Do you think American soldiers are put on too high of a pedestal

[Catholic_Lady]

I can tell you the vast majority of military members and their families are, themselves, conservatives.

They say the Air Force is the branch with the most liberals. Which is crazy, because even here it's rare to find one. Off the top of my head, I can think of like 3 out of everyone I know. My husband says there are always a ton of liberal jokes going around at his work. Especially around the time of the election.

I can tell you from personal experience that there is a some degree of fear in "coming out" as anything other than a conservative in the military.

Yeah, that is very true. Liberals in the military are definitely the odd ones out.

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The reason Vietnam was fought this way, was because video/cameras were starting to become popular, allowing people to see the effects of war and how horrible it is. The US government/leaders didn't want people to see how horrible it was so they half assed the war, setting all kinds of limitations and perimeters to the military that didn't make any sense, for the sake of saving their face. Partially by using agent orange... which at the end only made things worse.

I still don't see your point... You're saying the US Military needs less oversight in its operations, so that the war gets done quicker?  What about the rules of engagement...or things like the geneva conventions...or non-proliferation treaties...or the Chemical Weapons Convention?  I'm assuming you'd draw the line somewhere.  Hell, agent orange couldn't be used now specifically because of oversight.  Would you prefer the military do "whatever it takes" as long as we don't see/hear about it?

I'm not sure I see what any of this has to do with being 'politically correct,' it's about what kind of conduct is appropriate for our military and how we'd like our allies' militaries to act as well.

Agent orange was used in large part so that we could see what our enemies were doing, so that we could be sure it was "ok" to target them at that particular time in a specific location... rather than just bombing enemy sites and getting it over with. We were trying too hard to fight a nice, clean, polite war so that our government leaders wouldn't "look bad". And in doing so we set all sorts of unreasonable limitations, and half assed it. We weren't letting the military just do what they needed to do to get the job done quickly. And in doing that, not only did we lose, but we drew it out longer, lost more of our people, and effected more innocent Vietnamese lives overall. 

I don't know much about these sorts of things. I'm only repeating what my husband explained to me specifically about the Vietnam war. Being in the military, he's studied up a lot on history, especially war related stuff, and also has done a lot of military strategic studies.