Soldiers of Burden

[Draggingtree]

Chronicles Magazine

Soldiers of Burden

MARCH 1, 2023 BY ALEXANDER RILEY

 

Outsourcing Duty: The Moral Exploitation of the American Soldier
by Michael J. Robillard and Bradley J. Strawser
Oxford University Press
240 pp., $35.00

War is awful. Full stop. On that, just about everyone agrees. It would be superb to have a world without it.

Alas, we do not have that world. We have this one, where war—whatever the uncompromised pacifist would like to believe—is not altogether avoidable. And any society that would be prepared for such an event must have soldiers.

Outsourcing Duty tackles the moral issues that arise in countries where it is possible for a large majority of citizens to avoid military service and to isolate themselves from the risks and the moral responsibilities that soldiers face.

The book was written by two professors and published by an academic press, yet it treats soldiers and their work in a fair-minded manner that is increasingly hard to find among academics. The authors, veterans themselves, are admirably bipartisan in their staunch criticism of the emergence and growth of our military hubris. The Bush administration, for example, used bogus claims about Iraq possessing weapons of mass destruction in order to push a barely concealed regime-change operation that was never approved by the American public. Under President Obama, America targeted and killed many foreign adversaries—also without any substantive deliberation on the part of the public. The military actions of both administrations are evidence of a growing problem.  

[Valin]

@Draggingtree

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The Bush administration, for example, used bogus claims about Iraq possessing weapons of mass destruction

Bogus adjective: not genuine counterfeit, sham. Bogus?

[Valin]

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This problem with attempting to democratize service is indirectly acknowledged by the authors. Many citizens in our democracy, they observe, fail to comprehend why anyone would voluntarily serve. They see military service as something all rational people avoid, and indeed, it is perfectly rational to free-ride on the labor of others so long as there is no penalty for doing so.

Nonsense. 

[SDwaters]

18 hours ago, Valin said:

The Bush administration, for example, used bogus claims about Iraq possessing weapons of mass destruction

I'm pretty sure the Iranians and Kurds that Sadam gassed would beg to disagree with that characterization (if they were still alive).