A life is a life, no matter the age

by Jason Lewis

War is the economic equivalent of salt; it has the ability to give a dish’s flavor a boost, or the ability to ruin the flavor. A good war is sometimes the best option; it was during the Great Depression. Production goes up, research increases and the cogs of industry turn smoothly with the lubricating power of government spending. The trade-off for this boost to nearly every kind of capital a country has at its disposal is the loss, in abundance, of another kind of capital: human capital.

Every person that dies in a war is a loss. All of the skills, knowledge and raw muscle power that a person might have are nullified upon death. While war should be used sparingly, when someone does opt to salt their economy (or anything else), why not waste as little human capital as possible?

By using children to fight wars instead of adults, you gain many advantages. It takes half the time to get a new 9-year-old than it does to get a high school graduate, so it is easier to recuperate the loss and fewer educational resources go to waste. Children lack the experience that adults have, so they will more readily accept what they are doing and seeing as OK. This will eliminate the moral and practical concerns that plague the adult army.

John Watson, a famous behavioral psychologist, was confident that he could condition a child to become any sort of person. He never made this claim about adults because adults have a rough time learning new behaviors with the more experience they have. By the time most people are adults, they have never been a soldier. Learning to be one would require huge amounts of effort to overcome learned behavior patterns. Children can jump right in.

The only time that would be hard for a child to cope with is after they stop being a soldier. The reports from Lost Boys of Sudan corroborate this indirectly. I had the chance to listen to Ishmael Beah, a Lost Boy, talk on C-SPAN2 about his experience, and I realized that he had no problems with being a soldier until he was no longer one. Then, a nurse at his refugee camp began to tell him that he was not a bad person for what he had done. The insinuation that he was a bad person was probably what did him any psychological harm, not the actions themselves.

Children demonstrate a large degree of plasticity when it comes to getting over their actions. There was a “Dateline” story of Indonesian child prostitutes who were freed when they were between ages 8 and 12. Some are going on to be doctors, lawyers and other high-class professionals. Ishmael Beah was talking about going on to graduate school, and perhaps getting a Ph.D.

The emotional problems faced by the boy soldiers are, at most, equal to those faced by adult soldiers. With this equality in place, I do not see why there should be any opposition to using human capital more efficiently if we are going to use it at all.

War is never a child’s game

by Sujay Kumar

On Ralph’s fifth birthday, he had a sweet Power Rangers birthday cake. When he turned 6, Ralph finally learned to use the potty all by himself. And the night before his seventh birthday, Ralph learned how to cock, aim and fire an assault rifle.

Boy soldiers are children who are used in military combat. Today, more than 300,000 children are serving as soldiers in insurgent groups or governments in more than 20 countries around the world, according to Human Rights Watch.

In the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, children have been used in suicide bombing attacks. In Chechnya, separatist forces used many children to fight on the front lines. In Nepal, more than 6,000 children serve in the Maoist forces. And it goes on.

From 1993 to 2002 during the Sierra Leone conflict, children were used as soldiers. In the recent movie, “Blood Diamond,” a fisherman loses his son after the Revolutionary United Front invades his village. The boy is then brainwashed into worshipping the ideals of the RUF, so much so that he forgets his father. While this is just Hollywood drama, the film presents a captivating image of boy soldiers.

In the Geneva Conventions, it states that children who are under 15 do not take part in combat and shall not be recruited into combat. You may wonder, “Seven, 13, 16, what difference does it make when you’re holding a loaded gun?”

The answer is that it makes all the difference.

A child who is torn away from his family and forced to join the army is not the same as a 16-year-old who has voluntarily, or by law, enlisted to fight. The child is stripped of his childhood. Memories of playing with friends and going to school are replaced with training. All this is done in the name of violence.

The years from 5 to 15 of a child’s life are extremely valuable in shaping the mind. It’s that time period of my life that I can truly remember as being able to think on my own and make decisions. At the same time, it’s before I was given any real responsibilities. It was wonderful.

Granted these lines blur for every child, it is still not right to try to instill in that child “values” for them to follow while giving them a loaded gun and a living target.

When I was 10, my friends and I would have sleepovers where one thing and one thing only mattered: GoldenEye. The object of the video game was to kill the other players. Stuck in a basement for hours, we were hopped up on Pepsi, fruit snacks and adrenaline. Our parents would have to come downstairs throughout the night to tell us to shut up and calm down.

Those were amazing times. On the flip side, we were playing Goldeneye. Replace the video game controllers and parents with loaded AK-47s and war generals and you get a violent mess.