CAmeras Film, Video, infrare, video tape, disk, even single pieces of paper flipped before your eyes.

Oh yes movies will be here.

Of course the "quality" of the movie may be a thing of the past.

But who knows.

Those of us who light in film mainly in color wonder how those that light only in BW had to stay in so command of everything.

But I wax poetic on that.

good luck and work toward bush's impeachment with all your vigor if you can, and if you wish.

otherwise, just have a jolly good time and accept what comes.