Good points. I’d also add that officers are trained in politics, as in the art of dealing with people and hopefully accomplishing the possible.
Last one I remember was Bill Clinton.
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Sadly true, especially when the other side keeps stealing elections.
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Whether you appreciate his politics or not, it’s hard to claim that Barack Obama wasn’t a charismatic, engaging candidate; I’d say he’s one of the finest orators of the last thirty years.
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I’m 37, I’m not old.
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His politics aside, I never found him charismatic but indeed he’s a pro at giving speeches. Also, politics aside, a good number of lifelong Democrats I know back home and abroad found his persona aloof rather than engaging. I took those things into consideration when I said Bill Clinton before.
Just old enough. Its a tricky thing once one passes a certain age to remember that one’s generational touchstones might not mean shit to those younger than oneself.
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I might be. I don’t know the data on that and I don’t see why would your average soldier have any particular history, philosophy or history training.
That’s not to say ex-soldiers are not capable of being great political leaders, but I just don’t see the connection, sorry.
What you’re saying sounds a lot like you think well educated people are more likely to be good politicians, which I agree with, but that isn’t the same as evidence for direct correlation between military service and politics.
It could be argued that we started Vietnam, because we continued backing the south Vietnamese government after the French signed a peace accord with the north. We could have left and let the civil war play out, but we didn’t, because domino theory.
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Do such legal subtleties actually matter in reality? Vietnam wasn’t an officially declared war on our part either. As @FFabian notes, there was still a substantial body count of the local civilian populations.
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I’m thinking more of his campaigns, in which his speeches, public appearances, and persona really energized and engaged Democrats, and the HOPE campaign that galvanized his image. I know a lot of folks are eyeing Cory Booker and Elizabeth Warren as possible 2020 candidates, but it’s been awhile since we’ve had a moment like the 2004 DNC when a relatively unknown freshman senator with a funny name got up and blew everyone away with an electrifying, hopeful speech.
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Based on your reply to myself and @One_Brown_Mouse in that comment, I’m unsure if you are familiar first hand with many officers or enlisted people.
Understandable. I fully respect his professionalism at the podium. He is of course very knowledgable when speaking off script as well, but theres where the aloofness really comes into play.
They matter quite a bit both operationally and in terms of conflict studies. As you pointed out yourself, the US was in the middle of a complicated civil war(1) without a defined victory scenario for the US which created the operational problems. This is best illustrated by a conversation between Lt Col Harry Summers & North Vietnamese counterpart. When Harry told him, “You know, you never beat us on the battlefield,” Colonel Tu responded, “That may be so, but it is also irrelevant.”
- Using that term in its most simple meaning. Technically its hard to even define civil wars precisely
My point was that to people on the ground, such legal terminology makes no difference. Dead is dead, maimed is maimed. Does it really matter if we call it a war or an action.
Well, again, the vietnam wars (two wars, the first with the French and then with us) can be differently defined by how one views it (from which side). From the North Vietnamese side, both wars were anti-colonial rebellions. For the French, the first conflict was securing territory which they believed they were entitled, while in our case, we saw it as backing the side that wasn’t communist.
But how much did these distinctions matter to the Vietnamese peasantry, who often got stuck between either side?
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I assume that to historians, the taxonomy of conflict does matter as does the legal terminology. Of course dead and maimed are dead and maimed. However accuracy of terminology helps understand situations in the present and potential future for avoidance or de-escalation of conflict, or in some cases ending sooner.
Ambiguity can only lead to ignorance and ignorance of history blah blah blah
I know and knew quite a few ex-military, especially since up until 20 years ago or so we had involuntary draft, so most able-bodied people – if they didn’t come from wealthy enough families and couldn’t buy their way out like I did – had to serve 1-2 years. One of them, my wife’s grandfather, a field officer, later in life taught history at college level. Another, a friend’s ex-husband, drunk himself into an early grave. Yet another, my grandfather, ex-military-intelligence officer, after retirement was mostly interested in painting, gardening and woodworking.
All in all they seem like completely average people, if only because something like a fairly random 25% of population (roughly half of men, there was no draft for women back then) got drafted into the army, and then most of them left to pursue other careers. In no way it is apparent to me which people served in the army and which didn’t.
And I don’t understand how not having enough personal anecdotes would be in any way relevant. Military service does not seem to me to give any advantage in politics, other than by the virtue of people thinking highly of the military.
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Oh, of course. I just don’t think it should be used to paper over brutality, which it often does. An action or a conflict doesn’t carry the same emotional weight as the terminology of war does in the public imagination (or at least it used to not). Nor is the language employed to describe something like a war, action, or conflict always agreed upon by all historians, the public, or governments. American historians tend to center the actions taken by Americans as central to the narrative in Vietnam - historians writing from a Vietnamese perspective (on both sides of that conflict) center the Vietnamese perspective and it’s rarely been considered by Americans writing on the war itself.
And of course, we’re not just discussing historical categorization here, but the use of force by the American government more generally.
I’m not so sure about that. I think that, whatever the perspective, most consider Vietnam a war (even though it was never a declared war by the US), but calling it what it was certainly hasn’t changed our actions in Afghanistan or Iraq. Afghanistan is now the longest conflict in US history and shows little sign of letting up. Our post Gulf War 1 perspective of wars as short and splendidly carried out with little consequence for us carried us into those conflicts in the first place.
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I think this is Democrats’ attempt to figure out what the country wants. They think about it and say, “Middle America likes war heroes, right? Let’s find some war heroes!”
How about the DNC recruits real human beings in touch with their communities, rather than who the DNC Electomatron decides they should recruit after feeding the machine hundreds of gigabytes of voter data?
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Thank you for the explanation. Please excuse me for my earlier confusion. If I may ask where are you that the draft ended ~20 years ago?
That certainly cuts both ways as I’m sure you are well aware. Possibly thats why we now use the term war so lightly. More is the shame. Its not just my old-man-desire-for-precise-language module kicking in here and not just empty phrases like “the war on ” which of course lead to all sorts of nonsensical uses of the word. Just makes me wanna drop a stack of Clausewitz & Creveld, etc. on the terminology abusers. 
But of course not all uses of force are war by any sane measurement.
Indeed. People who have actually lived through a war (or action) and had their lives up-ended by it are probably more likely to take it seriously. I’d guess that people on the receiving end of the “war on drugs” for example are probably more like to agree with that characterization.
No, but what’s a war also depends on one’s perspective. Taking the American perspective as the ultimate arbiter of such definitions is problematic at best when it comes to modern history.
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