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Politics : High Tolerance Plasticity -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: stockman_scott who wrote (9292)	10/10/2001 2:45:42 PM
From: cnyndwllr	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 23153

Stockman, the following quote illustrates the point that I was trying to make in my last post: <<No doubt the Talibans and their Arab mercenaries are tough. On the other hand, to make Ranger, you have to run a 5:30 mile carrying a 60-lb. pack on your back, followed immediately by a second mile at a 5:50 pace — and be one of the first 50 men to finish the race. Those who qualify get a year's pressure-cooker instruction in weapons, tactics, and hand-to-hand fighting, if they last.>> That kind of macho thinking might have made sense in the beginning of the last century but not today. If you want to kill Afghans by causing them to fall off a cliff laughing, then maybe sprinting around with 60 lb. packs on your back is effective. On the other hand if you want to have the most efficient fighting force in your elite troops then don't have a gateway qualification that excludes most of your best and your brightest based on a tough criteria that is very low on the scale of actual usefulness in real combat. This reminds me of the fighter jet qualifications that they used to employ and may still use. They would select largely based upon academic standards in math, physics and engineering and thereby exclude many gifted pilots who had a natural ability to handle an aircraft. In the case of special forces it seems they seem to perpetuate a macho image when it's the mentally quick and the street smart who would shine in actual combat conditions. It's the same kind of thinking that makes people think that big guys are tough in street fights. Most of them have never been in a street fight or they would know that that is just one factor and not the biggest one at all. I would expect more from our military but it is, after all, a beauracracy. We should take lessons from the Israelis. In that country results are measured in lives and those that can, do. In the meantime, a threshold requirement that you run a mile in 5 minutes or so to qualify doesn't impress me. If you could run it at over 2000 ft/ second and thus outrun a bullet, I might change my mind. Ed