The Young Canadian Sailor

Yay! I just got a Gmail account! No more storage problems for me!

*Ahem*

Carry on.

This blog is going on hiatus. The recruiting office said I could expect an offer of employment sometime before October, and I've had to borrow yet more money from my family (to whom I owe a debt that extends far beyond the monetary).

So I'm putting the blog on hold. No one wants to hear about a whining civilian.

See y'all in October...

Well, I looked at a calender, and if the CF wanted to start a Basic course in the first week of September, I figure they should be letting me know any day now.

Yup. Any day now...

Tomorrow, I'm going to go in person to the recruiting office. Can't let them forget about me, right?

Also, I've started adding an advertisement of this blog to the signature of my emails, so hopefully someone might actually read this.

Keep on truckin'

Spooky.

Well, I put up a "tagboard" so that people reading this can write back to me, without editing the blog itself. This is good.

Still, one of my friends is leaving (just for a few weeks, but still) and I can't help wishing that it was me going. I hold fast to the tenuous faith that, if the Canadian Forces wanted to start a Basic Course the first week of September, then they should be calling any day now.

Yup. Any day now.

You know, one of these days this blog will have something to do with the military...

I've got a really good feeling that TODAY'S THE DAY.

Here's hoping...

Ugh. I was trying to find a way to have a "tagboard" or a place for people to write notes on the blog, but my HTML just isn't up to making it look good yet.

I'll ask Ellen about it tomorrow...

Night all.

This is a picture of my grandparents on my mother's side, Gramma and Old Gramps (don't ask).

The picture was taken on the 60th anniversary of the D-Day invasion, at which my grandfather served in a frigate offshore during the landing.

There is no particular reason I'm putting this up now, save that I just got the picture...

My wife is so smart. Go check it out.

Go now. NOW!

Because I am having such a difficult time actually starting my military career, I recently have been focusing on the financial and self-improvement aspects of the Armed Forces, as that is what I'm currently lacking in my life.

What I have neglected to mention, both on this blog and when replying to people who ask why I'm joining, is the other, perhaps more important reason. I feel there is a war coming, a great conflict of our age. Now, when you say something like this, it makes you sound like a nut, a doomsayer wandering the streets with a sandwich board saying "repent sinners for the End is near."

But I have reasons for my belief. The first is timing. Wars traditionally go in cycles. Now, there are many, many exceptions to this rule, but generally a country cannot fight more than one major war in a generation. Won or lost, a country that just fought a conflict that was at all in doubt generally needs at least 20 years or so to "catch its breath," so to speak. Especially with the modern system of citizen soldiers, one cannot take that many people out of the economy for too long.

The other side to this is that after about a generation or so, a country begins to "feel its oats" and the idea of the use of force as a diplomatic tool no longer seems as repugnant as it did right after the last armistice. Countries become increasingly belligerent, until a major war once again breaks out, the horrors of war are revisited, and the cycle repeats itself.

This is the second generation since WWII. Now, don't get me wrong. There have been peaceful eras in our past before, so the timing is not perfect, but even today the "war is bad" sentiment is increasingly not based on living experience, at least among the policy makers of the West.

The second reason I believe a great war is coming is that wars are generally fought over one or more of three major issues: Land, Religion, or Resources.

Okay, here we go. First: Land. Palestine and Israel is an obvious land issue, but one that has been brewing for a while. Still, it could go off in a new regional war, which may drag other countries in. Global Warming could also precipitate a crisis, for example over a now-navigable water route through the Northwest Passage. Or, there is always the unintended effects of a separation movement to trigger a conflict (for example, Quebec). In all actuality, though, land probably won't be the main causus belli of the next war.

Religion: Over the past few centuries, religion has been on the decline as a major cause of wars. All this could change, though. Firstly, more and more political thinkers have begun thinking of Islam as a "toxic meme,"or a wrong way of thinking. While this idea has taken on a more politically correct appearance, a war to change a peoples' attitudes is essentially a religious crusade. This is particularly worrying considering the increasing amount of religion is the politics of the United States. A war against Iran, for example, would almost certainly be fought to remove "breeding ground for terrorists," or in other words to change the hearts and minds of the citizens. This wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing, of course. There are beliefs that are inimical to a Western democracy, but it follows from the same logic as previous wars of religion.

Resources: This one's the kicker. Oil. Now, oil won't simply disappear in a global catastrophe. Instead, oil prices will simply climb as the easily mined sources are depleted and the more expensive sources are tapped (like the Alberta Oil Sands). This, of course, will trigger a redistribution of wealth as oil becomes both more expensive and rarer, and previously rich oil producing nations find themselves forced into poverty as their oil reserves run dry.

The issue is exacerbated by a simultaneous increase in demand by developing nations like India and especially China. While the old and new Iraq wars were not fought expressly over oil rights, it will only be a matter of time before a war is, as a powerful nation takes steps to secure a stable source of oil for its own prosperity.

While the West likes to believe that any future war will be short and, for the West, at least, victorious, the truth is that there are numerous scenarios that would lead to a full-scale war. An isolated conflict of NATO (or even a U.S. unencumbered elsewhere) versus Iran, say, could well be handled by the standing army, but a more general conflict, against, for instance, a pan-Islamic, or even pan-Arab (or pan-Arab/Persian) coalition would require a true war-footing on the part of Europe and North America. A non-nuclear conflict against China, on the other hand, would truly be World War III.

Sooner or later a country will try to continue its foreign policy through means of direct force, and sooner or later that will result in a conflict that will effect Canadian interests. When that happens, I do not want to be working selling computer games for minimum wage. And, if I'm going to help my country when she needs me, I need to get the training necessary to be of any use.

So, Recruiting Centre: Call me, 'kay?