[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.

[USAF80]

You can say that the pay system is similar to a socialist model. An E5 digging ditches and an E5 working on sophisticated electronics makes the same pay. All the other stuff don’t really compare.

[GATOR NAVY]

The author is very confused not about the military, but about socialism.

That's what I was thinking too. Socialism? Not really seeing it. Now if he had said the military is a Nanny Staters Paradise, I could agree. Anyone who has spent time on any base of any service is familiar with the mind-numbing volume of chickensh*t rules governing every aspect of life.