Let's bury the word "warfighter"

Readers (few though you may be) know by now that one of my bete noires is the militarization of this country. Today, I read Lt. Col. William Astore's essay at TomDispatch.com, and urge you to follow the link and read it yourself.

I quote here the colonel's most cogent point since he makes it far more eloquently than I could paraphrase it:

"Being 'the best soldiers' meant that senior German leaders...always expected them to prevail. The mentality was: 'We're number one. How can we possibly lose unless we quit -- or those [fill in your civilian quislings of choice] stab us in the back?'

"If this mentality sounds increasingly familiar, it's because it's the one we ourselves have internalized in these last years [Note: I would argue we've been internalizing it for the last 50 years]. German warfighters and their leaders knew no limitations until it was too late for them to recover from ceaseless combat, imperial overstretch, and economic collapse.

"Today, the U.S. military, and by extension American culture, is caught in a similar bind. After all, if we truly believe our to be 'the world's best military'...how can we possibly be losing in Iraq or Afghanistan? And, if the 'impossible' somehow happens, how can our military be to blame? If our 'warfighters' are indeed 'the best,' someone else must have betrayed them -- appeasing politicians, lily-livered liberals, duplicitous and weak-willed allies like the increasingly recalcitrant Iraqis, you name it.

"Today, our military is arguably the world's best. Certainly, it's the world's most powerful.... But what does it say about our leaders [Note: and our citizenry] that they are so taken with this form of power? And why exactly is it so good to be the 'best' at this? Just ask a German military veteran...in a warrior-state that went berserk in a febrile quest for 'full spectrum dominance.'"

The "best military in the world"? We can't even defeat two third-rate countries who had no significant armies to begin with.

And do we really want to be known for our outstanding ability to bomb civilians back to the Stone Age?