(the IDF upper levels want to get rid of conscription, and the officer corps is entirely professional these days).
Most soldiers go into officer course while still conscripts. You can, in fact, go into the officer course 6 months in, finish it in 6 months, and then be given command of conscripts who were in the army longer than you were. This sometimes leads to subordination problems.
All officers must sign for additional time in the army, but most won't continue with it as a lifetime career. Most low ranking officers in IDF you can call conscripts++.
The idea of getting rid of conscripts exists, but it will never happen until the geopolitical situation around Israel changes significantly.
The reason for that is the defense plans are based around drafting a large amount of reservists, and you can't have a pool of reservists without conscript army, unless you are USA (read: extremely rich). Israel can't afford a large professional army.
Consider also the state of mind of a reservist IDF soldier. A conscript, young and idealistic, might take military ethics seriously. An IDF reservist opinion is basically this: "I'd rather burn all the children in Gaza, than leave my own children without a father." The officers are aware of that. In any large operation, many officers will also be reservists.
"Revolutions come and go, but the government remains in charge".
]]>Book 14. The protagonists discover they are just characters in a book, and their survival depends on how good the series sell. Title: "The Scribbling on the Fourth Wall".
]]>Wait, why? This is such a waste. Da'esh are perfect cannon fodder against any eldritch stuff. Just open a gate in Iraq and tell them there are demonic infidels on the other side. That's what they live for, basically.
]]>]]>Some of them get to die. "Call no man happy until he is dead" and all that.
“She was called Victoria, because she had beaten us in battle, seven hundred years before, and she was called Gloriana, because she was glorious, and she was called the Queen, because the human mouth was not shaped to say her true name. She was huge, huger than I had imagined possible, and she squatted in the shadows staring down at us, without moving.”
Yes! Make The Queen Great Again!
]]>CASE NIGHTMARE ГОЛУБОЙ
Translated to Russian, this is CASE NIGHTMARE GAY.
...I don't want to know.
]]>There probably exist plans to sacrifice 90% of the human population to power some ultimate magic weapon.
I wonder though, at which point in the story is humanity going to sink to such lows in the struggle for survival that it will no longer be possible for the readers to sympathize with it?
]]>Did any author ever explored the parallel between Arthur, the Once and Future King, who will return one day from the island of Avalon to save Britain...
...and Cthulhu, The Great Dreamer, who will rise one day from the island of R'lyeh and eat our brains?
Because I think they might be the same person.
]]>Charlie already did, several times. Vile Offspring from Accelerando is one. Of course you can write about superhuman intelligence. What you can't do is convincingly describe the working of their mind, because it is by definition beyond human comprehension.
]]>Poor bastards. Don't they know Cthulhu is only vulnerable to being rammed by boats? :-)
]]>No one is going to do anything about North Korea. Developed countries would rather pay them off and avert their eyes when they kidnap people or experiment on their own population or whatever. Otherwise, the steady supply of smartphones might get disrupted.
Everyone is going to ignore the moral hazard of having nuclear bomb as an immunity ticket. Other countries will follow the example of North Korea. There'll be more of them, too, because technologies get cheaper as time passes. So you'll get more and more craphole countries doing whatever they want with impunity, because nukes.
Eventually, it will all blow up. Nukes will start to be used, by rebel groups against governments, by governments against opposition, by organized crime, by religious cults. It will be shocking the first few times, but the people in the developed world will soon get accustomed to having "fallout" mentioned in the weather reports.
And someone might wonder idly about an alternate universe where USA destroyed USSR when it had the chance, and remained a nuclear monopoly to this day. But what's the point of such exercises, really?
]]>The entire history of mankind.
]]>An ultimatum to North Korea. You have a week to peacefully dismantle your government and re-join South Korea. If you don't, get ready for Fallout 3 LARP.
And then, if North Korea decides to go out in a blaze of gore and nukes Seoul/Tokyo/ThePacificOcean (because let's face it, the chance they could nuke CONUS is minimal), suddenly you have a good reason to blow them up.
]]>