Ret. U.S. Army Colonel Douglas MacGregor: I would rate the Turkish military as certainly among the top five in the world. And remember that it's a mistake to look exclusively at technology and firepower. You have to look at the human material. The Turk is a very tough soldier. You talk about the Koreans, whether North or South—the Korean is a very tough soldier. You start stacking these different peoples up next to each other and look back at their history over hundreds of years. You're dealing with different kinds of people, and some make excellent soldiers. Not everybody does. That's one of the reasons many people like me were happy to see the draft go away, because you were bringing in too many people who were never going to be good soldiers anyway. It was better to have people who wanted to be soldiers. And the Turks have a song they sing at every funeral for a Turkish soldier: "Every Turk is a soldier."