main-stream western society is shielded from the military. There is no common experience. Period. That's the bigger story.
We talk about this a lot and it's an odd topic.
On the one hand it's great that western countries have the luxury of having so few impacts from wars that many don't even know that the US still has 8,400 military personnel in Afghanistan.
On the other hand it makes the population really not give a shit about issues surrounding formal war or it's personal impacts, so they end up just letting politicians slide on stuff.
The problem with the military is that it has unlimited downside. You're literally giving up your freedom. I don't really think western armies experience the realities of war either, at least not to the extent of their opponents.
I think pretty much anything you can do in the military you can do better in civilian life, you just have to be a bit creative. You rarely hear about it though, because no one is trying to recruit people for it. Here's kind of one example though: http://www.theamphour.com/220-an-interview-with-shaun-meehan...
That may be the case, but from a distance it seems like the US has more of a martial / military obsession than most western countries. Soldiers seem to be treated like saints, the president referred to as "Commander in chief", generals become household names even in peace time, etc. It's way more pronounced than anywhere in the G7.
So it's not a surprise to me that people who speak up against the military are shunned; not just by that group, but by society at large, which venerates the armed forces.
There is a huge real downside, and it is a massive one, is compulsory military service begets reasons to use the military.
Most of the free western world has recognized the invalidity of a large standing army or extravagant military spending. Money going into war is money totally wasted, literally burned up in bullets and bombs and lives.
In the US at least Eisenhower was already talking about where we are today becoming a problem back during his presidency 60 years ago - that the private enterprise built on military contracts would lobby congress to see the military used and expanded to give them more money. The US has refined to an artform the practice of making conflicts to send its young to die in to line the pockets of investors. One of them was both the former CEO of a major defense contractor and the damn vice president under the guy who started permanent endless war against a concept in a desert on the other side of the planet for going on twenty years.
The west and world at large should be happy to not need to train and send their young to suffer and die in war. Nuclear deterrents have functionally eliminated threats to homelands protected by them. Russia and China might be antagonists on the world stage against the capitalist establishment but they are also nuclear powers and thus no war can ever be waged against or involving them directly. It all has to be theater, destroying arbitrary swathes of third world nations in proxy wars meant to justify profits on both sides for private men who sell bombs and need to insure there is somewhere for the government to drop them.
The US and almost all western democracies should be moving towards demilitarizing entirely. There are still useful functions of militaries in defense of borders in most nations - fighting pirates, smugglers, etc - but nation-state level actors will not move against anyone pointing weapons that could glass their whole country in an hour, so wasting the valuable time of millions of young adults preparing for a war that cannot ever happen is all around a disastrous waste of time and money.
There is also the fundamental freedom angle of it. If you want to have kids spend the last two years of public education enroll in something akin to a communal public works labor program instead of teaching them Shakespeare and ancient Sumerian history they will never use that would be more defensible, but it is grossly inappropriate of anyone to say that full adults should be forcibly conscripted en masse against their will for no reason that could remotely justify the breach of their liberty.
Please stop the stereotyping of military service. It's shoddy and it's inaccurate.
For most of our country's history, large portions of the population have been exposed to military service sometime in their lifetime. This is the longest period (since the 1970s) where the greatest percentage of people have not had that experience. It's a great social experiment, one that's not generally acknowledged.
I'm not going to argue your stereotype. Suffice it to say I have several concrete examples that each of your points are wrong. "Not even wrong" would be a better characterization.
This sounds similar to the state of affairs in Scandinavia. The part about there being little pride in being a soldier rings especially true. Scandinavians have died in military operations in Afghanistan, but you never hear about it. No one wants to hear about it, because we don't see ourselves as warlike nations. Germany probably has that times 100 due to the legacy of the Nazis.
Outside of the US, many (perhaps most) educated and politically-aware Westerners do look down on people involved in the Military-Industrial Complex.
Nobody civilized wants to "go after" them of course, but make no mistake - it's not something you'd want to brag about while overseas if you're trying to make friends.
This is true even in friendly places like Europe, Canada or Japan. Make of that what you will.
First, there are a lot of people who really are pacifist or pacifist leaning.
And even for the rest, for the large number of people living in countries that haven't been invaded in living memory, I don't think they think of the military like that. In the US case, I assume people will think of what the military has actually done in the last few decades, i.e. Iraq and Afghanistan, and maybe some smaller things like ISIS, Yemen, Libya etc.
By the way, what game teaches any sort of militarily applicable skill? There's no regenerating health in the real world and officers don't lead with right clicks.
Maybe "many people here" feel that what our military does has little to nothing to do with defending our country, and often puts us at more risk and/or makes the world a worse place.
This is such a weird and controversial concept to so many people here.
Soldiers who have never fought are less capable in battle. It doesn't really matter how much they train or how many drills are run. Nothing really prepares you for the trauma of watching your friend of many years die by getting his head blown off next to you, or worse, bleeding out while crying for his mother. There are two kinds of people who witness that: those who curl up and pray for it all to stop, and those who pick up their weapons and keep fighting. Generals never know which kind of men they have unless battles weed out the first kind, by death or discharge. And militaries with too many of the first kind lose wars.
Yes, it's horrible. It's gut-wrenching just to think about it. We'd all be better off if we could resolve our conflicts without war. But in the world we live in, there are too many military and paramilitary actors who are not guided by such Enlightened ideals. What will we do if we are not prepared and they come knocking on our door?
Maybe you don't believe that the same irrational forces that first manifest as teenage graffiti, then grow into organized crime, could ever result in organizations the size of militaries. Maybe you don't believe that, in societies which have abolished all adventure, the only adventure left is to abolish that society. That's fine. I respect that. But what if you're wrong? Shouldn't society hedge that bet, considering the cost? Can no such hedge possibly justify its cost?
There's a reasonable discussion to be had about where the line (i.e. cost) should be drawn, and what shape the line should take. But the opinion that it is worth it to pay some cost should be relatively uncontroversial. And if you understand that society should pay some cost to maintain an effective military, you ultimately understand that, until the diplomats can succeed at building a genuine global peace, war is inevitable.
I don't think the point is about how many people actually perform military duty, but about how the US military culture works in practice.
Switzerland for example has a heavily compulsory military duty but IMHO a less violent, less patriotic, less indoctrinated and less glorified military culture.
The media is reporting what it is, which is a war that happens elsewhere. It's verbal white washing because it is socio-economically and politically white washed.
A draft would change this. But the military is a product like anything else. It's not civil service. It's not something that every family suffers from. The U.S. professional military is overwhelmingly middle and lower class. There's no meaningful representation of aristocratic families in the military. They have nothing to lose by supporting politicians who in turn support interventionist policies abroad.
Part of the issue here is that the military establishment and its peripheral industries in the US are so enormous, that most people who aren’t in the military are close to someone who is, or who does business with it. We’re all already in the Army, basically.
"I'm pretty sick of these stories being what get headlines and pages of coverage about military members. ... No hit on the authors, they all seem to be genuinely wanting to help/tell a compelling story - but I think it comes with some kind of fetish for war that they are trying to get in touch with."
There is truth to what you say. The biggest issue I see, isn't the story so much trauma, trauma and war are hand maidens in history, it's how main-stream western society is shielded from the military. There is no common experience. Period. That's the bigger story.
The author is C. J. Chivers, USMC (Capt. Retd.), so yeah, ^the fetish for war^ is strong. So strong, he had to quit for the sake of those around him. [0]
We talk about this a lot and it's an odd topic.
On the one hand it's great that western countries have the luxury of having so few impacts from wars that many don't even know that the US still has 8,400 military personnel in Afghanistan.
On the other hand it makes the population really not give a shit about issues surrounding formal war or it's personal impacts, so they end up just letting politicians slide on stuff.
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