General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: I do not worship the ground our military walks on [View all]Old Troop
(1,991 posts)I spent 27 years on active duty as an infantry officer. It was a career distinguished by remarkable mediocrity punctuated by moments of shrieking cowardice. But that's not important now. There are a couple of points that I'd like to respectfully make:
1. Both service members and welfare (for want of a better term) recipients receive most of their income from government. Soldiers, however, work to earn that income from the government; often extremely long hours in inhospitable environments. Much of what they do is very hazardous - working on the flight deck of an aircraft carrier for instance or switching out the power pack for a Bradley or Abrams under field conditions. Serving in battle increases those hazards, of course, exponentially.
2. Recommending that service members refuse civilian directives to conduct combat operations has a flip side. If the military arrogates to itself the decision to refuse to go to war, it also has arrogated the authority to decide to go to war when, in its opinion, civilian authority has failed to properly address a threat. In that dismissal of civilian authority lies the seeds of a coup.
Whether you love or hate the military is a personal opinion that is protected by the constitution. All military members swear or affirm an oath to support and defend that constitution; not to fight for a specific political figure or an institution, but to defend the basic law of the United States. My experience was that soldiers, when they thought about it, took that oath at face value.