Washington Post<\/em>: \u201cMany veterans deserve high praise for their heroism, but others of us do not. Infantrymen who put their lives on the line for a mission, aircrews who flew into harm\u2019s way to evacuate the wounded, servicemen and women who made the ultimate sacrifice \u2014 these are some of the heroes I\u2019ve been privileged to know. Applying the label \u2018hero\u2019 to those of us who haven\u2019t earned it diminishes the service and sacrifice of those who did. It also gets in the way of constructive debate and policymaking.\u201d<\/p>\nIn this situation, decisions about military expenditures, reform of the VA system, and other issues get distorted: \u201cThe past year offers an indication of the blinding effects of this problem. Defense spending is a prime example. Too often, policymakers frame discussion of whether to cut the military budget as being for or against the troops; the political battle over the military portion of the sequester\u00a0is an example of this black-or-white mind-set. But any bureaucracy \u2014 particularly one that doesn\u2019t function with a profit-and-loss mentality \u2014 can innovate and gain efficiencies when it\u2019s forced to do more with less. If we\u2019re not searching for opportunities to fix, clean and trim our organizations, we\u2019re not being good stewards of them. When we can\u2019t have political discussions that dig beneath the blanket of \u2018for or against the troops,\u2019 palatability wins over stewardship. And one of our nation\u2019s most precious resources suffers the long-term consequences.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
US Army Captain Benjamin Summers warns against hero-inflation in a\u00a0piece in the Washington Post: \u201cMany veterans deserve high praise for their heroism, but others of us do not. Infantrymen who put their lives on the line for a mission, aircrews who flew into harm\u2019s way to evacuate the wounded, servicemen and women who made the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3021,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[888,889],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16239","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-american-military","category-heroism"],"yoast_head":"\n
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