No, it has not.Weetabix wrote:You say that like it's a new thing. It's been going on for probably 150 years.Aesop wrote:They made their bed, and it's their careers and pensions above all. Including before the actual national defense, readiness, mission accomplishment, or troop welfare.
I don't have the time or inclination to give that the detailed fisking possible; suffice it to say that up until relatively recently (probably no earlier than about 1992), it simply was not so*, and for the few to whom it might apply, they were a relative pittance out of the whole.
Now it's virtually the entire establishment above a certain pay grade.
Those still stuck in the service and a victim of these recent vicissitudes have my sympathy and condolences.
But they should still GTFO with all possible haste.
*(e.g.: Were it not for his deathbed Memoirs, U.S. Grant would have died a pauper. Patton had family money before entering the service, but Bradley, MacArthur, and Marshall never did. The military was so small up until the Cold War as to not even be on the radar as any sort of path to retirement success.
Ike got it wrong: the problem is not the military-industrial complex; it's the politico-military-industrial complex that's become the problem, and it took just about 50 years from WWII to subvert and destroy the entire national military institution, primarily with the impetus of one political party, and the gasoline-on-the-flames accelerant of the current toxic presidency.)