Word: conscripts
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...many Americans came to regard the U.S. officer class as a band of dissemblers and incompetents. As for the grunts, their ranks had long been considered a repository for society's dropouts. From the Revolutionary War to the early 1900s, it was not only common but legal for a conscript to pay someone else to take his place in the armed forces. Some criminal court judges even sentenced miscreants to military service...
...consequence, says Anthony Cordesman, professor of national-security studies at Georgetown University (and now something of a minor celebrity as a result of his sophisticated military analysis on ABC television), the Pentagon can boast of "an unprecedented level of professionalism that in every way is superior to the old conscript." This, says Cordesman, has bred "a new civil-military relationship" that permitted Schwarzkopf and his commanders to pursue their goals with a minimum of political interference...
...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...