I thank Lucy Cooke for her Dec. 10 letter, “Military strength should not be glorified,” which said things that need to be said over and over.

This country has become more and more militarized. It all started after Vietnam. That was when the people who run this country learned they couldn’t fight their dirty, unpopular wars with a draft army. That was the big lesson from Vietnam. They had to have an all-volunteer army. To do that they had to increase the pay and begin to promote it and advertise it like never before.

They had to attack public education to create a pool of undereducated people who would volunteer because they had no other good choices. This was done by underfunding public education and continuing to drain better students from public schools with school vouchers and charter schools. What choices do high school graduates have today? For many it is between flipping burgers or going in the service.

Next they attacked the working conditions and pay levels of blue collar workers through attacks on unions and by shipping jobs offshore. All of this was encouraged by the military industrial complex, which President Eisenhower warned about. This is where we are now, having our volunteer army going around the world to protect American “interests,” which means “interests” of the wealthy and not the poor and middle class. There has barely been anytime in my lifetime that we haven’t been involved in a war or conflict someplace, either overtly or covertly.

— Donald B. Smith, Chico