The New York Times has an excellent blog on Unexamined Civil-Military Relations by a serving Army captain. The blog is definitely worth reading. My comment is posted below. One of the first comments was by somebody apparently from an Ivy League school, who wrote about how few veterans there were, but interestingly he said there were several veterans of the Israeli military, perhaps more than from the American military. There's something wrong with that, although we have the example in the White House of Rahm Emanuel, who served in the Israeli military rather than the American military. My comment:
I’m afraid that there is an increasing disconnect between the military and civil society. All this talk of “Support our troops,” means support them so that I don’t have to go. The disconnect means there will be less support for the troops when they come home, whether it’s military medical care (Walter Reed), the VA’s huge backlog, or just Americans not saying thanks by not giving vets jobs. It’s partly fallout from the Vietnam War (spoken as a Vietnam veteran), because so few of the social elites served despite the existence of the draft. Having avoided military service themselves, they can’t now say it’s a good thing. The latest travesty is the Congressional hold put on the nomination of the Secretary of the Army by the senators from Kansas, Roberts and Brownback. They are forcing the Army to fight two wars without its own political leadership. When the people of Kansas turn against the military, you know it’s in trouble
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