Thread: Now this scares me

Max Boot, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, which we’ve written about before, urged the creation of a mercenary army called the Freedom Legion in order to offset diminishing recruitment numbers to pursue permanent revolution and the neocon version of global democratic revolution. He wants to open recruitment to illegal aliens and foreigners so that if we had revolution in America these foreigners would think nothing of killing us, whereas the elitist know 80% of American troops would not shoot their fellow citizens. US citizenship would be offered as an inducement. There are currently 37,500 foreign nationals from over 200 countries currently serving in the armed forces.

I googled Freedom Legion and this is what came up from the Council of Foreign Relations.


Op-Ed
Uncle Sam Wants Tu
Author: Max Boot


February 24, 2005
Los Angeles Times

It is hard to pick up a newspaper these days without reading about Army and Marine Corps recruiting and retention woes. Nonstop deployments and the danger faced by troops in Iraq are making it hard for both services to fill their ranks. The same goes for the National Guard and Reserves. (The Navy and Air Force, which are much less in harm's way, have no such difficulty.)

Just to stay at their present sizes, the Army and Marines are shoveling money into more advertising, extra recruiters and bigger enlistment bonuses. And yet it's clear to everyone (except, that is, President Bush and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld) that the U.S. military is far too small to handle all the missions thrown its way. We need to not only maintain the current ranks but also to expand them in order to recover from a 1990s downsizing in which the Army lost 300,000 soldiers.

Some experts are already starting to wonder whether the war on terrorism might break the all-volunteer military. But because reinstating the draft isn't a serious option (the House defeated a symbolic draft bill last year, 402 to 2), some outside-the-box thinking is needed to fill up the ranks. In this regard, I note that there is a pretty big pool of manpower that's not being tapped: everyone on the planet who is not a U.S. citizen or permanent resident.

Since 9/11, Bush has expedited the naturalization process for soldiers. But to enlist, the Pentagon requires either proof of citizenship or a green card. Out of an active-duty force of about 1.4 million, only 108,803 are foreign-born (7%) and 30,541 are noncitizens (2%).

This is an anomaly by historical standards: In the 19th century, when the foreign-born population of the United States was much higher, so was the percentage of foreigners serving in the military. During the Civil War, at least 20% of Union soldiers were immigrants, and many of them had just stepped off the boat before donning a blue uniform. There were even entire units, like the 15th Wisconsin Volunteer Infantry (the Scandinavian Regiment) and Gen. Louis Blenker's German Division, where English was hardly spoken.

The military would do well today to open its ranks not only to legal immigrants but also to illegal ones and, as important, to untold numbers of young men and women who are not here now but would like to come. No doubt many would be willing to serve for some set period in return for one of the world's most precious commodities -- U.S. citizenship. Open up recruiting stations from Budapest to Bangkok, Cape Town to Cairo, Montreal to Mexico City. Some might deride those who sign up as mercenaries, but these troops would have significantly different motives than the usual soldier of fortune.

The simplest thing to do would be to sign up foreigners for the regular U.S. military, but it would also make sense to create a unit whose enlisted ranks would be composed entirely of non-Americans, led by U.S. officers and NCOs.

Call it the Freedom Legion. As its name implies, this unit would be modeled on the French Foreign Legion, except, again, U.S. citizenship would be part of the "pay." And rather than fighting for U.S. security writ small -- the way the Foreign Legion fights for the glory of France -- it would have as its mission defending and advancing freedom across the world. It would be, in effect, a multinational force under U.S. command -- but one that wouldn't require the permission of France, Germany or the United Nations to deploy.

The Freedom Legion would be the perfect unit to employ in places such as Darfur that are not critical security concerns but that cry out for more effective humanitarian intervention than any international organization could muster. U.S. politicians, so wary (and rightly so) of casualties among U.S. citizens, might take a more lenient attitude toward the employment of a force not made up of their constituents. An added benefit is that by recruiting foreigners, the U.S. military could address its most pressing strategic deficit in the war on terrorism -- lack of knowledge about other cultures. The most efficient way to expand the government's corps of Pashto or Arabic speakers isn't to send native-born Americans to language schools; it's to recruit native speakers of those languages.

Similar considerations early in the Cold War led Congress to pass the Lodge Act in 1950. This law allowed the Army Special Forces to recruit foreigners not living in the United States with the promise of citizenship after five years of service. More than 200 Eastern Europeans qualified as commandos before the Lodge Act expired in 1959. There's no reason why we couldn't recruit a fresh batch of foreigners today. It would certainly be easier than trying to sweet-talk more troops out of recalcitrant allies or, these days, recruiting at U.S. high schools.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Max Boot is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

http://www.cfr.org/publication.html?id=7861



This is from the Democratic Underground.com

Max Boot is Barking Mad

March 4, 2005
By Weldon Berger

Max Boot is barking mad. The neoconservative polemicist, long an outspoken fan of a new American imperialism, is calling upon our country to embark upon a dramatic reenactment of the final volumes of Edward Gibbon's masterpiece The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

In what can only be described as a vicious act of revenge by mild-mannered former Crossfire host and Slate Magazine founding editor Michael Kinsley, the now-chief of the Los Angeles Times editorial pages has hired Boot as the paper's designated neoconservative hitter. Boot has responded nobly with a series of bizarre op-ed pieces including, most recently, a proposal that the U.S. seek its citizen soldiers from among the ranks of illegal aliens, non-citizens and citizens of othercountries.

A few years ago, in the wake of 911 when achieving the American Empire looked like somewhat less actual work than it does today, Max penned the most famous Boot-ism ever: "Afghanistan and other troubled lands today cry out for the sort of enlightened foreign administration once provided by self-confident Englishmen in jodhpurs and pith helmets." Now, though, Boot despairs that the U.S is capable of generating sufficient troops from within our own borders to carry out that mission.

What happened was that instead of enlightened foreign administration, we got Iraq Proconsul Jerry Bremer in a business suit and desert boots, running satchels full of large, unmarked bills from the Oval Office to the Green Zone. It's a far cry from even the tailings of the original. And the administration's astounding series of screwups in that country has led to a situation in which Army recruiters are struggling to meet their quotas in every demographic. Max is now so discouraged by the scuffs on his boots and the dust on his jodhpurs and the stains on his once-pristine pith helmet sweatband that he proposes a wholesale redistribution of particular burdens.

"Some experts are already starting to wonder whether the war on terrorism might break the all-volunteer military. But because reinstating the draft isn't a serious option (the House defeated a symbolic draft bill last year, 402 to 2), some outside-the-box thinking is needed to fill up the ranks. In this regard, I note that there is a pretty big pool of manpower that's not being tapped: everyone on the planet who is not a U.S. citizen or permanent resident."

In other words, pith on it: let's hire out the grunt work. We need another right hefty chunk of troops to spread democracy, and Max knows just where to find them.

What he proposes is the establishment of The Freedom Legion, a force to be recruited from among legal and illegal US resident non-citizens as well as through "recruiting stations from Budapest to Bangkok, Cape Town to Cairo, Montreal to Mexico City."

"The simplest thing to do would be to sign up foreigners for the regular U.S. military, but it would also make sense to create a unit whose enlisted ranks would be composed entirely of non-Americans, led by U.S. officers and NCOs."

Conspicuously missing from the list of alliterative recruiting sites is Riyadh to Rawalpindi, no doubt simply because he hadn't got that far in the alphabet before the word count alarm went off.

Max likens the new force to the French Foreign Legion, including even the latter's reward of citizenship to those who survive in service to it. Students of less recent history - including most certainly Max himself - may recognize similarities to an older empire, not only in the recruitment of a surrogate force to fight its battles but in the circumstances necessitating it as well.

He worries at that concept of a New American Empire like a brain-damaged dog trying to suck some nutrition from an old boot. He is prepared to, if not die for it, at least present the opportunity of dying for it to as many people as is remotely possible. He won't give it up no matter how many teeth it steals from him, no matter how many times life conspires to snatch it away and no matter how deeply warped his plans to secure it may be.

And the plan is deeply warped. Boot proposes adding sufficient troops to our ground forces to effectively occupy Iraq and embark simultaneously on other democracy-freighted missions; an agenda that, whether he realizes it or not, would require something along the lines of at least an additional 200,000 soldiers. The Congressional Budget Office in 2003 estimated the cost of adding even a tenth that number at around $20 billion over five years, and the annual additional cost of maintaining the new troops and deploying them overseas at around $10 billion. Multiply those numbers by ten and we're adding more than $100 billion per year to an already swollen Pentagon budget.

And that's not counting the new infrastructure necessary to support the troops (so much for base closures) or the extraordinary expense involved in training and maintaining a non-English speaking army. We don't have enough English-speaking drill sergeants now; where will we come up with thousands more who speak a second or third language?

The money, though, is the least of the difficulties. Imagine if you will opening recruitment centers for the new imperial army in any of the cities Boot mentions. The U.S. is not topping the popularity charts these days, and protecting the recruiters and their recruits would likely add billions more to the tab.

Imagine too, as right-wing pundits such as anti-immigrant doyenne Michelle Malkin surely will, the prospect of training and arming would-be immigrants among whose ranks would certainly be some who do not wish our country well. And imagine the trepidation of certain host countries at the notion of supplying the U.S. with recruits who may decide their futures lie not in supporting the U.S. government but in toppling their own. Boot's plan would replace liberals as fifth columnists in the right's imagination with the thing itself.

Boot describes the scheme as an example of thinking outside the box. What it really is, though, is an example of someone trapped in a box of his own making and not so much thinking as praying for Warren Zevon to swoop down from the heavens bearing lawyers, guns and money.

And that, dear reader, is Kinsley's Revenge. The soft-spoken deacon of the Radical Center has got one of the leading intellectual lights of the ruling hierarchy publicly forwarding the lunatic notion of embarking the United States upon a larger-than-life reenactment of the declining days of the Roman Empire.

A word to the wise recruiter: anyone named "Spartacus" gets turned down flat and, if the customs of the host country allow, shot dead on the spot.

Weldon Berger is a writer living in Hawaii who, despite his vaguely foreign countenance, is not fodder for the Freedom Legion. You can reach him via email at weldon.berger@btcnews.com, or through his BTC News website.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/ar ... _boot.html

These people are insane.

I'm not surprised since this issue of holding the masses in place when their total plan kicks in would be part of their MasterPlan, but to actually read it out in the open this soon is:

FRIGHTENING AS HELL!!



And Wackident does whatever these Maniacs in the Council on Foreign Relations recommend. It's probably his idea which he then funnels to them to then offer, propose and recommend as appropriate.



I can assure you FREEDOM is the last thing on their minds.

It's control of the masses.

you do not want to know what I think of someone who claims Expertise:
on anything military and has never servered a day in uniform.

Loony tone time again.

I want to know more about this Max Boot character.

W

Originally Posted by ALIPAC

I want to know more about this Max Boot character.

W

I was planning to dig in to him tomorrow if we don't get anything before them.

GO GET 'EM, Charles!!

He wants to open recruitment to illegal aliens and foreigners so that if we had revolution in America these foreigners would think nothing of killing us, whereas the elitist know 80% of American troops would not shoot their fellow citizens.

I just don't think that these foreigners would last in a fight. Not only would our boys not fire on us, but they would turn on the foriegners trying to kill us. An attack on us would be an attack on them too. There's going to be one big outbreak of violence if this is what they are planning.

You nailed it Rockfish!!

http://www.cfr.org/bios/bio.html?id=5641




Senior Fellow, National Security Studies

Contact Info:
Phone: 212-434-9619
E-mail: mboot@cfr.org

Location:
New York, New York

Media downloads:
high resolution photo (JPG, 137K)
additional CV (DOC, 29K)



Expertise:

National security; military technology; military history; U.S. foreign policy; terrorism and guerrilla warfare; terrorism; the media.
Experience:

Contributing editor to The Weekly Standard (current); editorial features editor (1997-02), the Wall Street Journal, and writer and editor (1994-97); writer and editor, The Christian Science Monitor (1992-94).
Education:

M.A. in Diplomatic History, Yale University (1992); B.A. in History, University of California, Berkeley (1991).
Honors:

In 2004, Max Boot was named by the World Affairs Councils of America one of "the 500 most influential people in the United States in the field of foreign policy." Boot's "Savage Wars of Peace" was awarded the 2003 Wallace M. Greene Award for best nonfiction book on the Marine Corps, and selected as one of the best books of 2002 by the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post and The Christian Science Monitor. Two-time finalist, Gerald A. Loeb Award for Business Journalism; twice selected as one of America's 30 leading business journalists under 30 by the TGFR Newsletter.

Selected Publications:


Currently writing "War Made New: Four Great Revolutions That Changed the Face of Battle" (Gotham Books/Penguin); "The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power" (Basic Books, 2002); "Out of Order: Arrogance, Corruption and Incompetence on the Bench" (Basic Books, 199; contributes regularly to The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, USA Today, Financial Times, The Times, The Weekly Standard, and other publications.



Research Projects

* Study Group on the History of Military Revolutions


He has written over 200 articles, You can go through them here
http://www.cfr.org/bios/bio.html?id=5641

Max Boot is an editorial features editor at the Wall Street Journal. Boot is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations (2001). Boot is the author of The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power. According to Publisher's Weekly, which reviewed the book, he "has a reputation as a fire-breathing polemicist and unabashed imperialist." He is a self-described neo-conservative.

Table of contents [showhide]
1 Basic biography

2 In his own words

3 Articles by Boot

4 External links

[edit]Basic biography
According to his Benador Associates' biography:

"Max Boot is Olin Senior Fellow in National Security Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, and a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard.
"His last book, The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power (Basic Books) was selected as one of the best books of 2002 by The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times and The Christian Science Monitor. He is now writing his next book, a history of military technology revolutions over the past 500 years, tentatively titled, War Made New: Four Great Revolutions That Changed the Face of Battle.
"Before joining the Council in October 2002, Boot spent eight years as a writer and editor at The Wall Street Journal, the last five years as editorial features editor. He was twice named one of America's 30 leading business journalists under 30 by the TGFR Newsletter. From 1992 to 1994 he was an editor and writer at The Christian Science Monitor.
"Boot's writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Financial Times, The Weekly Standard, Foreign Affairs, and many other publications
"Boot is a frequent public speaker who has addressed institutions ranging from the Naval War College to the American Bar Association to Dartmouth College. He has also appeared on CNN, Fox News Channel, CNBC, ABC, National Public Radio, and numerous other television and radio outlets.
"Boot holds a bachelor's degree in history, with high honors, from the University of California, Berkeley (1991), and a master's degree in history from Yale University (1992). He lives with his wife and three children in Larchmont, N.Y."
[edit]In his own words
Max Boot, Herzliya Conference, Israel, December 16, 2004:

"But then why is the term being used to apply to people today like Paul Wolfowitz or Bill Kristol, or even little old me when I don’t – I’ve never been a Leninist, or a Trotskyite, or even a democrat. I’ve always been a con, and no neo about it. And yet nevertheless, I find myself, and a number of other people, being described as, as neo-cons."[1] (http://www.herzliyaconference.org/Eng/_ ... goryID=188)
[edit]Articles by Boot
Max Boot, "What the Heck Is a Neocon? (http://www.benadorassociates.com/article/180)", Wall Street Journal, December 30, 2002.
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?ti ... _biography