Thwaites Call For Mandatory Military Service:Albeit Late..

Opposition spokesper­son on Education Ronald Thwaites recent­ly called for manda­to­ry mil­i­tary ser­vice for some young peo­ple who are not on the way to college.
Or in oth­er words what he called “unat­tached youth”.
Ronnie Thwaites A Catholic Deacon, A lawyer, for­mer radio Talk show host Parliamentarian and for­mer Education Minister has a wealth of expe­ri­ence around the issues of youth and the prob­lems they face.
It is all the more curi­ous that Mister Thwaites nev­er used his posi­tion in any of his sev­er­al capac­i­ties to push the Administration of which he was a part for years to adopt his idea into law.

Said Thwaites: 

I believe our prime min­is­ter recent­ly vis­it­ed Israel, and they have a sys­tem like that because they are fear­ful of war and unrest,” Thwaites noted.

Our state of crime and social unrest exceeds, sta­tis­ti­cal­ly, the indices of a civ­il war, and for all of the oth­er mea­sures that we will take, led by the lead­ers of crime fight­ing in this coun­try, they are like­ly to be more expen­sive, they are like­ly to be more puni­tive than nec­es­sary, if we only had a prop­er sys­tem of reori­en­ta­tion,” he stated.
Thwaites argued any such pro­gram should leave out weapons training.
The call came amidst a bill being shep­herd­ed through the house by Andrew Holness the Prime Minister which would cre­ate 700 spaces in the JDF for such youths.

As a polit­i­cal leader it behoove Mister Thwaites to read up on the ben­e­fits of mil­i­tary ser­vice, both manda­to­ry and voluntary.
Several nations adopt and use manda­to­ry mil­i­tary ser­vice to their advan­tage , not just for mil­i­tary rea­sons. cer­tain­ly the Swiss are not fight­ing wars but they have used that mod­el to their advantage.

I applaud the Prime Minister for this move , as well as for­mer min­is­ter of nation­al secu­ri­ty Peter Bunting who sup­port the bill while voic­ing con­cerns that the bill once it become law would effec­tive­ly low­er the age of recruits to the JDF from 18 to 17 years old.
Despite my sup­port for this pro­gram I believe it does not go near­ly far enough in address­ing the prob­lem of youth unemployment.

On March 19th last year I wrote an arti­cle titled” it may be time for manda­to­ry ser­vice and arm­ing the pop­u­la­tion”.
I argued then for manda­to­ry mil­i­tary train­ing for young peo­ple not going to col­lege. I also made the case for arm­ing the cit­i­zen­ry which I believe Government will be forced to look at eventually.
I said then that this could eas­i­ly be done through leg­is­la­tion which puts in place seri­ous back­ground checks which includes psy­cho­log­i­cal eval­u­a­tion and manda­to­ry con­tin­u­ous train­ing while increas­ing sig­nif­i­cant­ly the penal­ties for gun crimes.
This by itself is not a sil­ver bul­let which will dri­ve down crime, but it is one more thing which will seri­ous­ly and pos­i­tive­ly impact this out of con­trol crime sit­u­a­tion in Jamaica which nei­ther the Government nor the police seem to know how to handle.

Lets see if sim­ple com­mon sense approach­es like these can catch on giv­ing hope to young peo­ple while help­ing to reduce vio­lent crime.

It May Be Time For Mandatory Military Service And Arming The Population.…

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