Things that Should Exist

[forsyth]

Why the hell don't we have an entire branch of the military, or a separate group even, dedicated to keeping order and rebuilding stuff? That's most of what military interventions that aren't planned by madmen and liars are going to be, and it'd have a billion uses besides. But it's not as sexy as a bunch of long hard missiles and planes and boats and guns that are good ad spitting death, I guess. And the recruits would have more useful skills once they left, too.

Shit, that's what we really needed in Iraq, peacekeepers and builders, trained to deal with people and with at least a little knowledge of Arabic. Blowing shit up only gets so far. Is that really so hard to grasp?

Comments

[the-s-guy.livejournal.com]

Because if they had a Bunch of Reconstruction Guys who were separate from the Blowing Shit Up Guys, they wouldn't be able to send in the Blowing Shit Up Guys while pretending they were the Bunch of Reconstruction Guys.

Plus the Blowing Shit Up Guys wouldn't be able to occasionally get some mollifying PR by building stuff, thus leading to a lack of militarily usefuly momentary confusion as to what they were going to do at any given moment and whether or not to nuke them into glass the moment they appeared on your border.

[forsythferret.livejournal.com]

It'd be a continuum. Everybody'd learn to blow shit up a little, and build shit a little. Some would just specialize more in blowing shit up, and some more in building shit. In theory, anyway.