3 ms·

Being in the Army and being on the front lines getting mowed down are not mutually exclusive. And for example, U.S. casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan for the

Being in the Army and being on the front lines getting mowed down are not mutually exclusive. And for example, U.S. casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan for the last 15 years is ~4,424. Being in the army in the U.S., UK, or nearly any advanced nation today isn't quite the meat grinder that WWI was.

arethuza 8y ago
To be fair to the small number of posh people I've known who have been in the British Army they all had led troops on the ground - probably desperately trying to live up to the reputations of their ancestors at Waterloo/Culloden/Hastings...
- Brockenstein 8y ago
  Well there's a lot of caveats to this depending on how you're defining "posh people" to the previous ideas of aristocracy and nobility of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. I mean one of the big ones is that WWI was atrocious for infantry because the tactics were 19th century, but the weapons were 20th century. IE generals were fighting the war like there weren't machines guns, chemical weapons and a laundry list of revolutionary developments that made outdated tactics just devastating. A lot of wars have been fought since then and our tactics have adjusted quite a bit. Which means we're generally not sending wave after wave of men into entrenched enemy fortifications and railing about their cowardice when those assaults fail or saluting their "heroism" when those units are wiped out to the man. We've got better protection and better medical care leading to higher survivability. We're not in a state of total war, and we're not anywhere near close to talking about lost generations from current conflicts. Probably most of the posh people you know came back whole. Well that didn't always happen and amount of risk certainly tempers many peoples decisions about whether to serve in the military if they have options. And frankly given a choice between serving in the darkest days of WW1 and a current conflict wouldn't be a tough choice for many soldiers.
  - arethuza 8y ago
    Ah - I'm from the UK so "posh" in this context to me means traditional very upper middle class or lower upper class. Definitely not posh as in spice.

arethuza 8y ago

To be fair to the small number of posh people I've known who have been in the British Army they all had led troops on the ground - probably desperately trying to live up to the reputations of their ancestors at Waterloo/Culloden/Hastings...

Brockenstein 8y ago
Well there's a lot of caveats to this depending on how you're defining "posh people" to the previous ideas of aristocracy and nobility of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. I mean one of the big ones is that WWI was atrocious for infantry because the tactics were 19th century, but the weapons were 20th century. IE generals were fighting the war like there weren't machines guns, chemical weapons and a laundry list of revolutionary developments that made outdated tactics just devastating. A lot of wars have been fought since then and our tactics have adjusted quite a bit. Which means we're generally not sending wave after wave of men into entrenched enemy fortifications and railing about their cowardice when those assaults fail or saluting their "heroism" when those units are wiped out to the man. We've got better protection and better medical care leading to higher survivability. We're not in a state of total war, and we're not anywhere near close to talking about lost generations from current conflicts. Probably most of the posh people you know came back whole. Well that didn't always happen and amount of risk certainly tempers many peoples decisions about whether to serve in the military if they have options. And frankly given a choice between serving in the darkest days of WW1 and a current conflict wouldn't be a tough choice for many soldiers.
- arethuza 8y ago
  Ah - I'm from the UK so "posh" in this context to me means traditional very upper middle class or lower upper class. Definitely not posh as in spice.