Very nice speech, but the probability of a given American serving in the military is overwhelmingly determined by his or her economic class, and his or her family members' prior military service. And what that means, in trems you can take to the bank, is that kids from the former Confederacy serve in proportionally higher numbers than kids from the former Union States. The decidedly poorer quality of education in the defeated Southern states contributes to this over-representation. So it's hardly astonishing that the military pulls hard on the teat of "God" in its effort to orient and motivate its recruits. Not a lot of them had read Braudel.

If you don't spend all your online time on the Dawkins site, then you may know that Israel is considering yanking the military exemption from the Ultra Orthodox, the worst religious parisites on earth. David Ben Gurion accommodated them because he assumed that they would die out in a generation. In the United States, we have almost the opposite problem. The brainwashed Christian teenagers go out and fight these brainless and immoral wars against defenseless but equally brainwashed Muslims, while we cool-minded seculars go shopping and pretend that we care.

Imaginary solution, as every proposed solution is:

Make military service compulsory, period. "Tiitle 9" may get your daughter killed. No deferrments. If you're a C4 quad, we'll find something you can do with your mind. If you have Down's Syndome, we'll harness your good nature and brave love of life. If you're in a coma, we'll dress you in a uniform and count your days of service. To borrow from the cheesy film adaptation of Robert A. Heinlein's "Starship Troopers," "Everyone fights. Nobody quits" No one is allowed to slink off, like our former President Shrub. If this were our national policy, how often would be deploying troops overseas?