[Zhang Fei]

Funny, a few comments back you were saying that since I'm a citizen and have a vote I'm exactly the right sort of person qualified to have an opinion on who should fight and die where. So, do I as a voter get a say or are those who have served and been honorably discharged not allowed to vote when the subject is sending troops somewhere?

Of course you do. But it's about as meaningful to criticize people who aren't paid to fight and favor a more assertive stance vis-a-vis Russia as cowards as it would be to criticize them as serial killers or child molesters. It's orthogonal to the point. The military is a tool funded and employed by the people. It is not for the instrument of government policy to call the citizens who fund it cowards or any other epithet that comes to mind.

[Rashputin]

"The military is a tool funded and employed by the people."

Having once been property of he USMC I can tell you this, you are dead wrong on that count. It's another case of infantile theory as opposed to hard reality.

The military is a tool funded by the people and employed by the politicians and the bureaucrats they appoint. The Politicians and the people are definitely not one and the same. The last time anyone could even pretend they were one and the same was WWII and the fiction was falling apart even then.

Had the people employed the military in Vietnam, for example, the war would have been over in about two years and there would be a free, democratically elected, government running a united Vietnam as we speak.