Word: conscripts
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...gold patch worn on his uniform's shoulders. The second is more subtle but just as telling: a Republican Guard tends to look healthier than a regular soldier. No wonder: the guards are paid about 300 dinars a month (roughly $900) -- double the wages of an ordinary conscript -- and are pampered with such perks as free housing and free cars...
...minded young officers have begun to push for change. Unlike the top brass, this new generation of military men takes a more independent approach to the army's troubles than the one dictated by orthodox communism. They have proposed a radical agenda that includes abolishing the draft, turning the conscript force into an all-volunteer army, expelling party cells from military units and permitting the formation of territorial reserve units as a way to check the flow of soldiers into unofficial regional corps...
...economically groundless and politically shortsighted," he said recently, "to try to make the reduction of defense expenditures the sole method of liquidating the budget deficit and the resolution of all of today's social problems." He went further, arguing that a modernization that would shift the emphasis from mass-conscript armies to smaller forces with high-tech weaponry would cost more, not less. The idea of eventually dropping the draft and adopting a volunteer professional army is still opposed by most of the senior commanders, but if it were ever tried, it would require more money...
...Sandinista army may prove to be the bigger headache for the incoming Chamorro administration. Despite an increase in conscript desertions since the elections, the army's 15,000-strong professional core remains well disciplined and loyal to the Sandinistas. Chamorro has vowed to abolish the draft and reduce the size of the military. Luis Humberto Guzman, a member of U.N.O.'s senior advisory board, has said that military spending should not exceed 15% of the budget. Under Ortega, defense expenditures totaled 50% of the budget. For that reason alone, demobilization of both armies makes sense if Nicaragua is going...
Will the next conscript in the war on drugs be an inch-long, greenish-white beastie with a taste for coca leaves? The idea of bombarding the high mountain valleys of Bolivia and Peru with millions of eggs from the malunya moth, which in its caterpillar stage loves to munch on the foliage of the cocaine- producing plant, got a lot of play in Washington last week...