All-volunteer military may desensitize U.S. to war, some fear

[Swilly]

[quote=Wikipedia]"At the heart of Heinlein, science fiction, libertarianism, and America. Heinlein imagined how everything about the human world, from our sexual mores to our religion to our automobiles to our government to our plans for cultural survival, might be flawed, even fatally so."[/quote]

Heinlein is one of those weird writers where you don't full understand where his point of views are or how he goes about forming opinions because his writing material is too broad and tackles too many issues from different viewpoints.

[NoDachi]

I heard the opposite.

That he writes like a simplistic mouthpiece of agendas.

[EmperorScorpious]

[QUOTE=Swilly;39080812]Heinlein is one of those weird writers where you don't full understand where his point of views are or how he goes about forming opinions because his writing material is too broad and tackles too many issues from different viewpoints.[/QUOTE]

Not sure if that makes him a well-rounded individual or indecisive.

[Swilly]

[QUOTE=Emperor Scorpious II;39080838]Not sure if that makes him a well-rounded individual or indecisive.[/QUOTE]

They're usually the same thing.

[editline]3rd January 2013[/editline]

[QUOTE=NoDachi;39080837]I heard the opposite.

That he writes like a simplistic mouthpiece of agendas.[/QUOTE]

It really depends. His later works were definitely guilty of this, but that was past his prime by that point.

[ironman17]

[QUOTE=Saxon;39066348]I don't really see the problem with less volunteers.

It seems like the idea of having an overly large armed forces grows more obsolete every year in this age.[/QUOTE]
It's a matter of quality over quantity; better to have a relatively-small assortment of top-class marines who chose their path, than a massive legion of young conscripts who didn't have a choice in the matter.

That said, the main issue is that we all keep using lethal weaponry; lives are lives whichever way you look at it, and nonlethal is usually better from a standpoint of morality unless it involves torture. We need less cannons that fire metal death, and more stuff that can knock people out or disorientate, things that are better at incapacitating but don't cause folks to lose their legs. Here's hoping we get microwave pain rays (based off of Active Denial; they project beams of microwave radiation that causes pain rather than directly damaging the body) before some crazy physicist-engineer ends up inventing the plasma rifle (in theory a shot from one of those things would make your clothes catch fire).