A lot of conspiricy theories are based on some basic grain of truth, which is why they can be somewhat believable.
My general attitude is that most Conspiricy Theories are false, because they make no plausible sense. There has to be some motivation for keeping things secret. What's more, the larger and longer lasting a conspiricy theory has to be in order to work, the less likely it is.
Things like "The Earth Is Hollow" or "The Earth Is Actually Flat", make no serious sense because there really isn't any plausible reason to cover something like that up, no matter what might have been discovered as a result of it.
The same generally applies to cover ups of Alien Crashes/Landings, or the goverments knowing when the world is going to end. In the case of the latter, the goverments *DID* know when the world was going to end, it was called the "Y2K Virus" however instead of covering it up, the entire problem was averted by informing the population which lead to solutions being developed and the entire mess never happening.
When it comes to things like "The Boy Scouts are a paramilitary force" there is apparently some truth to that. As I understand things decades ago the idea was that if the US was ever invaded, especially if the troops were overseas, children who were scouts would be the first to be drafted as part of the backbone of civilian resistance. The logic being that scouts were being taught things about living off the land, and gaining familiarity with the US's wilderness areas. If we ever had to do the "Fortress America" thing and stop invasions from the coasts, we'd have a lot of people hiding in the woods and mountains acting as an insurgency trying to prevent troops from entering the center of the country. Boy scouts could be trained to shoot and such, and would already have the knowlege needed to operate and lead people in those areas. This is supposedly why there was so much federal funding at various times for various Scouting programs, as well as allegedly the goverment stocking shelters
and survival bunkers in and around scouting camps.
Simply put an emergency plan, for an unlikely set of circumstances. Nobody was ever seriously saying "oh yeah, the Boy Scouts are uber-warriors, we're going to send them into combat". Merely that they had a skill set that could be useful in an extreme situation, and plans were being made to "tap" it if the need arose.
At least that's how *I* heard it, and as I heard it, it was never a big secret or conspiricy or anything. It's just something that nobody bothered to talk about much publically because it could be bad PR, or convince people that the goverment thought an invasion was likely (which they didn't).
Of course scouting has changed over the years, and the places I heard the above from, have said that this is no longer the case. The goverment still funds scouting to some extent, but apparently it's no longer involved as much as it once was either.
To put things for retro-active perspective for the guy saying the war would be over if his troop was involved, i'll agree that it would have been a desperate situation (by definition), but chances are he still goes to camp, hikes in the local woods, and knows the local caves and such. That's more than someone who isn't even from the country knows. Something that seemingly trivial could be a REALLY big deal in situations like that
