PLUS: teenage gang-raping Mexicans; this tidbit:
Back in the 1960s, the Air Force officer qualifying exam had a 100 item Officer Biographical Inventory. The latter was a personality test that asked about “past experiences, preferences, and certain personality characteristics related to measures of officer effectiveness.” It inquired into enthusiasm for sports and hunting, and was only vaguely correlated with IQ.
(A retired Air Force test psychologist told me that this section was later dropped because women did very poorly on it, and urban and suburban youths didn’t do as well as country boys. “It was politically incorrect, but”—he recalled wistfully—“It was a predictor of success as an officer.”)
Dispatching more troops to Afghanistan would be a monumental bet and probably a bad one, most likely a waste of lives and resources that might simply empower the Taliban.
In particular, one of the most compelling arguments against more troops rests on this stunning trade-off: For the cost of a single additional soldier stationed in Afghanistan for one year, we could build roughly 20 schools there.
