Eichiro Oda's World Government Navy

One Piece is likely, the most read serialized comic in the world. It's been published in Shonen Jump for most of my life.

Set in a "waterworld" style future dystopia it follows a pirate crew on an epic adventure. While innovative in many regards, it also adheres to many tropes of the Shonen genre. It's protagonist Monkey D. Luffy for example is a rambunctious boy who is always hungry and very pure of heart. There's plenty of fanservice and pervert characters who get nosebleeds when they see breasts or panties.

Enemies generally come in two varieties in this comic - rival pirate crews and naval officers.

One of the action-movie tropes lampooned in early 90s box-office flop "The Last Action Hero" starring Arnold Schwarzenegger was that the henchmen were always the climactic bad guy in action films. This is certainly true of Roadhouse with Patrick Swayze, all the Jason Bourne films (which hadn't been made before Last Action Hero) I'm sure a bunch of Bond movies (though my Bond knowledge is not encyclopedic) and certainly a lot of B-Action Movies.

I feel the explanation is likely simple and pragmatic for this trope. You can hire a good actor to play "Mr. Big" who can deliver the villainous monologues, then hire like a skilled martial artist to do the fight choreography and have them in a bunch of scenes where they stand behind Mr. Big while he makes speeches.

But it is also likely to be true of police and military institutions. Moving up ranks takes time, a 5-star general is likely in the modern era, to be quite an old person well past their athletic prime, even if for their age bracket they are in the top 1%. 

Eichiro's comic though has magic powers and shit. Firstly there's fruit characters can eat that permanently imbue them with a unique super-power. Not all super-powers are equal, so one character can wind up with the power of soap bubbles and another can command earthquakes. Then there's two occidental tropes one being the in-universe version of vitalism, called 'haki' that is possessed by all strong characters, the other is a marshal-art system that basically gives a character matrix powers, like the ability to dodge bullets, punch through walls, walk on air/fly etc. 

As such, unlike real world military where there is likely some negative correlation between rank and athletic ability beyond say the rank of captain under most systems; in the fantastical world of One Piece you get this interesting thing where, as a general rule, the higher the naval rank the stronger the combatant. 

A strange mathematics is created, and early in the series publication the creator in response to a reader question actually spelled out the maths in terms of multiples of marines. So rather than a naval captain being in command of 100 marines, it was more like they were worth 100 marines (in terms of combat impact). Admirals though in their 50s maybe 60s, become veritable one-man navies. 

Of course it all gets ridiculous, but I find the departure from reality kind of interesting.

Militaries around the world still tend to enlist soldiers based on their passing rigorous physical testing. Even older applicants joining the army reserves have to meet some minimum standard. Military recruitment has tended in the WEIRD nations, to skew young and skew poor. 

In the 2000s around the 2nd gulf war, Michael Moore was Louis Theroux's mentor and starred in a tv show "Michael Moore's The Awful Truth" had published a book called "Stupid White Men" and won an Oscar for his documentary "Bowling for Columbine" and was booed during his Oscar acceptance speech for criticizing George W Bush and getting political (can you imagine now). He followed this up with "Fahrenheit 9-11" an all out hit-piece on George W Bush and the War On Terror.

Somewhere in here, he did a political stunt where he filmed politicians supporting the war in Iraq (in their vote casting) by asking them to enlist their children to go fight in this war they supposedly believed was so necessary and just.

In more recent times, and in direct response to a bill passed in the US I'm going to guess, re-"enabling" a military draft (last seen in most countries during the Viet Nam war) there are some calls to enlist Barron Trump, the US Presidents youngest son and only child of his marriage to his third and current wife Melania. 

I'm thinking though, that being the 21st century and well into the era of robot warfare what with Smart Bombs going down air ducts in the first Gulf War of the early 1990s in response to Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, perhaps its time to look at drafting older rather than younger men.

I'm not suggesting drafting old guys with shit knees into special forces, navy seals, commando roles etc. I think there will always be a need for food-powered elite athletic specimen soldiers. But like, it seems we are increasingly possessing technology that could kind of do what super-power-fruit does in Oda's One Piece for the Navy. 

Like instead of targeting recruitment campaigns at disenfranchised inner city youth, (and I'm not opposed to national service programs) how about targeting middle-aged divorcees trying to cheer themselves up by sleeping in a race-car bed and working on a demo-tape to try and get their music career going?

I would guess that this is the kind of thing that just basically has happened in Ukraine since the invasion. Russia marched its troops from the earliest days into the Ukrainian country side and even attempted to surround Kiev. As Krusty the Clown said to Homer, "[Guns] are for keeping the King of England out of your face." Which was somehow funnier when England hadn't had a king since Elizabeth II's older brother abdicated, but the anachronism has now become true again and less funny.

Yeah though, in the Ukraine regular Ukrainians having an AR-15 rifle on the farm is good for keeping Russian tyrants out of your face. As are drones and what not.

Last year I got talking to a US Air-Force engineer on a train heading to give a guest lecture at a University. He told me basically that 'dog fights' are just a thing of the past with fighter jets able to use rockets to shoot down enemy aircraft so far away that they do not have visuals of them. All that cool shit of loop-the-loop dogfighting in Porco Rosso and maybe even the original Top Gun just doesn't happen anywhere anymore.

I just suspect we may be entering a new phase of history, where the old and rich can viably be strapped into some exo-skeleton and deployed to a war zone with great effect. Even automating the targeting and fireing of weapons while keeping battery weights downs by offsetting human locomotion. Perhaps poor inner city kids can sit in a mall somewhere aiming and firing those weapons strapped to an old person.

But this could lead to a fundamental shift in the economics of war - decision makers may once again have skin in the game, rather than simply making 'tough decisions' to send young poor people off to forever wars. 

It'd be interesting to see.