Speculative question about war

One advantage of employing children is that their minds are more easily trained. Perhaps not spoiled rich children, but for poor children, without any previous education or stable life, war is a step up, not a step down. They might be more accepting of the ideological reasons for fighting, ie. brainwashing, and automatic weapons preclude the need for good marksmanship.
 
At what age, and for what reasons, would you send or allow your children to go off to war?
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There's two scenarios to consider:
1. My child decides to join the military voluntarily, to fight in a war effort.

Obviously my child would have to be 18 years of age to qualify for military service(I live in Canada), at which point what influence could I have? Allowing my child to go off to war at 18 really isn't my call. I mean, I could say to him/her, 'i will not allow you to go off to war!' (something i'd probably say, despite the fact I have no children) but really, what say do I have?

2. The government of the day legislates conscription.

If my child receives a draft notice in the mail and has moral dilemmas about fighting in a war he/she does not agree with....well....then I'd probably do everything I could to get them out of the country.

Under what circumstances would you put a rifle or a molotov in a 15 year-old's hand? How about a 12 year-old?
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This is a tough one.

I just started reading, 'Shake Hands With the Devil' by LGEN. Romeo Dallaire. He was forces commander of the UN Peace Keeping Mission in Rwanda. His book will explain under what circumstances a person hands a machine gun to a 12 year old - and its not their parents.....

I saw him speak some time ago about his experiences in Rwanda, he spoke of one particular incident where he, and three other soldiers under his command, came accross a 15 year old Tootsie being beaten to death by a mob.....all the while gun-toting 12 year olds taunted him and his men to just try and do something about it...I can't tell you how quiet the audience got, how sick to my stomache I got while listening to him explain the circumstances, in explicit detail, under which these 12 year-olds would pick-up a rifle and defend the brutal attack on one helpless pregnant teenager...

I suppose everyone has a breaking point.
 
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spidergoat said:
One advantage of employing children is that their minds are more easily trained. Perhaps not spoiled rich children, but for poor children, without any previous education or stable life, war is a step up, not a step down. They might be more accepting of the ideological reasons for fighting, ie. brainwashing, and automatic weapons preclude the need for good marksmanship.
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Terrorist organizations worldwide agree with you.
 
As some time has passed and we've all had the opportunity to think about or forget entirely the question, I raise the inevitable follow-up:

• On what grounds do we judge the presence and use of child fighters in other conflicts?

For instance, are the LRA and the Palestinian militants any different in their approach to and regard for child fighters? Do those or other examples compare at all to the situations in which we would send our own children to fight before they are legally old enough by national law or international convention?
 
There are implied reasons for war, caused reasons for war and just reasons for wars. Those needs need to be emotional supported to propagate and justify the existence of the set war. Having a reason to war creates the canvas that allows details like minimum age participation.

Implied reasons for war are usually events that lead to the war such as the 911 plane incident. It implied we need to retaliate when in fact the tension between the Middle East and the United States had been in place for much longer than sept 11 2001.

Caused reasons for war are usually economic and or territorial.

Just reason (justification) could be exampled by religion, nationalism and morality.

Having said that what each person weights (indexes) for each reason will create a function or formula to base a decision on.

I personally believe most wars are unjust and that there exists a universal morality that binds humanity to the idea of wrongness of killing for something other than food.

At this present time; my personal justification says that there should have been an economic and non-military way to avoid war in Afghanistan and Iraq, and that our presence is El Salvador and other Central American countries in a military fashion does not meet that criteria.

But if one did arise the predominant factor would be based on the need age wise in order to prevail with a floor (as opposed to ceiling) where they would be of such diminished use that it would not be relevant if they were in service or not in service.

I would say if we had an all out non-avoidable war that called for the maixmum human resources of the United States that 16 would be the absolute min exceptable age.

I don’t ever see an extremity of that magnitude to come about.

Undecided in response to your post about cnn, children and war the one variable that is different in children fighting on cnn is that they are fighting from their own homeland as opposed to someone else country
 
tiassa said:
At what age, and for what reasons, would you send or allow your children to go off to war?

Under what circumstances would you put a rifle or a molotov in a 15 year-old's hand? How about a 12 year-old?
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If it seemed that they would be better off to die fighting than to live in the post-defeat world, I suppose.
 
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