Bay 12 Games Forum

Quote from: Il Palazzo on March 09, 2022, 03:02:39 pm

Quote from: anewaname on March 09, 2022, 01:13:02 pm

Yeah, I had similar thoughts but more oriented towards the "what political gain could Putin gain by pushing troops into a meat-grinder?".

[spoiler]Putin does what every other political animal has done over thousands of years... He keeps internal political groups from rising against him by getting them to fight each other. Quietly help one community gain economically at the expense of other communities and they will learn to hate each other... example: hire police from one community to enforce unjust laws against another community. When there is a risk of those communities grouping together against the politician, the politician declares an external enemy and sends the young from both communities to die in a meat-grinder. This is usually done with mandatory conscription.

In America, conscription was used to send "liberal hippies" and "non-white" people to fight in Korea and then Vietnam, rarely in command positions and often in infantry positions. In WWI and WWII, the undesirables were sent into more dangerous positions and died at a higher rate.

Russia and Belarus still have a limited conscription system and a question I have is, how many of the Russian invaders were identified by Putin's regime as supporting Putin's internal political rivals and put into dangerous positions?

EDIT: Just read about the news that Russian conscripts among those captured, but still would ask, "how many of them were identified by Putin's regime as supporting Putin's internal political rivals?"

I don't see how any of that checks out. E.g. US losses in Vietnam or Korea, by race, roughly match the general demographics of the population. In WWII blacks were preferentially kept in non-combat units because racism, duh. Or the fact that the vast majority of conscripts are too young to earn the label of a dissident, or even as much as develop concrete political opinions - you're talking kids right out of secondary education.
Where conscription discriminates, it's against the poorer strata of the population. Which are also the most susceptible to government propaganda.

The most charitable read on that is that is a misreading of "McNamara's Morons", officially called "Project 100,000", where Robert McNamara drastically slashed the minimum test score requirements for recruits and the draft in an attempt to make up a massive shortfall in available troops. This was not a "get rid of the undesirables" plan, but specifically a "we need more guys on the ground and think we can make do with these ones" one. Previous experience in WWII had found that soldiers below a certain intelligence threshold were absolutely useless, but McNamara thought they could make up for that with technology-based rote training.

...
Correction: Meteor struck Africa in 2018
...