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Two reasons: they chose to take the job (which can result in your own death and being ordered to do very difficult things in service to your country) and they a

Two reasons: they chose to take the job (which can result in your own death and being ordered to do very difficult things in service to your country) and they are our children, brothers and sisters. Once they chose to serve, they are subject to the orders of our civilian government and so we separate the decision to go to war made by politicians from the decision to potentially die in service to our country made by soldiers, sailors, marines and airmen. Finally, most wars the US gets involved with are sold to the people as defense. We we sold that Iraq was behind the attack on the World Trade center and the removal of Sadam Hussein would make our country safe.

lopmotr 9y ago
But didn't people learn from the Vietnam and Korean wars that they might be unnecessary for defense even if the government says so? Is it that a new generation forgets the lessons from the previous one? In that case, why not blame the soldiers - if there was little popular support for them and it was seen as a shameful or failure of a job then maybe fewer would be sucked into it. I heard that in WWI, soldiers were naive and didn't understand what they were getting into. Now though, there's no excuse. Everyone learns history at school and can use Google. So the decision to join should be fairly obviously likely to lead to doing bad things. The US has been nearly continuously at war since WWII, it's not going to suddenly stop when your son joins the army. Also, how do Americans reconcile that "my family" attitude with the fact that the people they're fighting are also somebody's sons and brothers? It's not seen as equally noble to be an Isis soldier as a US one. What makes the US special other than "my country"?