About Aaron Woell’s column, the United States Armed Forces are currently experiencing trouble with their “poverty draft,” the $2 billion business of targeting for duty high-achieving young people in low-income communities and communities of color or ethnicity.

Army Times states that 35 percent to 40 percent of personnel in the four branches did not complete their first term. The government thinks the problem must be the slogan or lack of money.

It doesn’t take much to figure out that it’s just a case of people overcoming the adversity of the American public school system and actually becoming smarter.

In this time of economic growth, who can blame John Q. Apple Pie for choosing civilian education and employment over a four-year contract that strips him of many civil rights and makes him into a indentured servant trained to mindlessly kill on command?

The World War I and World War II days of good vs. evil are over. It’s hard to feel a sense of duty, of serving your country, when we’re fighting far inferior forces in other people’s civil wars and operations over cheaper oil.

More people probably died from our extremely overzealous “humanitarian” involvement in Kosovo than would have if we had watched from afar. It must have slipped their minds to thank us.

Who’s the selective humanitarian official that decided to intervene with drastic force where 2,000 people had died from civil war in Eastern Europe and not associate ourselves with the millions of people in several African countries who have been killed by their own government?

Why are we sending almost $300 million to a Colombian government that annually kills over a thousand of its own civilians?

Is throwing more money towards the military going to be in ANYONE’S best interest?

Pentagon spending today is 90 percent of the arms race Cold War average. Even though it’s proven that our fleet of $33 million F-15 fighters are far superior to anything else in the world, we’re spending $64 BILLION to scrap them all and replace them with F-22’s that cost $188 million a pop.

With $64 billion dollars, we could modernize and repair 60 percent of all schools in the United States.

We need DECREASED military spending. According to Dr. Lawrence Korb, former assistant Secretary of Defense under President Reagan, if we cut military by a mere 15 percent, about $40 billion, we could fully fund the Head Start program to educate the impoverished, bring many of the public schools up to minimal building safety codes, provide health insurance to ALL uninsured children and hire enough teachers to reduce class sizes and improve education.

Why is it that in Congress’s discretionary budget, approximately 6 percent goes to education, 4 percent to health care and over 51 percent to the military?

Compared to the rest of the industrialized world we are 18th in math and science scores and 10th in per student spending.

We’re the only country of them to not provide health care for ALL children and therefore we’re 13th in infant mortality rates.

But drum roll please, we’re number one in military spending.

What does that say about our priorities?

Tai Ward

Junior

Computer engineering