Policy on a Slippery Slope
     The Department of Defense announced last week a new policy that will allow illegal immigrants living in the United States to enlist in the US armed forces and be eligible for an accelerated path to US citizenship as a result.  The program, Military Accessions Vital to National Interest (MAVNI), will recruit illegal immigrants who came to the United States with their parents before the age of sixteen.  The program is capped at 1,500 recruits per year.
     On one hand, this initiative can be viewed as an initiative by the Obama administration to ease pressure on immigrants and shore up its political support from the immigrant community.  On the other hand, it can be viewed as a pernicious means to shore up recruiting into a stressed All-Volunteer Force.  The reality is that the  US military is knowingly enlisting felons into its ranks because, to some extent, as Charles Moskos (a respected sociologist at Northwestern University) wrote in 1988, "we can't get enough middle class kids to die for their country.  This is the next step". 
     One might ask, "is the All-Volunteer Force working and will it work in the future"?  An alternative question is, "what if we had a war and no one showed up on our side"?

Strategic questions
     As I continue to think about President Obama's address to the nation last Wednesday regarding ISIS, three questions keep coming to mind.  First, an NBC poll found that a majority of Americans(62%) favor his plan.  But an even larger majority of Americans (68%) are skeptical as to whether it will succeed.  Why would a rational person support a plan that they are not confident will succeed?  Second, the president said that US military involvement will be limited to air strikes and training and equipping Iraqi ground forces and the Free Syrian Army.....no US "boots on the ground".  This is the same Iraqi army that we trained from 2004 to 2011 only to have it desert and leave behind its weapons and equipment at first contact with ISIS....two full brigades deserted.  ISIS is now driving around Iraq and Syria in US Humvees given to the Iraqi army which subsequently abandoned them on the battlefield.  As for no US "boots on the ground", I suppose that the special ops soldiers and "advisers" are wearing sandals or sneakers.  Why would a rational person believe that either one of these "armies" is capable of successful military ground operations in the foreseeable future without invoking magical thinking?  Third, how much will this cost and how will we pay for it?  Has everyone inside the Beltway forgotten that America is seventeen trillion dollars in debt and continues to run a budget deficit?

Military Justice?
     Earlier this year Congress chose to retain authority for the investigation and prosecution of rape and other forms of sexual violence in the military within the military "chain of command".  Uniformed military bureaucrats convinced Congress that they could fix the problem.  In fact, the problem goes back to the 1991 Tailhook scandal and has only gotten worse since then.  Members of the "chain of command" have been perpetuators and enablers of sexual violence in the military for decades.
     On August 27 the Associated Press reported that an Army Major General, Michael Harrison, had "failed to properly investigate sexual assault and other allegations against a colonel on his staff and be retired at one-star rank".  The allegations go back to March 2013.  When enablers of sexual violence in the military are the principal administrators of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, the system is broken and unjust.