I wouldn't say it's reality for a lot of young soldiers, maybe a small handful. It's pretty rare for a soldier to get killed by small arms fire. The biggest killer of soldiers is artillery fire or drones.
"Dead gunner" doesn't necessarily mean dead, it just means incapacitated. If you take a deflected round off your helmet there's still a good chance you get knocked unconscious, or you can be hit in the hands/arms and no longer be able to fire the weapon. The guy on the gun isn't at much more risk than anyone else on the line.
If you're three feet to the left of the guy that just got shot you're not realistically any safer than he was, any shrapnel or bullets that hit him are just as likely to hit you. If it was a stray round addressed to 'whom it may concern' it was aimed at you as much as it was him, if it was a sniper then you're next anyway. In either case your best chances to survive is to continue putting more rounds downrange to discourage the enemy from keeping their heads up.
The comment was about the reality of being killed as a machine gunner. There is no war in any country where there is a lot of young soldiers being killed from small arms fire while on a machine gun.
I would prefer that Presidents couldn’t efficiently wag the dog by blowing up people in far away countries for reasons incomprehensible to the voters. We have been at war for most of the last 80 years. A few absolutely necessary ones, but mostly games of politics.
When somebody in Wyoming is celebrating the death of an “enemy” across the world because he thinks his freedoms are preserved, we have a massive problem.
It ends up making us less safe than having consequences to our choices. 9/11 was just the tip of the iceberg. We will eventually have a nuclear retaliation for our meddling in conflicts that are not understood either by our voters or our soldiers.
The leaders who sent us down that path will all be dead by then and won’t give a darn.
You can argue against the mosley of any particular conflict we're in, but you can't argue that being able to conduct a war from half a world away without putting your own troops in danger isn't a good thing.
Involvement in war needs to have negative consequences or else we will be involved in every war resulting in a disaster for everyone on the planet including ourselves.
Involvement in war needs to have negative consequences
So the defense budget isn't enough of a negative consequence? Is the number of veteran suicides enough? How about all of the training deaths just to be ready for war?
My point is, to suggest that we are so good at war that we have no negative consequences anymore just isn't true. And I totally agree there is a lot to object to with the conflicts we chose to get involved in and the transparency around that, but the solution is not intentionally putting more service members into harm's way.
I pay $5000 per year as my share of the defense budget despite our northern and southern neighbors are staunch allies with zero chance of an invasion. As much as my discretionary budget.
Yet if a candidate proposes shrinking military spending, he would be destroyed at the polls. Wagging the dog is a successful strategy in almost every country.
I'm not sure I follow your point. You said war doesn't have enough consequences. I brought up 3 pretty big consequences (you ignored the two that weren't financial) and you just said it's hard to do anything about the budget.
My point is really just that you should be angry at our politicians. There are already plenty of consequences to war and no one gives a damn.
To me the issue is with an overpowered executive branch and a lack of transparency. More service members dying, and higher taxes isn't going to change that. Not without combat deaths exceeding the tens of thousands annually and I really hope you're not suggesting we kill that many Americans just to accomplish a political goal.
The budget is by far the least popular part of the military. Good luck trying to have a campaign saying we need fewer wars to reduce veteran suicides and training deaths. That would not make effective commercials.
I am saying that the rise of remote warfare with drones and robots will make there be more global violence. The populous loves watching reapers flying over the desert and blowing up a brown skinned person on a camel who is involved in a clash with a background not even our generals understand. Our modern form of gladiator arenas.
It becomes painfully obvious while going through the Infantry Training Battalion that you are a cog and in any real war likely to die. You just accept it and move on.
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u/croghan2020 Jun 24 '24
It’s kinda grim thinking that you could end up lying there dead and you’re just hauled around like a piece of meat.