Recruitment
The U.S. Army is proposing raising the recruitment age to 42. Still plenty of time for Jonah Goldberg, age 36, to sign up. Boot camp might kill him, or flatten him for a while, but now he will have time for several attempts.
Glenn Reynolds is still too old at 45. Perhaps he could lie about his age? (UPDATE: As many doughboys have done in several wars?) (From his reports, it seems that he's in good shape, and thus much more likely to survive boot camp than Goldberg).
Young Republicans in general apparently don't want to sign up. They seem to have intuited, as the White House is now confirming, that there isn't a Global War on Terror (GWOT) underway after all; instead there is a Global Struggle Against Violent Extremism (GSAVE). Soon it may be a Big Effort Against Isolated Bad Guys (BEAIBG), and then Just Plain Hard Work (JPHW).
UPDATE: the article I link to above says: "Congress also is being asked to raise the maximum recruiting age to 42 for all services - just four months after raising it from 35 to 39 for National Guard and Reserve recruits, but not for active duty troops."
It may seem unfair to single out Goldberg, but he has entertained some of the debate on the question of whether he should enlist:
[blockquote]I mentioned in passing that "a few" of the reasons I never signed up before the war were my age, my financial situation, my brand new baby daughter and my physical condition.... [snip] I never said these were the "only" reasons I didn't sign up. Merely that these were among them.... [snip] I've received lots of email from folks who sincerely believe - for one reason or another - that I was saying my family or my financial situation was more important than those of the soldiers, marines and airmen in Iraq who also have families and, often, even greater financial challenges. So let me just say here that this was never my intention nor my meaning. If I gave that impression, I'm sorry. While obviously my family is everything to me, I have never thought in those terms.[/blockquote]
But then by way of a follow-up, perhaps getting closer to the real or deepest reason for not signing up, Goldberg says: "...the fact that I am too old to enlist seems to bounce off of most of these people (to serve at my age I would need to have already served before or be in the reserve)." This now seems, er, no longer operative.
Goldberg is relatively honest, but Hobbes was more honest. He said government has the right to recruit troops to fight, but the real reason anyone submits to government is to protect one's own life. The paradox can be resolved by finding people who actually want to fight, and paying them to do so. But then Hobbes didn't kid himself that he was a great patriot. He boasted that when civil war broke out, he was "the first of all that fled." He had no sympathy for those who had suffered exile as a punishment. As long as you get your three squares, and some freedom to move around, he insisted, exile is no punishment.
Finding volunteer soldiers is just like recruiting for the police and fire departments, as important as those are? This is the Chris Hitchens "let's have another drink" argument, and it works--as long as we are living in relatively, even remarkably, peaceful times, and not, say, in a GWOT.
UPDATE: Since I am reading the letters of Evelyn Waugh: Waugh managed to enlist in the Army at the beginning of World War II, at the age of 36--although his application, even using influential contacts, was rejected several times. He was certainly no athlete. At first he thought his duty would be both exciting and glorious; he more or less expected to be killed. Then the days and weeks of monotony set in, punctuated mostly by false alarms of actual battle. The other men were never very congenial to him. He kept running into Randolph Churchill, and got thoroughly sick of him. The last straw: when British troops finally started real fighting, no one really wanted an aging amateur officer such as Waugh.
As he became disillusioned, and appalled at the need to cooperate with the Bolshies, he applied himself more and more to his writing, and actually wrote Brideshead Revisited more or less while in the service. This became his focus, so he kept trying to get a combination of leave and soft service that would allow him to finish the novel. All the Army could think of for him by this time was that he could be ADC to a general; he tried several. One comment to his wife on March 9, 1944: "So the new general is very much less assuming than Tomas & fully appreciates, or appears to appreciate, the importance of a gentleman leading his own life." So maybe that's it: it's not Hobbes at all, but the necessity of a gentleman leading his own life, even with a war on.
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