Political Crossfire Forums

I think this is more appropriate:

These guys deserve a medal?



over these guys?



This is f**k up. The military should be ashamed to even be thinking about it much less doing it.

1. Mixing apples and oranges. Ground troops and anyone looking at the action from above, be it through a canopy or through a monitor, have entirely different roles to play, and it is most definitely not a matter of the pilot getting a medal "over" a ground pounder. They get different medals for different duties.

2. Medals are awarded for a wide variety of things. You don't just get them for deployments, or even for combat. However, the act of killing other humans is real, be it from behind the protection of tank armor, from the cockpit of a plane, or by tossing a grenade or whatever at someone else. This isn't something that can be written off as a videogame. The training, the discipline, the man hours, and the toll it takes is meaningful. I suppose we shouldn't reward service from the coast guard, or the navy either, since of course there is little actual danger to their persons from their position in this kind of warfare?

When you disparage it thus your not only taking a piss on the service of your own guys, but on the basic respect owed to the dead enemy as well. It wasn't a videogame to him. At least not yet.

3. These clowns from the VFW are frankly out of date, and need to brush up on the changing realities of how warfare is conducted. The latest generation of fighter aircraft will probably be the last that we stuff actual human beings into. As time goes on there will be more and more unmanned warfare being carried out. Machines just stand up to those conditions better than people do. Unmanned aircraft will be able to operate to the limits of the materials, rather than what the pilot can survive.

Rather than sneer at these peoples' contributions maybe we should think in terms of the changing context of their service, and the larger role they and those like them will take on as time goes by.

Should soldiers be getting medals at all? Doesn't that just glamorise warfare?

If they fight a virtual war they should get a virtual medal.

Is the problem that the geeks get any medal at all or that the medal ranks above the purple heart?