Quote Originally Posted by AmericanPride View Post
What if both joined their respective jobs to pay for college or for the healthcare benefits for their families? There has been extensive discussions about values here, and you have made clear that it's based upon the assumption that people join "on behalf of others" and implicitly that culture and norms surrounding that act makes service-members in some way socially or even materially privileged compared to the public. But here the top 5 reasons people enlist:

1. Education
2. Stability
3. Respect (from community, family)
4. Sense of community
5. Adventure and challenge

Seeing how people join for self-gain, and that's how the military actively recruits and retains, on what basis can you argue that there's a special military culture and that this culture ought to be preserved?
None of that applies to people who join an go into a combat arm like the infantry, one where you are definitely going to be shooting at people and where they are going to shoot at you personally if there is a war. It is eminently possible to get all 5 of your reasons without going into a real combat arm. And even if you go into one in peacetime for the macho factor and change your mind when a war comes, getting out of it is easy. So any of those who go to the sharp end voluntarily, at least now, are doing for something other than the GI bill and health care.

So it seems to me that since the purpose of the military is to fight and win, the motivations of people who do that most directly are most important.