We’ve all experienced topic drift in a thread before but holy shit. Seriously? We’ve gone from talking about what kind of person joins the military to whether or not the American Revolution was justified.
… Really? You’re telling me that somebody with DARPA funding is bad? So somebody who takes military money and does research on language acquisition with children (I’m not making this up as a random example, this is a thing a professor at my university is doing) is bad?
People at Los Alamos whose job is to optimize the energy grid, to provide cheaper, cleaner power for people. Or people at private research institutions researching, say, solar panels under military funding are bad solely because the military funds it or is involved with it?
Shouldn’t you be happy that they’re taking money that COULD go to M16s and drones and putting it towards physics, clean energy, linguistics, or AI?
Heck, by his reckoning I joined the US Military when I was in a NATO Researchers Exchange Program - a program which was established because NATO is required to spend a large % of their research budget on non-military research.
I spent 10 weeks in Germany doodling pretty pictures of proteins and synthesizing a couple of artificial aminoacids; a German dude spent too many months in Florida learning how to get a computer to run calculations and turn them into pretty doodles of molecules. Turns out that, when I was cleaning the electronic scales in the lab, I was actually walking on the footsteps of the American soldiers who fought in the Spanish-American War (my foreparents would be so ashamed, we were the other side!).
ETA: what I want to know is, what is your pay grade when all you got was the price of a round-trip plane ticket?
I thought you didn’t like the article. If you are now embracing it then I hope you realize that regardless of whether or not I am a wolf or sheepdog, it still makes you one of the sheep. Being one of the sheep is easy. There are others willing to do your dirty work for you. But at least put in the effort to have a coherent philosophy beyond “War is bad m’kay?”
Thissays it better.
I’ll give you my own personal take on this.
The military is one big team. Everyone works together for a common objective. Whatever the team does, every single member of that team is responsible. If, working together, they kill 100 of the enemy, then every member of the team has killed 100 people. It doesn’t matter who fired the actual fatal shots.
The team is large and has a lot of different jobs. You need, for instance, to transport stuff (e.g. missiles) to a war zone. So you have people to load stuff into trucks, and other people to drive the trucks to the destination, and other people to maintain the trucks and keep them working, and other people to process the paperwork to buy that equipment from the defense contractor, and so on. Every last one of these people are killers. When those missiles arrive at the destination, and are fired, everyone is jointly responsible for those deaths. That includes the medics, and the chaplain.
I do not have much respect for someone doing any job in the military who tries to tell me that he doesn’t kill people.
Recently my niece graduated from high school and started college. She had really, really enjoyed marching band in high school, but for whatever reason was not able to participate in college. She missed the camaraderie and teamwork and sense of “belonging” that she had gotten from being in the band, and thought she might be able to experience that again if she joined the national guard. Her mom dissuaded her, and I helped. Among other things, we reminded her to consider the possibility that she could end up in combat. Being killed/maimed is a real risk, but so is being called upon to kill (or to witness killing) in horrifying or morally ambiguous circumstances, and then having to live the rest of your life with those awful memories. I often think of the essay “What is a Veteran”, and I tear up every time I read this line:
It’s fair to say that there are a lot of people who join without really thinking through the risks they are taking on - people like my niece, but without someone to get them to think it all through.
You have to remember the OP is a loaded question based on the predetermined conclusions: War = bad, Military = Bad. So if follows people in the military must have something psycholigically wrong with them. What a load of unabashed tripe.
Now go review the comprehensive list of U.S. Military actions, and tell me if a “small standing army” for the sole purpose of repelling attacks on the homeland is not a totally naive assumption base on misinformation and imaginative thinking:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_United_States_military_operations
We/they (U.S. Military) have been quite busy literally since it’s inception as a primary tool of national foreign policy and national security policy. You might not agree with each and every one of the decisions and scenarios leading to these actions, because you don’t have the big picture. Not even a grainy thumbnail. Thank the men and women of our Armed Forces for their sacrifice in keeping you and others around the world safe so you don’t have to worry about the boogie man.
It’s fair to say that there are a lot of people who join without really thinking through the risks they are taking on - people like my niece, but without someone to get them to think it all through.
[/QUOTE]
So it would have been better if someone had taken that old guy aside when he was a young man and gotten him to “think it all through”? PTSD can be awful, but the guy helped liberate a Nazi death camp - kind of a textbook example of self-sacrifice being worth it.
That article is touching, but maybe you shouldn’t give it to your niece. It might make her really want to join the military.
And I’m absolutely fine if she does join, as long as she has a clear understanding of what her future might be. Likewise with the old guy in the essay: yes, it’s a great public service that he did, but I hope he didn’t sign up a few years before the start of WW2 thinking nothing more than “by golly, this seems like stable employment.”
You would have to be really stupid to come out of the recruiting inteviews believing that, and that alone. In which case, contemporary service recruiters would probably find way to disqualify the idiot. Joining the militarry is not a given. In fact, disqualifications based in many cases on obesity these days is pretty common.
Not really. Mostly they only protect us from other militaries.
Thwey say you should set a thief to catch a thief. Should we praise thieves?
So, we hire a boogieman to chase away another boogie man. Don’t ever forget what they are.
Except of course we don’t use thieves to catch thieves. Its just a dumb saying and a good movie. And the military is filled with people just like you and your family. Not boogie men.
You would first have to know and understand that of which you speak, before you can forget it.
You have not achieved that feat, quite yet.
Wow
I’m not saying there aren’t bad people and bad things out there. I’m not saying the military in general is wrong. I’m not saying it’s not necessary to have a military. But the US military is not a bare bones organization built for and used only for self defense.
The United States military is a group full of wolves and you have put yourself in that group. If our military was used for defense only, you could parade around and pat yourself on the back, as you are doing now, for being a sheepdog.
Not recognizing the simple implied distinctions of defense and offense in the context of international relations seems somewhat disingenuous.
You might consider the finer points of deterrence, containment, arms races and other small details surrounding military concepts as they relate to foreign policy and national security.
Did you know that some people join the Armed Services and actually grow up to be real leaders, Generals, Admirals and the like?
Of course I recognize all of that but none of that matters to me. The point is, there are already plenty of people in the military so nobody needs to join the military
“for the good of their country”. And it’s been that way at least since the end of WWII. The moral clause, I did it reluctantly to help protect my country doesn’t apply. The country was already very very very well protected when you joined.
It’s a topic not everyone wants to engage head on. As a democracy we cherish myths about our military: that it doesn’t have a warrior culture; that it is above politics or social trends; that it embraces apple pie American values; that our servicepeople are a perfect cross section of the citizenry.
All these beliefs are reasons people might want to redirect a question such as the OP’s - even as they try to engage it.
If it wasn’t an election year, I’d guess that is probably going to the dumbest thing I hear before it’s over.
Do you view “the military” as some sort of static entity? It’s just there? Why would anybody join any private commercial company? Civil/public/government? Can we not also assume they already have plenty of people too?
Maybe we can attribute high unemployment to organizations across the country adopting this notion. :rolleyes:
Yup, done here. Fighting ignorant teenagers seems somewhat frustrating.
I don’t know anything about your brother, so I’ll talk in general terms.
Some people see a just cause, and decide to join it. There were peoplw who saw Hitler as a threat, and joined specifically to fight against him. There may have been marines who enlisted specifically to help in Bosnia/ Serbia and Somalia. Certainly there have been some who enlisted specifically because of 9/11 who wanted to get Bin Laden. These people may be good people. Not all of them are. Some causes are evil. Fighting for a cause does not guarantee that they are good. But they might be.
Then there are other people. Those who regard the military as ‘just a job’. People who are hired to fight, who will go wherever they are sent, and not care if it’s wrong or right. These are always bad people. Now, it may just happen that they are sent into a justified war. That doesn’t make a difference. They would fight a bad cause just as happily. They are still bad people.
So, basically, those actions you mentioned actions in Somalia and Bosnia/Serbia, they had a mixture of people. Some were there because they believed in the cause, and may have been good people. Others were there to earn college money, and were bad people.