[2ndDivisionVet]

Jacob Siegel is a reporter and editor at The Daily Beast and an Army veteran who served in Iraq and Afghanistan. He was an author and editor of Fire and Forget: Short Stories From the Long War, the first anthology of fiction written by Iraq and Afghanistan veterans.

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Isn't the Daily Kos founder also supposedly a veteran?

[Darksheare]

Yes, Kos is supposedly a veteran.
Yet he rails at us every chance he gets.

[Darksheare]

Ping, just for you so you can drool and slavishly shriek at us who served.

[darkangel82]

You only need to see the source to know that this drivel is not based in fact and the author is an idiot.

[CommieCutter]

I’ve never served but I’m pretty damn sure EVERYONE has a JOB TO DO in the military, unlike Socialism!

[Rides_A_Red_Horse]

One of the reasons behind our nation's Military success is our Non Commissioned Officers are allowed a high level of autonomy.

Socialism is central planning, command and control. Autonomy is strictly forbidden.

[Doomonyou]

The U.S. Military Is a Socialist Paradise

Supported and funded by capitalists. It's not self sustaining.

[Billthedrill]

The author is very confused not about the military, but about socialism. There are certainly collectivist aspects to the military as there are with any corporate enterprise, sports team, etc, etc, but not socialist. There is no common ownership of the means of production. Decision making is strictly hierarchical. Funding does not come from its constituents making a contribution to a common pool (except in the broadest sense that they are taxpayers too). Property not held in common, legal system by external authority outside the collective, you could go on and on: it's simply not a socialist model.

I sympathize with the author's suggestion that there is a culture within the military that is very different from its source population but I'd have to ask him to name a society, even a communist one, in which that is not true. Ever. Even in an army populated by inductees, which is as close as one can come to one that properly mirrors its parent society, there are radical differences. "You're in the Army now / you're not behind a plow." Anyone who has ever worn a uniform learns that in the first week.

What the author is attempting to do is to establish a superficial moral equivalency that eases the application of socialist precepts to the country at large. You can certainly hold such ideas in theory; living them is a very different matter indeed.

[stockpirate]

You can leave the service when your enlistment is up, you can’t leave a socialist/fascist state like we now have.

I will die in a socialist/fascist country as a slave to the collective, I was born a free man in a country known as America.

[Teacher317]

Um, sir... thanks for your service, but your assertion is 100% wrong. The US military is not one of the only working models of Communism in America. There are over 100 million such models. In point of fact, Communism works almost perfectly, and in ALL cultures and ALL societies. It's called "The Family Unit". The problems inherent in Communism arise when you start forcing vast numbers of people to pretend they are a family, and to act accordingly, and do it at the point of a gun. Well, you're not my dad, I don't love her kids as much as my own, and I won't work harder so that my "brothers" that I've never seen (and read bad things about in the newspaper) can have a better life. Communism is an utter failure of a philosophy, everywhere it is tried... other than the family unit.

From each, according to their ability, to each according to their needs... Dad, and maybe mom, generate revenues. The new baby has lots of needs, and his big sister is a special needs child and needs lots more, but their older brother Simon is a healthy teen, and he mostly covers himself with his paper route money. They work harder and cooperate and share and sacrifice because they love each other. I, and most others, will NOT do it so that families in Baltimore and Pine Bluff and Catawba OH can have as much (or more) than the ones I do actually love and care for.