The Empire is in such dire need of new centurions that, as the Boston Globe reports, the Pentagon may go international in its recruiting methods [hat tip: Lew Rockwell]:
The armed forces, already struggling to meet recruiting goals, are considering expanding the number of noncitizens in the ranks — including disputed proposals to open recruiting stations overseas and putting more immigrants on a faster track to US citizenship if they volunteer — according to Pentagon officials.
Which brings to mind this passage from Gibbon‘s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire:
The warlike states of antiquity, Greece, Macedonia, and Rome, educated a race of soldiers; exercised their bodies, disciplined their courage, multiplied their forces by regular evolutions, and converted the iron which they possessed into strong and serviceable weapons. But this superiority insensibly declined with their laws and manners; and the feeble policy of Constantine and his successors armed and instructed, for the ruin of the empire, the rude valour of the Barbarian mercenaries.
History really is the endless repetition of the same mistakes. But then again, they probably don’t teach Gibbon in the schools anymore, do they? In any event, this latest development gives a whole new meaning to “multilateralism.”