How does that make your sister a leech?
Marc
Tell that to the hundreds of thousands of American men & women who gave up their lives to defend your liberties, you stupid, worthless, useless, git. :mad:
Heh. I swear I mean this in the nicest way possible, but this is what was meant by “crass ignorance.” I couldn’t even begin to list the stupid things I said or wrote (some of them on these very forums) when I was a college freshman that, today, make me want to slam my head into brick walls until the shame goes away. The above will be one of those kinds of statements for you before very long at all.
I’m a typical liberal scumbag, so no great love for the military have I. Still, to say that you in no way benefit from the actions of the U.S. military is absurd on its face. You benefit from its mere presence! Even aside from defense against invasion and terrorism, the U.S. military is vital since the threat that it implies allows us to have a meaningful foreign policy, which is in turn vital to (among other things) the economy.
Because they’re training for a civil service job, and that training precludes the earning of a meaningful income from another source. Should police cadets not get paid? By your logic, they should just take the free lessons in law enforement and physical fitness and be happy with it.
Words fail me. This is, without question, the most ignorant statement I have ever had the misfortune to read on these boards. Bar none. Bar none. You have spoken volumes in your level of immaturity and lack of worldview with these few sentences. You are an immature twit, and have decades of growing up to do. I’m sure to you my words sound like a crotchety oldster who doesn’t have any clue; however I remember thinking in the exact terms you voiced here; I was about 14 at the time.
I think this is just a teensy bit over the line.
I, for one, see none of my liberties being defended by the soldiers dying in Iraq. I do see them getting killed for hegemonic agenda.
On the other hand, I do see my liberties being threatened and curtailed by the very administration who claims to be upholding them and fighting for them by sending kids to die.
*
“We had to destroy the village in order to save it”*
It’s not even close to any line you might care to draw. The original statement has a definitive and repeated “never”. Unless NinjaChick is very young (say, 15 or less), it’s a safe bet that the existence of the U.S. military did serve to protect her existence, in the sense that it countered the military of the USSR, which would have been quite happy to flatten their primary economic rival, if they could have done so without retaliation.
Well, the INF treaty (an agreement between the US and USSR to get rid of long-range nukes) was signed before I was 18 months old. The Berlin Wall fell three months after I turned three years old. I think that by then, the ‘threat’ of the Soviets attacking the US was pretty much gone.
So, unless anyone else can scrape up an example that works, I’m not yet willing to say that I’ve ever been protected, or in any way benefitted, from the military.
That may be true, but do you think the US millitary’s actions before you were born might have had something to do with the fact that you were born in a United States that wasn’t Communist or Fascist?
For that matter, you live in Santa Fe, which the US won in the Mexican-American war. So, at the very least, you owe the fact that you live where you live to the US military.
Since the military has never done anything for you, it stands to reason that we don’t need it at all. And logically, we don’t need any police forces either. yay! We’ll all be free and live in a world of peace and harmony. Won’t that be nice?
OK, NinjaChick, so we finally get to the point of why you think your sister’s “leeching”, and that is that you believe the Service Academies in particular to be pointless, and the military in general to give you no benefit. Fine. Now we know. It’s ideological/philosophical.
You must be obviously aware that since society is largely in agreement that the military is useful and worthwhile to have and pay for, and that in such a case it should be led by properly trained and educated people, your POV is in dissent and is so duly noted. Like I said, she no more leeches than anyone who takes a Pell Grant, and on top of that incurs a severe legal obligation.
And while your sister may be an engineer and a professor, she will be fulfilling a mission of training others. Not every defender has to be out there with a fixed bayonet.
And I’m sure Martin thanks you for the opportunity to trumpet the utter greatness of Academy Grads in general and himself in particular. I had almost forgotten that pesky aura of conviction of divine anointment that emanates from West Pointers 
Well, the US military opposed the british in the war of 1812(rather ineffectually, but that’s a different thread). Then, an entire war was fought over the issue of enslaving people based on race alone. Afterwards, the US military was somewhat involved in a little skirmish to prevent a bona-fide madman from taking over the world. Sounds like the plot of a bad Bond movie, I know.
Then came that whole USSR thing.
And then you were born. You weren’t born into a vaccuum, you know. There’s a whole world of history out there. And we won’t bother looking at the natural disaster in which the National Guard is called out to perform some service or other. You might not have been involved with any of those.
Claiming you’ve never benefitted from the military because they haven’t done anything for you lately is a little disingenious, don’t you think?
This is what one branch of the military does:
Save 11 lives
Assist 136 people in distress
Conduct 106 search and rescue cases
Protect $3.2 million in property
Enforce 103 security zones
Interdict and rescue 15 illegal migrants at sea
Board 3 high interest vessels
Enforce 103 security zones
Board 138 vessels of law enforcement interest
Board 152 large vessels for port safety checks
Seize 39 pounds of marijuana and 324 pounds of cocaine with a street value of 10.8 million
Conduct 296 vessel safety checks and teach boating safety courses to 289 boaters
Conduct 20 commercial fishing vessel safety exams
Respond to 20 oil and hazardous chemical spills
Process 238 mariner licenses and documents
Service 140 aids to navigation
Monitor the transit of 2,557 commercial ships through U.S. ports
Investigate 38 vessel casualties involving collisions, allisions and groundings
http://www.uscg.mil/hq/g-cp/comrel/factfile/index.htm
That’s every day.
Sure, perhaps the military hasn’t come and rescued your cat from a tree, but they’ll come and get you if you need help.
Do you know who is charged with inland search and rescue in the US? The Air Force is. Do you know who responds to major disasters that strike the US such as hurricanes and floods? The military does - pretty much all branches in some way.
The list goes on and on - these are just a few of the more visible ones. Trust me - you benefit from the military every day.
NinjaChick:
Your position in extremely short-sighted and lacking in imagination, and your request for concrete examples of catastrophes (either at home or abroad) that have been deterred by the U.S. military is ridiculous.
Congratulations on your pitting, NinjaChick! 
Well, only time and experience and no amount of advice can cure you of being an idiot.
JR, he did not provide a link to the original thread in his OP and I read only this thread, if I recall correctly. I saw that he mentioned that he had joined USMA and attended USMA – neither of which answered my question about holding a degree. It took a third reading for me to see that he did indeed say that he had “a very real degree from there.”
I am familiar with West Point and have paid my respects to a long ago friend buried there.
Even though I am opposed to the military on general principles, I side with Martin Hyde on the central issue. The cadets that I have known (three in a very small group of friends) have more than paid for the extensive educations they received.
The graduates that I knew were more skilled with the language and less likely to be arrogant cads. They were very aware that they were receiving full college educations that would prepare them for work in the public sector or graduate school once their military obligations were complete.
I agree with Martin Hyde on this one. Just because people in the military get paychecks or other benefits from the military doesn’t mean that they couldn’t go out and get much more lucrative positions in the private sector with their same skill set. Maybe it doesn’t make sense to go around prostrating ourselves to cadets, but they have agreed to serve our nation for a number of years, and based on their acceptance to the AFA, I can only presume that they’re a very bright, motivated person that could likely succeed in any field or at any school. They at least deserve a thank-you. That people are willing to do this in public with strangers is quite nice as well.
Eventhough this is in the pit I was hoping we could avoid flames in this thread as I considered it to be somewhat still part of GD. As it is though NC while misguided knows how the pit works and brought the flames onto herself, so I guess nothing can be done about that now.
However to try and address some core points again:
- I don’t know how much experience you have with OCS or basic training but you are aware that in both of these environments there is more than just physical training? There is intellectual training, and written work to be done. So should “regular” Army recruits only be paid for the physical training they do and not be allowed to receive pay for any “educational” training they undergo?
As I said to you, you have military training requirements every summer at West Point and they are functionally not very different from “real” basic training or something similar to that.
Thankfully we can go right to the source on this, the link above shows cadets doing their summer training. If you don’t deserve to get paid for that then a large part of the military doesn’t deserve to get paid for anything other than combat itself.
SO no, you are not just being paid to study. And unless the Point has changed since I attended you aren’t paid money for “studying” and money for “summer training” it was all just a flatline amount paid out and was not earmarked for any specific purpose. Looking at the wholistic picture I think Academy students definitely do things throughout the year that warrant a wage, and they receive a wage.
- The redundancy argument you make is the only one that even smacks of legitimacy. Eventhough I’ve given all your arguments far more time and effort than I think they warrant. But again, you don’t understand how the military works or how the military develops its better strategists and high level leaders. So I just don’t know what more I could do to explain it to you.
The Military doesn’t believe military greats like Grant, Eisenhower, Patton, et al. are created by random chance. The military believes certain intelligent people can achieve this greatness with the right training, and that without said training these people may never realize their potential. That’s why you can’t call the Academies redundant, they are there to try and develop the potential of those most likely to be “potential strategic geniuses” or “potentially great leaders.”
- Have you ever had a violent crime committed against you? Have you ever had anyone try to stab you but a vigilant police office kills the man before he can? Probably not, I don’t know. But do you say that “the police force has never done anything for me”?
I don’t even know how to begin to explain this to you, so I’ll just try my best (as the mantra says, “Fighting Ignorance”). Ever played Sim City? You build a police station in that game and then you can look at a display view that shows a “police protection” area that emanates from the station.
Police protection works as an umbrella effect. Just because you don’t see it working directly doesn’t mean it isn’t in effect. It’s what maintains that “barrier” that separates human activity from the law of the jungle.
Military protection, national defense, works in the same way. Most of the examples in this thread were unnecessary, you don’t have to have any examples. A national defense is beneficial for you because you couldn’t live your life in peace if nations did not institute militaries and maintain internal and external stability. Whether or not the military has directly thwarted an attack against you is completely immaterial.
Military protection is like a condom. Just because you’ve never had sex with a guy who has an STD doesn’t mean the condom has never done anything for you (we’re making the assumption you use condoms for the sake of argument by analogy), it functions as a shield that is ever vigilant and must remain so if we are to have stability (nationally, not sexually.)
It bewilders me to be generally anti-war and still awed by the military mind. One thing, among many, that impressed me about Eisenhower was that he chose to live near Gettysburg in order to study the military strategy used there – or so I was told.
You have made your points well.
Wow. I almost never post in the Pit.
However…let us ignore for the moment that cold, bare fact of life–when you sign up for the military, in return for the clothing, food, shelter, medical care, education, seeing the world (and all the other good stuff promised by the recruiter), you are agreeing to, if or when required, to kill or be killed for your country (possibly both), and think about hardware.
NinjaChick, do you:
- Use the Internet?
- Use a microwave?
- Used a device that bounces a signal off a satellite (like, maybe a cellphone or GPS unit?)
- Travelled on an Interstate Highway built since 1956?
- Fly in a jet aircraft?
- Driven a car with airbags?
- Used any kind of freeze-dried food, like those Ramen noodles so popular (!) with students?
Welcome to direct benefits to your life from military research and development–and this list is just off the top of my head.