Never argue with an idiot. He'll drag you down to his level and beat you with experience. Loath as I am to neglect this excellent advice, I feel that I need to respond to Philip Shropshire's latest post on WarbloggerWatch. After approvingly quoting radical Socialist Imbler Victor Debs on class warfare, Shropshire selectively excerpts two comments from my earlier post on the term "chickenhawk" without providing even an acknowledgement of the many refutations contained in that post. These remarks are from two veterans (Jo Fish and Doubting Thomas), and you can read their comments in the context of the discussion here. In the interests of expediency I will summarize the reasons why Shropshire's "argument" (if we are to be charitable) is deeply unpersuasive:

1) A volunteer military is fundamentally different from a force of conscripts. There is no coercion in sending these men to fight, as they are doing it of their own free will. 2) If everyone who supported war was "not hypocritical" by Shropshire's definition, our military would number more than 100 million souls. 3) Those using the words chicken hawk don't really give a damn about the lives of our military men and women. The truth is that the left worries more about the enemy's rights than about our soldiers. [from Lupinek] 4) The chickenhawk namecalling is equivalent to the claim that anyone who is not in the armed services who is pro-war is a coward and a hypocrite. A reversal reveals the absurdity - you're not allowed to speak out against third world poverty unless you've joined the peace corps, because obviously you don't really believe in that cause either. [from Doug Turnbull] 5) Doubting Thomas' attitude - that only people who joined the military are worthy of respect - is stupid. He implies that if you aren't in a job where you're getting shot at, you're a coward and thus unworthy of respect. Are the people who get shot at the only ones deserving of respect? Why then do officers rank above grunts? Examine your premises. 6) This argument is a typical Leftie/PC canard. The "experience" of going to war, being poor, being black, being whatever trumps all intellectual debate. So if a civilian can have no opinion on the military, why don't we just have a general running the country, a la Musharraf in Pakistan? F***in' brilliant, you lefties must be so proud of your "logic." [from David] 7) Doubting Thomas seems to be saying that he feels contempt for those who don't serve in the military -- and then goes on to prove it by stating fairly unequivocally that unless you have served in the military, you may not have an opinion on whether we should attack Iraq. (He doesn't quite say that, preferring instead to only attack the pro-attack side. But that difference is academic.) Well, Mr. Thomas is certainly entitled to respect or disprespect as he sees fit, but otherwise, his argument goes nowhere. Not having served in the military in no way robs me of the ability to assess world events, and decide that a certain group of people pose a danger, and should be disarmed, forcibly if need be. Having held an M-16 in your hands in no way enhances your ability to do this. Were this a debate about military tactics, Mr. Thomas might have a point. I certainly wouldn't presume to get into discussions with career officers over the best way to deploy a tank column or evaluate an intelligence report. But we are not discussing the best way to attack Iraq here; we are discussing whether to attack Iraq at all. In other words, this isn't about military tactics -- it's about government policy, which the military is supposed to carry out. [from E. Nough] 8)Now, a very small percentage of our military actually sees enemy fire (far less than 50%). The rest of it is involved in logistics or command. Cowardice only enters the equation as a reason to not enter the service if there is actually a chance of death, so by Shropshire's criteria those in noncombatant positions - the vast majority of the military - must be cowards or REMFs.

Those are the impersonal arguments. As the accusation of cowardice has been leveled at me personally, let us now consider my situation. As a military researcher with an advanced degree, there's no way that I would be allowed to fight on the front lines. No general would put me in the line of fire because my research contributions are too valuable. But suppose that I did have a choice of whether to enlist as a private or to stay as a researcher. The optimal decision is still to stay as a researcher if the optimality criterion is made explicit. As Patton said, "No bastard ever won a war dying for his country. You win a war by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country.” In other words, if we go to war with Iraq my goal will to be maximize the enemy casualties . By any reasonable person's reckoning, the source of American military supremacy is not manpower, but technology. The killing efficiency of our military comes from the technology that I help to develop, not from human waves. In other words, if you were to assign credit for each Iraqi kill, only a small fraction would go to the man who physically pulled the trigger, while a far larger fraction of the credit would go to the engineers who developed the technology. This is because in hand-to-hand combat the American advantage is not that great - it is American technology that wins wars. In other words, if my goal is to win the war and/or maximize enemy casualties, my optimal strategy is to pursue military research. I didn't want to have to say this...but man for man, I'm far more valuable to the war effort than a soldier like Doubting Thomas or Jo Fish. The simple truth is that technology rather than manpower wins wars, and if we speak of kill credits it is the scientists who are the most highly trained and lethal of all our nation's forces.