Starmer’s plan for unemployed people into army for Ukraine resurrects US plan that killed 3x more soldiers

US Vietnam-war ‘Project 100,000’ saw huge casualty rates among soldiers drafted from unemployed

Keir Starmer’s plan to put unemployed people in the army to increase numbers that can be sent to the front line against Russia ‘to protect the peace’ has been compared to a US plan so ill-devised that it became known as “McNamara’s folly” and killed triple the number of its inductees as died among ordinary soldiers.

Then-Defense Secretary Robert McNamara’s misnamed ‘Project 100,000’ – it actually affected three and a half times that number of men – lowered the entry requirements for army volunteers and draftees significantly, to pull in unemployed men, many of whom had minor physical or mental health issues that would have previously ruled them out. The Washington Monthly later described the plan as a programme designed to protect young privileged men from conscription, saying that:

The program offered a one-way ticket to Vietnam, where these men fought and died in disproportionate numbers … the men … provided the necessary cannon fodder to help evade the political horror of dropping student deferments or calling up the reserves, which were sanctuaries for the lily-white.

Labour has made clear that it intends to wage war on the unemployed and wants to force the ‘unsustainable’ disabled, the long-term sick, the mentally ill and others into work that medical specialists have classified as unfit to work, by slashing sickness and disability benefits to unsurvivable levels and making people jump through even more hoops to qualify for any support at all. For those who remain unable to comply, the government has opened a route to early death carried out by corporations for profit – and has refused to exclude people with Downs Syndrome, diabetes, arthritis and anorexia as justified victims – and is now looking to put them into warzones.

One observer who spotted the similarities to ‘McNamara’s folly’ described Starmer’s plan as feeding unwanted people into a shredder:

You don’t want them in your army unless your goal is literally feeding them into the shredder.

Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian men have been fed into the shredder or ‘meat-grinder’ of the Russian front, causing Zelenskiy’s regime such a shortage of troops that his operatives are abducting men from Ukrainian streets and forcing them into the military.

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