that the rangers will turn around and start poaching rhinos themselves
None of this is difficult to understand - it's no different than the right-wing death squads the US trained to fight their little "War On Drugs" suddenly and not-so-mysteriously ending up the biggest players in the drug-smuggling business.
Who did you think these "rangers" work for? They are pigs - that's what they are. And like all pigs, profiting from the illegal things they are (supposedly) "preventing" is merely one of the unspoken but universal perks of the job. As long as their violence serves the capitalists that wants to exclusively loot and pillage natural resources, everybody in power will turn a blind eye. And it's not just the trade in animal parts - don't be surprised when it's discovered that these privatized goon squads being lauded in the media for their (supposed) "anti-poaching" activities take their orders from multi-national mining corporations or companies that want to exploit local populations as cheap labor.
No. You are. This meme demonstrates how easily first-worlders will slavishly applaud fascist terrorism in the third-world as long as you wrap it up in green capitalism first.
The only thing these privatised death-squads you call "rangers" are doing is waging unrestricted warfare on impoverished brown people while (at best) doing absolutely nothing to hinder the mass-slaughter of wild life or (at worst) simply monopolizing it for their own profit - but you get your "eco-friendly" revenge-porn in exchange, so everything's cool, right?
How long do any of you idiots upvoting this think it'll be until these (so-called) "rangers" start selling rhino horn themselves? That is... if they haven't already and this is really just them clearing out the competition?
are you really saying that professional troops are less effective than untrained conscripts who really don’t want to be there?
Firstly... there is absolutely no rule that says conscripts have to be untrained, just like there's no rule that says a conscript wouldn't necessarily want to be there - but that's irrelevant to the question at hand.
More importantly, yes - a citizen army can be more effective than a professionalized one. Napoleon Bonaparte's armies proved that to the world to such a degree that military theorists of the time literally thought the professional military obsolete. Of course, the problem with a citizen army is that you have to animate the citizenry with a cause that can actually be justified - kind of a difficult thing to do if you're waging colonialist wars that only benefit the wealthy half-way around the world. Which is what a professional military is good for - that's why the US didn't experience the same level of revolt in the ranks during the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan as they did during the war on Vietnam.
but a professional army would have been much more effective
Ukraine did have a professional army at the start of the war - almost all countries do. Not even NATO would be able to defeat Russia with a purely professionalized force - that's pure fantasy.
"Progressive" is merely another word for reformist... ie, people who will (at best) achieve absolutely nothing except the continuation of "business as usual."
What meagre labor protections (for instance) the working class in the west has wasn't won because of reformists... it was won in spite of them by militant and thoroughly radical labor organising.
Oh look... somebody who thought Captain Planet cartoons were actually documentaries!