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Americans don't want to fight for their country anymore
(www.newsweek.com)
Best news I've seen today.
Isn't the stat on "how long do empires last on average" about 250 years?
How old is the US again?
That is indeed the number floating around, citing some work I admittedly haven't read by John Bagot Glubb.
Average lifespan does, however, make little sense as a metric. The Roman Empire is commonly understood to have lasted around 1500 years; you would need five extremely short-lived ten-year empires (I'm not sure that's even possible) just in order to cancel out the effect of Rome down to an average in the mid-200s.
Then comes questions of measurement. When did Rome really fall? Did the Abbasid Caliphate last 770 years, or was it two different empires lasting 500 and 250 years? These things matter a lot when calculating averages.
It would make a lot more sense to speak of the median lifetime. And still it's a wildly complicated thing to measure.
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Seems a bit hyperbolic considering the numbers.
In 2023, the Army and Air Force fell short of their respective goals by around 10,000 recruits, while the Navy was under by 6,000.
That's expected to be per year though, ain't it? Which means the air force will be about 40,000 underneath it's wanted amount? 40,000 seems like a large percentage of the ~330,000 reported as their ranks in 2021. The navy has a hair more personnel, I believe, around 350k? So 24,000 below that, not quite 10%. Those numbers probably aren't telling the full story, either. If the overall quality of the enlisted suffers, oof. Maybe those 10,000 that aren't coming in now were the smarter ones.
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this post was submitted on 11 Nov 2023
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