Lori Siegel

And by getting rid of that, Iraq, Afghanistan, the years of the forever wars, you take the best and the brightest of these poorer areas, promise them the moon, the signups and Ford F-150s and all this other stuff, and then you just ship them off.

And it actually enables you to keep it going for a longer period of time.

So that's what I look at this recruitment as.

age expansion as is to try and expand the pool to be able to offer all of these incentives, like the financial incentives and stuff, which I don't, I'm not opposed to any of that per se, but what it does is it creates the space to actually bring more people in the military and have less democratic consent.

Like only 1% of people have ever served in the U.S.

Armed Forces.

Very few people actually know people who've served in the armed forces.

It's one of the biggest class divides.

If you're upper income, you probably don't know anybody you served in the military.

It's extremely rare.

If you're college educated, again, very, very rare.

Your closest connection might be like ROTC people on your campus, but you're not even going to know necessarily like enlisted folks.

And that's the issue, which we saw.

is that with Vietnam, yes, we had a draft, but we had basically the draft exclusion for a lot of the upper elite who didn't have to go in to serve, is it ends up becoming the poor and the uneducated who are either forced by circumstances or tricked or told to go into the war, and it creates exactly this type of situation.

When you are expanding recruitment age, it's usually a sign either that the populace is too obese, which is true, too drug addicted, true,

you know, for a variety of reasons, like ineligible to serve, but you have to create this where you have to like suck people more in for incentives.

And it sends the message of, we don't have enough people and we might be coming for you.

And that's the danger, even though I do support a draft, but it's one of those where I support it because I know that it would do what it did under Vietnam, where people were like, I am not going for this war.

Like this is not happening, which will force you to engage harder in the democratic process.

It's a matter of life and death.