BeaverFever wrote:
Interesting from Bart's comments is that he talks about soliders as if they are nothing more than sociopathic misfits hard-wired to comit these crimes, which makes me wonder how he can celebrate any soldier or consider them heroes?
Without having served in the US forces it's hard for an outsider to appreciate those intangible things that come together for seamless unit cohesion and for individual initiative in combat.
The Stephen Ambrose book,
Band of Brothers, and then his other works such as
D-Day and
Citizen Soldiers give light to the intangible and often mercurial qualities of unit cohesion. If you have not read these books then I highly recommend them to you.
As to the individual initiative this is something that tends to show up a little in training but it really comes out in combat.
And the fact of the matter is that the men who make the best combat soldiers are the ones who
abandon themselves to it, immerse themselves in it, and who think of nothing more than how to get through the next day alive.
Paradoxically, those men are so inurred to so many conventions of civilization that they are as prone to misbehavior as is a pit bull fighting dog.
The annals of military lore are rife with misfits, drunkards, thieves, murderers, fools, and etc. who have distinguished themselves in battle and acquitted themselves with valorous contempt for their own safety.
The military ideally works hard to extinguish conscience and civilization in the combat soldier and the politically correct nonsense of then asking that same soldier to attend to cultural sensitivities and to women who do not belong in their company is asking too much.
The net result is that in a few short years the military will feminize in order to accomadate a social engineering mission and it will necessarily become more focused on technology as the front line units become less and less composed of the personality types that excel in combat specialities. Seriously, the military is moving towards a culture that eschews the warrior ethos and at the point that the new paradigm reigns then the US military will be reduced to a mere jobs program that literally won't have the 'nads to fight a war.
I listen to people whine and gnash their teeth (rhetorically) over the loss of 4,000 troops in Iraq and Afghanistan and I see in this the fact that the USA would not have the gall to fight another major war where losing 4,000 troops in a day, let alone a decade, would be conceivable.
Some folks on this site bitch and moan that the USA was slow to get into the two World Wars in Europe and I can assure you that if the UK and France ever again needed millions of Americans then they'd be lucky to see
hundreds. If even that many. This country has lost its nerve and our society is projecting that loss of nerve onto the military.
In short, you folks had better develop your own warriors because one fine day in the century ahead I expect we won't have any.
CKA Uber 
CKA Uber 
