21 December 2010

The Full Deployment of the World's Eighth Largest Army Goes Unnoticed....

In case you missed it in the news, the world's eighth largest army successfully deployed and conducted widespread and sustained operations involving the live fire of ordnance against a native population, in which they inflicted significant loss of life while incurring no casualties themselves.

You likely missed it in the news because the events described above took place entirely within the state of Wisconsin (HT: voluntaryXchange):

The state of Wisconsin has gone an entire deer hunting season without someone getting killed. That's great. There were over 600,000 hunters.

Allow me to restate that number. Over the last two months, the eighth largest army in the world – more men under arms than Iran; more than France and Germany combined – deployed to the woods of a single American state to help keep the deer menace at bay.

But that pales in comparison to the 750,000 who are in the woods of Pennsylvania this week. Michigan's 700,000 hunters have now returned home. Toss in a quarter million hunters in West Virginia, and it is literally the case that the hunters of those four states alone would comprise the largest army in the world.

Of course, they still lack an effective air force to seriously challenge any of the more well-known armies, but perhaps that's beginning to change....