Troops in Glass Houses Shouldn't Throw Big Warrior Stones

Vance is attacking Walz for "stolen valor" in his military service, which is a pretty silly thing for a glorified military press agent to make hay over.

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It is not difficult to join the United States military. That is by design — we have the largest military in the world and it requires an enormous amount of manpower and troops. “Military,” invokes a certain sense of danger and martial prowess, seeing as the military’s job is to kill people the country wants killed, but the reality is only a tiny fraction of active duty military personnel see any kind of real combat.

And yet! Here we are: with the two candidates for Vice President of the United States engaged in a mostly one-sided dick-measuring competition to prove who is actually the bravest and most steadfast warrior. On one side, J.D. Vance, a U.S. Marine. On the other side, Tim Walz, a U.S. Army soldier. The crux of the controversy today is Vance’s allegations that Walz is performing “stolen valor,” in — allegedly — describing himself as someone who carried a weapon “in war,” given that Walz never deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan.

All of this is typical political inside baseball resume bullshit. Let’s be clear about that. Politicians serve in the military all the time, often in weird dork jobs like “intelligence” or even more embarrassing as like, an Army lawyer or something. Very, very few of them actually serve in combat, because very few soldiers (just 10 percent, per 2019 numbers) actually serve in combat. For all of the U.S.’s imperialism, we don’t actually fight very much, proportionally speaking, because we have an enormous auxiliary corps and no opponents with anything even remotely resembling a near-peer force that would require large amounts of front-line troops and an expansion of the battlefield to roles that are usually insulated from all but the most indirect threats.