I had a MEPs exam at Ft. Meade in the spring and found I had a form of red green color blindness, which would nominally discount me from military service, but I received a waiver. Even kids being overweight by twenty or thirty pounds isn’t a huge issue, since that can be reduced prior and during basic training.

The real issue is criminal records, but thanks to the recession, all the services have met their quotas thanks to absorbing high school and even college grads (like me) who would normally be in the civilian work force. Unfortunately since I’m going into the USMC rather than the army or nat’l guard, I don’t get a fat signing bonus.

Anyways, it seems like a country as populous as the United States will always have an adequate pool of manpower to choose from.

Afghanistan is a failed state. Pakistan is getting there. Similar things could be said about Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, to varying degrees. None of these countries are able to supply the education and social services that their people need. This isn’t a problem that can be solved by USMil or USAID, it needs a wholly different way of looking at the problem.”

I agree its useful not to just look at the global socio-economic problems that confront us strictly as matters of security, but there is a limit to that kind of thinking. For example, if we see terrorism strictly as a sympton of a number of self-perceived global injustices (therefore fighting terrorism/terrorists is a futile matter until these global injustices can be perceived as ‘rightened’) then this means we are entering a stage in the war on terrorism that requires nation building on a global scale and requires all the tangibles and intangibles that we don’t have (money, resources, global goodwill etc).

Even if you are talking about not necessarily providing these services (ie health services, education) directly to populations in question, but rather empowering countries and governments with tools to do it on their own (which is arguably what we already do, maybe just on a lesser scale than you desire) it becomes a matter of politics and some places like Turkmenistan probably wouldn’t be keen on building an American University in Ashgabat.

What I’m saying is its great to think about things in this way, but in the real world it has limited utility and we should already raise the fundamental questions Can we? and Should we? before taking any proactive measures in the world.

Like less than one percent of the value of the gas/oil/whatever that flows down it.

Pity he Afghans don’t have a pipeline (yet).