> It is the American state doing what the American state has always done when it needed staff it could not otherwise generate. World War II offered the GI Bill. Vietnam offered college deferments. The post 9/11 wars offered signing bonuses and citizenship pathways. The Iran war will need to offer debt relief. The economics of the indebted American 20-and 30-something make this the most efficient conversion mechanism available to the Pentagon and the Trump administration.

This paragraph is weird. It suggests that the GI Bill, enacted towards the end of WWII, was used to incentivize enlistment during the war that was already nearly over when it was enacted. It's a strange world where information flows backward in time. The college deferments of Vietnam were a way of getting a better assignment (and often an officer commission instead of enlisting) than you would have if you were drafted, people took the option because it was a way to survive a terrible situation where the alternative was to go and jump out of a helicopter and hope to live. Signing bonuses have been a thing for ages, predating 9/11, and used for select fields that had a harder time recruiting or retaining (pilots, for instance, weren't hard to recruit, but were hard to retain so various bonuses were used to keep them in the active duty service).

There are also existing student debt forgiveness programs that don't require anyone to go to fight in a war almost no one in the US wants to fight. There are certainly a lot of desperate people who would take them up on an offer like this, but I sincerely doubt it'll cover the necessary staffing gaps in the armed services. Also, if you've got a college degree you will usually try to go in as an officer, not enlisted, and what we'll need with boots on the ground are enlisted soldiers, not a larger officer core. So you're offering people debt forgiveness for shitty pay to get shot at in a war they don't actually support.

https://www.dfas.mil/MilitaryMembers/payentitlements/Pay-Tab... - monthly enlisted pay rates

For being in combat zones they'd not pay income tax (helpful) and there's combat pay and there are other incentives and subsidies they will receive. But enlisted pay still sucks. Let's say we're generous to these enlisted debtors and drop them in as E-4s and credit them with 10 years of service (for pay calculation purposes), that's about $46k/year for basic pay for them. The debt forgiveness has to be very generous, and we're already blowing up our deficit for this war so it'll only be worse. The US would become, in this article's proposition, the payer for $40-100k in debt per person. It's a terrible economic proposition when ending the damn war would be much, much cheaper.

He really doesn't want a ground war.

I'd file this one under Cargo-Cult Fantasies.

"The counter-trade is Taiwan. Beijing has wanted a public American recalibration on Taiwan for two decades. "