{"id":67918,"date":"2016-09-12T11:35:12","date_gmt":"2016-09-12T15:35:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=67918"},"modified":"2016-09-12T11:35:12","modified_gmt":"2016-09-12T15:35:12","slug":"rosa-brooks-veterans-are-not-experts-on-foreign-policy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=67918","title":{"rendered":"Rosa Brooks: Veterans Are Not Experts on Foreign Policy"},"content":{"rendered":"

Chock Block sends us a link to Foreign Policy where some chick, Rosa Brooks<\/a>, writes “Sorry Folks, Veterans Are Not Necessarily Experts on Foreign Policy<\/a>“. According to the bio about her, she’s “a Schwartz senior fellow at the New America Foundation. She served as a counselor to the U.S. defense undersecretary for policy from 2009 to 2011 and previously served as a senior advisor at the U.S. State Department.” In other words, she’s way smarter than rest of us because she’s sequestered in a think tank with a bunch of other pointy-headed hippies, and she doesn’t like the idea of veterans being asked our opinions on foreign policy.<\/p>\n

I focused on “US Diplomatic History” when I was in college. Much of that study included our wars, there was really very little about diplomacy – like Clauswitz said “war is politics by other means”. No one hates war more than those who have to fight them – so who knows more about pitfalls of bad foreign policy?<\/p>\n

Ms. Brooks disagrees. She’s concerned about the attention that veterans got during the last presidential debate which was sponsored by that broke-dick IAVA and NBC News;<\/p>\n

Some of those service members and vets are smart, thoughtful, and sophisticated about politics, policy, and global affairs. Others are dumb as rocks.<\/p>\n

This is par for the course in any group of millions of Americans: Some know what they\u2019re talking about; others just like to talk. Wearing a uniform \u2014 or having once worn a uniform \u2014 doesn\u2019t make someone uniquely qualified to evaluate political candidates.<\/p>\n

No question, service members and veterans have a unique personal stake in politicians\u2019 decisions about whether and when to use military force. But having a unique personal stake in these decisions isn\u2019t the same as having unique wisdom.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Funny, but that’s the way I feel about those in academia who have no real practical experience outside of their cloistered existence inside the ivy-covered walls, whose only personal stake is worrying about that peer review on a paper. Brooks really just doesn’t like the military – she called us a welfare state<\/a> a while back.<\/p>\n

The generous benefits we give our military reflect the increasingly reflexive esteem in which we hold the armed forces. Despite (or because of) the dwindling number of Americans who serve or have a close relative who serves, support for the military has become America\u2019s civil religion.<\/p>\n

In part, this is because we recognize that with our all-volunteer military, the few truly do make sacrifices for the many. The punishing deployment tempo of the last decade \u2014 not to mention the thousands of military personnel killed and wounded \u2014 has wreaked havoc on military families and communities, even as most Americans live lives wholly untouched by terrorism and war.<\/p>\n

But this can\u2019t fully account for the disproportionate benefits we bestow on the military. Plenty of other Americans serve the nation in vital ways \u2014 consider public school teachers and nurses \u2014 and plenty of other Americans, from fishers to fire-fighters, have dangerous jobs. We don\u2019t seem inclined to fling free health care and housing in the direction of teachers or fire-fighters, though. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

She claims to be married to an Army officer, Lieutenant Colonel Joseph Mouer, but, I’d advise him to sleep with one eye open. She doesn’t like military folks no matter what we do, or what we know. Or maybe she’s just a tiny bit jealous of the fact that our opinions are more valuable to Americans than those of a petty little teacher in a second-rate school.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Chock Block sends us a link to Foreign Policy where some chick, Rosa Brooks, writes “Sorry … Rosa Brooks: Veterans Are Not Experts on Foreign Policy<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":67919,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,145],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-67918","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-foreign-policy","category-schools"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67918","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=67918"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67918\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/67919"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=67918"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=67918"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=67918"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}