Sdi 2010 Midterms Impacts Updates
Health Care Bad – Recruitment
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Health Care Bad – RecruitmentHealth care reform hurts military recruitment Norris 8 Floyd, comments on finance and economics, Health’s Gain May Be Army’s Loss, NYT, Proquest Call it the law of unintended consequences. When you fix one thing, it messes up other things. If the Democrats win the election this year, and are able to enact a health care plan that extends adequate coverage to all Americans, the loser could be the Army. Getting enough people to enlist could become a major problem for the next president. Senator John McCain, the presumptive Republican candidate, has already pointed out that Senator Barack Obama, the likely Democratic candidate, never served in the military. It remains to be seen how potent that will be as an issue, given the fact that the last four presidential elections have been won by the candidate with the less impressive military resume. But there is something else that distinguishes Mr. Obama from all recent candidates for the presidency. He would be the first presidential nominee to come of age after the draft was abolished in the administration of Richard M. Nixon. He never had to decide how to deal with the draft, and legally was under no more pressure to enlist than he was to go to medical school or become a bus driver. Joining the military was a career option like any other. And that has made it harder to put the Army together. Government polls show that the proportion of young people who think they might enlist is roughly half what it was in the late 1980s. The military has responded with more recruiters and higher cash enlistment bonuses, and has met its goals. A significant factor for many recruits, it turns out, is the military’s generous health benefits for dependants. Ground force availability is vital to the perception of our military – A declining pool of recruits risks aggression by our enemies Perry 6 William, Senior Fellow @ Hoover Institution, The US Military: Under Strain and at Risk, The National Security Advisory Group, January 2006, National_Security_Report_01252006.pdf In the meantime, the United States has only limited ground force capability ready to respond to other contingencies. The absence of a credible strategic reserve in our ground forces increases the risk that potential adversaries will be tempted to challenge the United States. Since the end of World War II, a core element of U.S. strategy has been maintaining a military capable of deterring and, if necessary, defeating aggression in more than one theater at a time. As a global power with global interests, the United States must be able to deal with challenges to its interests in multiple regions of the world simultaneously. Today, however, the United States has only limited ground force capability ready to respond outside the Afghan and Iraqi theaters of operations. If the Army were ordered to send significant forces to another crisis today, its only option would be to deploy units at readiness levels far below what operational plans would require – increasing the risk to the men and women being sent into harm’s way and to the success of the mission. As stated rather blandly in one DoD presentation, the Army “continues to accept risk” in its ability to respond to crises on the Korean Peninsula and elsewhere. Although the United States can still deploy air, naval, and other more specialized assets to deter or respond to aggression, the visible overextension of our ground forces has the potential to significantly weaken our ability to deter and respond to some contingencies. Health Care Bad – RecruitmentUS primacy solves all major impacts Ferguson 4 Niall, Prof of history @ Harvard, Hoover Digest So what is left? Waning empires. Religious revivals. Incipient anarchy. A coming retreat into fortified cities. These are the Dark Age experiences that a world without a hyperpower might quickly find itself reliving. The trouble is, of course, that this Dark Age would be an altogether more dangerous one than the Dark Age of the ninth century. For the world is much more populous—roughly 20 times more—meaning that friction between the world’s disparate “tribes” is bound to be more frequent. Technology has transformed production; now human societies depend not merely on fresh water and the harvest but also on supplies of fossil fuels that are known to be finite. Technology has upgraded destruction, too; it is now possible not just to sack a city but to obliterate it. For more than two decades, globalization—the integration of world markets for commodities, labor, and capital—has raised living standards throughout the world, except where countries have shut themselves off from the process through tyranny or civil war. The reversal of globalization—which a new Dark Age would produce—would certainly lead to economic stagnation and even depression. As the United States sought to protect itself after a second September 11 devastates, say, Houston or Chicago, it would inevitably become a less open society, less hospitable for foreigners seeking to work, visit, or do business. Meanwhile, as Europe’s Muslim enclaves grew, Islamist extremists’ infiltration of the E.U. would become irreversible, increasing transatlantic tensions over the Middle East to the breaking point. An economic meltdown in China would plunge the communist system into crisis, unleashing the centrifugal forces that undermined previous Chinese empires. Western investors would lose out and conclude that lower returns at home were preferable to the risks of default abroad. The worst effects of the new Dark Age would be felt on the edges of the waning great powers. The wealthiest ports of the global economy—from New York to Rotterdam to Shanghai—would become the targets of plunderers and pirates. With ease, terrorists could disrupt the freedom of the seas, targeting oil tankers, aircraft carriers, and cruise liners, while Western nations frantically concentrated on making their airports secure. Meanwhile, limited nuclear wars could devastate numerous regions, beginning in the Korean peninsula and Kashmir, perhaps ending catastrophically in the Middle East. In Latin America, wretchedly poor citizens would seek solace in evangelical Christianity imported by U.S. religious orders. In Africa, the great plagues of AIDS and malaria would continue their deadly work. The few remaining solvent airlines would simply suspend services to many cities in these continents; who would wish to leave their privately guarded safe havens to go there? For all these reasons, the prospect of an apolar world should frighten us today a great deal more than it frightened the heirs of Charlemagne. If the United States retreats from global hegemony—its fragile self-image dented by minor setbacks on the imperial frontier—its critics at home and abroad must not pretend that they are ushering in a new era of multipolar harmony or even a return to the good old balance of power. Be careful what you wish for. The alternative to unipolarity would not be multipolarity at all. It would be apolarity—a global vacuum of power. And far more dangerous forces than rival great powers would benefit from such a not-so-new world disorder. 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