Part 47 (2/2)
CMTC candidates got 3~ per mile to and from their homes, no other money.
In 1925 I was appointed mids.h.i.+pman. There were 51 qualified applicants trying for that one appointment.
240 of my cla.s.s graduated; 130 fell by the wayside. One of that 130 resigned voluntarily; all the others resigned involuntarily, most of them plebe year for failure in academics (usually mathematics), the others were requested to resign over the next three years for academic, physical, or other reasons. A few resigned graduation day through having failed the final physical examination for commissioning. Three more served about one year in the Fleet, then resigned-but these three volunteered after the attack on Pearl Harbor. 28 of the 129 who left the service involuntarily managed to get back on active duty in World War Two.
So with four exceptions all of my cla.s.s stayed in the Navy as long as the Navy would have them.
About 25% were killed in line of duty or died later of wounds. Neither at the Academy nor in the Fleet did I ever hear a mids.h.i.+pman or officer talk about resigning. While it is likely that some thought about it, all discussion tacitly carried the a.s.sumption that the Navy was our life, the Fleet our home, and that we would leave only feet first or when put out to pasture as too old.
Enlisted men: When I entered the Fleet, before the Crash of '29 and about a year before unemployment became a problem, Navy recruiting offices were turning down 19 out of 20 volunteers; the Army was turning down 5 out of 6. The reenlistment rate was high; the desertion rate almost too small to count.
Span of Time-Today in the Armed Forces I have said repeatedly that I am opposed to conscription at any time, peace or war, for moral reasons beyond argument. For the rest of this I will try to keep my personal feelings out of the discussion-as I did in the rosy picture painted above. I reported facts, not my emotions.
I will not review details showing that the USSR is today militarily stronger than we are as the matter has been discussed endlessly in news media, in Congress, and in professional journals. The public discussion today concedes the military superiority of the USSR and centers on how much they are ahead of us, and what should be done about it. The details of this debate are of supreme importance as the most expensive thing in the world is a second-best military establishment, good but not good enough to win. At the moment the three-cornered standoff is saving us from that silly way to die . . . but I cannot predict how long this stalemate will last as key factors are not under our control, and neither our government nor our citizens seem willing to accept guns instead of b.u.t.ter on the scale required to make us too strong for anyone to risk attacking us. Polls seem to show that a controlling number of voters think that we are already spending too much on our Armed Forces.
What I set forth below comes primarily from an article by Richard A. Gabriel, a.s.sociate Professor of Politics, St. Anselm's College, Manchester, New Hamps.h.i.+re, author of CRISIS IN COMMAND. I lack personal experience with Army conditions today but what Dr. Gabriel says about them matches what I have heard from other sources and what I have read (I belong to all three a.s.sociations-Army, Navy, Air Force-plus the Naval Inst.i.tute and the Retired Officers a.s.sociation; I get much data secondhand but no longer see it with my own eyes, hear it with my own ears).
Readers with personal experience in Korea, Viet Nam, and in the Services anywhere since the end of the Viet Nam debacle, I urge to write and tell me what you know that I don't, especially on points in which I am seriously mistaken.
Summarized from ”The Slow Dying of the Amen- can Army,” Dr. Richard A. Gabriel in Gallery magazine, June 1979, p.41 et seq.: Concerning the All Volunteer Force (AVF): Early this year the Pentagon admitted that all services had failed to meet quotas.
30% of all Army volunteers are discharged for offenses during first enlistment. Of the 70 per 100 left, 26 do not reenlist. The desertion rates are the highest in history. . . and this fact is partly covered up by using administrative discharges (-i.e., ”You're fired!”) rather than courts martial and punishment-if the deserter turns up. But no effort is made to find him.
According to Dr. Gabriel, citing General George S. Blanchard and others, hard-drug use (heroin, cocaine, angel dust-not marijuana) is greater than ever, especially in Europe, with estimates from a low of 10% to a high of 64%. Marijuana is ignored-but let me add that a man stoned out of his mind on gra.s.s is not one I want on my flank in combat.
Category 3B and 4 (ranging down from dull to mentally r.e.t.a.r.ded) make up 59% of Army volunteers.. . in a day when privates handle very complex and sophisticated weapons and machinery.
Add to this that the mix is changing so that a typical private might be Chicano or Puerto Rican, the typical sergeant a Black, the typical officer ”Anglo.” And that officers are transferred with great frequency and enlisted men with considerable frequency and you have a situation in which esprit de corps cannot be developed (an outfit without esprit de corps is not an army unit; it is an armed mob-R.A.H.).
Today we have more general officers than we did in World War Two. Our ratio of officers to enlisted men is more than twice as high as that of successful armies in the past. But an officer is not with his troops long enough to be ”the Old Man”-he is a ”manager,” not a leader of men.
Dr. Gabriel concludes: ”The most basic aspect is the need to reinstate the draft.”
I disagree.
My disagreement is not on moral grounds. Forget that I ever voiced opposition to slave soldiers; think of me as Old Blood-and-Guts willing to use any means whatever to win.
Reinstating the draft would not get us out of trouble, even with the changes Dr. Gabriel suggests to make the draft ”fair.”
As everyone knows, we were in the frying pan; s.h.i.+fting to AVF, instead of producing an efficient professional army, put us into the fire. Dr. Gabriel urges that we climb back into the frying pan-but with improvements: a national lottery with no deferments whatever for any reason.
I can't disagree with the even-steven rule. . . but my reason for thinking that Dr. Gabriel's solution will not work is this: A lottery, even meticulously fair, cannot make a man willing to charge a machine-gun nest in the face of almost certain death. That sort of drive comes from emotional sources. Esprit de corps and patriotism cannot be drawn in a lottery.
Conscription works (among free men) only when it is not needed. I have seen two world wars; we used the draft in each.. . but in each case it was a means of straightening out the manpower situation; it was not needed to make men fight. Both wars were popular.
Since then we have had two non-Wars-Korea and Nam-in ”peacetime” and using conscript troops.
And each non-War was a scandalous disaster.
I don't have a neat solution to offer. If the American people have lost their willingness to fight and die for their country, the defect cannot be cured by conscription. Unless this emotional condition cnanges (and I do not know how to change it), we are whipped no matter what weapons we build. It could be overnight, or it could continue to be a long slow slide downhill over many years-ten, twenty, thirty. But the outcome is the same. Unless something renews the spirit this country once had, we are in the terminal stages of decay; history is ending for us.
Our foreign masters might graciously let us keep our flag, even our national name. But ”the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave” will be dead.
Time Span-Inflation The Winter of '23-'24 I paid a street vendor 5~ for a five billion mark German note and I paid too much; 5,000,000,000 DM was worth a trifle over 1 c~. A bit later it was worth nothing.
In 1955 at the foot of the Acropolis I bought a small marble replica of the Venus of Melos for 10,000 drachma. I wasn't cheated; that was 35~ USA.
There are the British pound, the Turkish lira, the Italian lira, the Mexican peso, and several others; all mean one pound of silver. Look up ”exchange” and ”commodities” in your newspaper; grab your pocket calculator and see how much each is inflated.
When I was a child of four or five my brothers and I used great stacks of hundred-dollar bills as play money. Confederate- After two centuries, ”Not worth a continental,” still means ”worthless.” Memory is long for the damage done by inflation.
Before paper ”money” was invented, inflation was accomplished by adding base metal to silver and/or gold while retaining the name of the coin. By this means the Roman denarius was devalued to zero during the first three centuries A.D. But inflation did not start with Caesar Augustus. In the early days of the Republic before the Punic Wars the cash unit was the libra (libra = lb. - pound = 273 grams, or about 60% of our pound avoirdupois, 454 grams). That's too large a unit for daily retail use; it was divided into 12 unciae (ounces).
A ”lb.” of silver was called an ”as.” 1/12 of that, struck as coinage, made efficient currency. Now comes war and inflation- Eventually the ”as”-once a pound of silver-was so debased that it amounted to a penny, more or less.
Augustus, by decree, went back on a silver/gold standard and created the denanius, 3.87 grams of fine silver. He made 25 denarii equal in value to one aureus (7.74 grams of gold), or a ratio of 12.5 to one.
(”Free and unlimited coinage of silver at a ratio of sixteen to one!” The Great Commoner and the august Emperor had similar notions about hard currency.) One Augustan denarius equalled in gold at today's London fix ($385/troy ounce) a nominal $3.83, or about 3/~~ of a gram of gold. This tells us nothing about purchasing power; it simply says that the Augustan denanius was a solid silver coin almost the size and weight of the solid silver quarter we used to have before the government foisted on us those sandwich things. How much olive oil or meal that would buy in Rome around 1 A.D. can be estimated from surviving records-but all the gold in Rome could not buy an aspirin tablet or a paper of matches. No way to compare. And hard money was not supplemented by printed money, bank checks, and transactions that take place entirely inside computers-but I can't go into how those phenomena affect purchasing power without writing a book twice as long as this one on fiscal theory (which I am quite willing to do but n.o.body would buy it).
What Augustus did was to stabilize Rome's money by defining it in terms of two commodities, each intrinsically valuable, each stable in supply, each almost indestructible, and he defined also the legal ratio between the two coinages-an effort to circ.u.mvent Gresham's Law, unknown then but Augustus appears to have had a gut feeling for it. (Not Bill Gresham-the other one. Thomas Gresham.) But a bimetallic standard has its problems; the free economy ratio tends to drift away from the legal ratio, and Gresham's Law begins to work. But this happens very slowly with hard money and is not the disaster that printing-press inflation is, or the debasing of hard~ money.
Caesar Augustus died in 14 A.D.
His corpse was hardly cold before the vultures got to work. Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, Nero-even Claudius did nothing to stop the robbery. t.i.tus attempted an Augustan return to honest money in 80 A.D.
but he died in September the following year; his successor was a disaster even as Caesars go.
”Put not your trust in Princes.” Debas.e.m.e.nt of the currency continued under every Caesar for the next two centuries. Diocletian (reign: 294-305) inherited a worthless denarius; he returned Rome to the bimetallic standard at a level barely below that of Augustus. But he increased enormously the bureaucracy, inst.i.tuted the harshest of taxation to pay for his ”reforms,” and decreed price-fixing-which worked just as it always does.
On his retirement (not a.s.sa.s.sination~!]) debas.e.m.e.nt was resumed while taxes stayed high, and Rome was on the skids. The decline and fall of the denarius and of Rome paralleled each other.
I'm tempted to discuss France's incredible inflation and collapse thereof during the French Revolution (and three more French inflations since then), and the inflations of several other countries in other centuries. But they are monotonously alike and differ from debas.e.m.e.nt primarily in the fact that the invention of paper ”money” permits the corruption of legal tender to get utterly out of hand before the people notice it. In Germany in the early twenties people used to take wheelbarrows to the grocery store-not to fetch back groceries but to carry money to the grocer. But the early stages of disastrous inflation feel like ”prosperity.” Wages and profits go up, old debts are easier to pay off, business booms.
It is not until later that most people notice that prices and taxes have gone up faster than wages and profits, and that it is getting harder and harder to make ends meet.
There is a strong emotional feeling that ”a dollar is a dollar.” (Hitler called it, ”Mark is Mark!”) But you can reexamine it in terms of prices on bread, or how many minutes to earn a dollar. And don't forget taxes! If you aren't working at least the first three months of each year to pay taxes before you can keep one dollar for yourself, then you are on welfare, one way or another. You may not think you are taxed that much- paycheck deductions and hidden taxes are extracted under anesthesia. Try dividing the Federal Budget by the number of wage earners not on the public payroll, then take a stab at where you fit in. Don't forget the same process for state, county, and city. There are Makers, Takers, and Fakers, no fourth category, and today the Takers and the Fakers outnumber (and outvote) the Makers.
Today it takes more dollars each year to service the National Debt than the total budget for the last and most expensive year of the Korean War. I am not going to state here the amount of our National Debt. If you have not heard it recently, you wouldn't believe me. If you don't know, telephone your Congressman and ask; he has a local office near you. If the telephone information service can't (won't) tell you, the city room of any newspaper does know his number.
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