Back in my home state, there is a guy running for elected office who is a member of the Reserves, who recently deployed to Iraq, and, in my opinion, is milking that deployment for every political point that he can score with it. (I am omitting his name, party affiliation, and office sought so that this won’t look like a politically motivated thread.)

I heard one of his commercials which said (paraphrasing) that as an Iraq war vet, he thinks that we need to drill for oil off our shores in order to protect our national security interests. As an Iraq war vet? What does that have to do with it?

This guy’s wife was campaigning for him in his stead while he was deployed recently and made sure to make it clear at every event and on every commercial that she was speaking for him because he was in Iraq. One could make a good case that his deployment was basically a taxpayer-funded campaign stunt. That seems to be 80% of this guy’s campaign: vote for me because I served in Iraq.

This really rubs me the wrong way because it seems, in my view, to be very bad for civil-military relations, bad for the state of the military profession in general, and encouraging political opportunists to use their political connections to score low-risk deployments just to pad their resumes (which this guy may have done).

Any thoughts?