Pam of Pandagon doesn’t quite grasp the point of a military:
It’s so awful that the good men and women in uniform have to serve alongside animals like these, and that superiors that allow the sh*t to continue.
Oh dear, soldiers are beating people up and raping them again. That’s not, like, supposed to happen, is it? I mean, that hardly ever happens….
The purpose of a military is to break things and kill people. In order to do this effectively, you have to train individuals to become killing machines. The best killing machines tend to be young men with moderate IQs and high testosterone levels, who, surprisingly enough, tend to be significantly more aggressive than the norm.
This is a wonderful trait when you are told to take a location away from a heavily armed enemy that outnumbers you. It is less wonderful when you are at a tea party. The reason those superiors allow the “sh*t” to continue, and always will, is that they would like to have an army that is capable of breaking things and killing people, especially since the civilian command seems to have a fairly long wish list of things to be broken and people to be killed.
The group of five soldiers that beat up the gay man were not only exhibiting poor manners but also martial honor; what Pam also doesn’t understand is that those five men are expected to fight as one regardless of whether they face one or thirty opponents. Expecting an American soldier to fight fair is not only wildly absurd, but reveals a complete ignorance of how the USA trains its men to fight… the USA fights in the most unfair manner of any military in history. It’s most amusing to read how soldiers of the Waffen SS, a truly fearsome fighting machine, complained about how the American infantry in WWII fought. The SS didn’t think it was quite fair play to simply make contact, hold your ground and call in air strikes and artillery to pound your opponent, only assaulting when the Germans were half-broken from the massive bombardment.
Joe Haldeman wrote a classic SF novel about how an advanced society finally puts its warriors into deep freeze since it doesn’t need them anymore and they simply can’t fit into an emasculinized, peaceful society. Considering the serious challenges looming on the near-term and medium-term horizons, Pam should probably be grateful that there are still a number of dangerous men able to do terrible things on behalf of her and her compatriots. Even if American society had such a deep freeze and people favored using it, I rather doubt we’d be able to.
There are fine, upstanding men in the military who would never dream of beating someone up for no reason. And there are hard men who like nothing better than fighting anyone, for any reason at all. Both sorts will continue to have a place in the US military as long as winning wars involves breaking things and killing people, if ever humanity evolves to the point that needlepoint and color coordination represent the primary means of settling human conflict, America will be able to afford an Army of Fabulous that would likely offend Pam less. As for the good women in uniform… the less said about that negligible collection of quasi-militarized welfare cases, the better.