Why are people in the US so obsessed with militarizing everything?

[DetlefK]

* Nurses and doctors are "on the frontline."
* Trump has said that "the enemy" has "outsmarted" us.
* The Daily Beast calls for an "army" of volunteers to test people for COVID-19.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/its-time-to-recruit-train-and-supply-a-covid-testing-army?ref=home

Why this obsession with military terms?



You do realize that this has nothing to do with war whatsoever, right? It's a medical and economic problem that requires time and intelligence to solve, not violence and money.

[ProfessorGAC]

1. Ship Has Sailed

I agree with you, and wish it wasn't so. But, it's not going away, at least in our lifetimes.
It was bad. 9/11 made it worse.

[Aussie105]

2. People got excited when the US became involved in WW2.

The economic boom war produced! The chance to prove American democracy was superior!

It was a great time, everyone enjoyed it, business profited! Ignore of course, millions dead, whole cities destroyed.

America was never given the 'stand down' order, that is all. Military thinking. military terms, military strategies are used wherever possible, even when inappropriate.

[no_hypocrisy]

3. My theory:

It's making the military metaphor into another sports game.

I worked for two attorneys who saw EVERY legal issue as litigation, even a benign house closing. It was war on the most pedestrian aspect. (There's zealous representation, and then there's over-the-top.) Shouting at the other attorney over a house inspection report, etc. This was their mindset, like everything was a football game with only winners and losers.

Think back to Operation Desert Storm (Iraq invasion in 1991). The endless loops of bombing was more like a sports show than news.

To address your OP, a lot of Americans have been trained to think in terms of "war" and "military", Us vs. Them, with no concept of cooperation, bipartisanship, and pulling together. It's their format, their template.

[rampartc]

4. when your only tool is a hammer every problem looks like a nail.

[The Magistrate]

5. In The First And Third, The Metaphor Seems Appropriate

In each instance, people are putting their lives at hazard, and doing so for reasons beyond themselves, in dedication to something larger --- dedication to a vocation, or to the society at large. There is something of the soldier in this, and of the hazards of war.

[Blues Heron]

6. It's bully thinking, what a weak country would do and say. False bravado.

It's one of our worse problems, and one of the reasons we are doing so badly. Think about the ten trillion dollars we pissed away on blowing up pickup trucks in Afghanistan - some of that would have made a nice rainy day fund for times like these.

[2naSalit]

7. I have asked that question

for years. Not on DU but in general. I don't care for the answer so much but it seems we like to cling to a "winning" ideology. When's the last time we "won"? WWII. So how did we do that? Militarizing life in every way because that's the winning formula, and we haven't been able to let go of that since we also created a military industrial complex which has dominated the world for too long. It's looking ready to implode so maybe we can evolve to another frame of reference for positively energizing our forward motion as a people. Most of us are over it, too bad the cling-ons are so numerous.

[3Hotdogs]

8. Everything is now a "War on....."

So which ever president announces it, the message is supposed to be that the problem is being taken seriously.

War on drugs. War on terror. War on poverty.


Now, if they would declare a war on why my little soldier doesn't stand to attention as much as he used to, I could get behind that. But I guess that war would be as successful as the three wars I listed.

[gratuitous]

9. It's our national religion

We live in the land of the high church of redemptive violence.

[Chainfire]

10. War is something people do so well

Bombing, shooting, burning, raping, starving; so we try to transfer these skills to all of our problems.

[abqtommy]

11. I agree that war terminology can seem distasteful but we obviously know how to mobilize for

and win literal wars. But we can apply the same processes to any urgent/worthwhile undertaking like dealing with COVID-19 so the comparison is apt.

Unfortunately for us, tRUMP has chosen to wage war on his own population and not the virus...