Dear Director, first of all I greet you and congratulate you on the work you do every day.
I am an Army soldier in sp and I am writing to you to have an opinion on the following.
I have been working for this great administration for ten years. They are few? Are so many? I do not know this. I can certainly say that I have formed some ideas and formulated some solutions.
The years pass, I have been abroad on a mission, I have carried out many jobs on the national territory and I have seen people pass by... I ask myself: but is it possible that the armed forces structure must be based on a totally incorrect competitive system ?
Let me explain better: every year the carabinieri, finance, police and so on... hire thousands and thousands of kids, newly hired by the Army. Boys who are between the ages of twenty and twenty-eight or so. The paradox is that among the various armed forces and law enforcement in general, the one that needs young people most is the one that loses them the most, that is, the Army.
Over the years I have worked alongside foreign armies for various things and it's not nice when you find yourself faced with platoons with an average age of twenty and yours is almost forty!
I say: let's eliminate challenges between administrations, just to be able to say and show off hiring numbers to the population and make ourselves look good.
There is a big problem here that the higher bodies are underestimating. Anyone who wants to be a policeman or carabiniere and so on must first guarantee ten or fifteen years of operation in the army and then choose whether to transfer to the territorial forces, in this way we would resolve the seniority of the Army and be able to increasingly raise the level of preparation , we would solve the modernization and in the area we would have mature and adult people with a certain experience.
I'll give you an example: a boy decides to enlist, guarantees at least ten years, then the administration offers him to transfer to other forces or to remain in the Army, as an instructor or other roles.
Every month I read provincial articles where they welcome hundreds of new private agents, new private carabinieri and so on and I ask myself: but those are a young force who should be with us in the most tortured places on the planet, in tents, in helicopters in the cold or at two thousand feet and instead they drive around in comfortable cars for hours in the heat while we young soldiers are surrounded by colleagues with twenty years of service and with a high age and spending nights in tents or six months on a mission has become too stressful and exhausting.
I conclude by saying that the young recruits must serve the country, the new agents in the area or the new carabinieri can very well be transferred by modernizing the military with at least 10 or 15 years of operational life, solving in one fell swoop various problems that are becoming unmanageable.
I greet you and await your consideration.
Good job!
Unsigned letter
Dear reader, thank you for the compliments and above all for the testimony.
Allow me three observations, which are absolutely personal and questionable.
The first is that the problem of the average age has also afflicted the police forces for years and, if it is true that operating in "disadvantaged" places is hard for people over forty, it is equally problematic at the same age to deal with criminals on a daily basis various and common criminals (de noantri or imported).
The second is that the choices to join the police force or the armed forces can be alternated but must not represent an obligatory path.
Let me explain: wearing a uniform represents a more than honorable but counter-current path in times in which personal interests and/or vanities dominate national culture. However, putting oneself at the service for the order and safety of fellow citizens or doing so for their defense in arms are extremely different activities and not ambivalent. While law enforcement focuses on internal security, law enforcement and citizen protection with limits on the use of weapons or coercion, "armed" forces are primarily oriented towards national defense and military operations, i.e. areas in which the use of violence is (potentially ) maximum.
They are different choices, to be made consistently.
If a career in the police force represented the Checcozalonian "permanent position" and not a "mission", the mafias would occupy every political, economic and financial space.
If a career in the armed forces represented the Checcozalonian "permanent position" and not a "mission", Italy would still be a defeated country, servile and charlatanly incapable of protecting its own interests. The military's first fear? It would be a public opinion (re)educated (by others) for almost a century to squawk, always and in any case, against it.
Risks, you will agree, are absolutely unacceptable which - we hope - we will never have to face.
The third is that in the military field a pre-established stop already exists, for example, for Air Force pilots. The State spends millions on training, ergo it wants to be able to have a guaranteed return before possible escapes into the civilized world. Perhaps, with the ever-increasing technological sophistication on the way, the next soldiers will also involve investments such as to make their premature exit uneconomical, imposing a greater and incentivized compulsory shutdown.
The real crisis today is perhaps in "vocations": why enlist in the FF.OO. or in the FF.AA.? To realize, after too long, that the enthusiasm and the illusions as twenty-year-olds - in Italy - can't they last forever?
Photo: US Army
