Peace-time Military

I don't know why I'm surprised by THIS:

Many people in the military now perceive a "generation gap" that is marked by a specific date; September 11, 2001. Those who joined after that day, were more likely to have done so for patriotic reasons and were in to fight. The pre-911 troops had served in a peacetime military. The 1991 Gulf War lasted only four days. The Balkans peacekeeping operations of the 1990s involved very little combat. In other words, the pre-2001 troops had seen very little action. A lot of the pre-2001 officers and NCOs had a hard time adapting to wartime.

There are people in the military who aren't really comfortable with the military's prime mission, which is to kill people and break things.

This shouldn't surprise me.

Ten years after I left the Navy, I ran into a couple of peace-time sailors who were still in the Navy, as a career, who hated going to sea, and resented the Navy for sending them to a ship that by definition, goes to sea!

The peace-time military acts much like a large corporation. You follow the peace-time rules and sing the company song, and you get promoted, especially if all of your paperwork is in order and your subordinates don't pee in the potted palms.

In wartime, all of a sudden the rules change, and the "routine" that you've been following, the simulated "war games" that you've been doing, the immaculate paperwork that you thought were the "real reason" you joined, are supposed to be actually put into real mud and blood practice.

And so, some of the peace-time military gets moved aside, and is "encouraged" to find something else to do.

And the newspapers, who are not staffed by war-time vets, "view with alarm" the number of mid-level officers and NCOs who are leaving the services.

Of course, once the war is over, the guys who do the heavy lifting, and are good combat leaders make the politicians uncomfortable. They are shuffled aside as quickly as can be arranged, because after all, we have to be "politically correct" while we're "preparing our military for the next "humanitarian mission" in Kosovo or wherever...