On this Veterans Day we honor the service and sacrifice of veterans.  We do this with parades, wreath laying and many people silently going to grave sites to visit the last resting place of a comrade or loved one.  All of these are appropriate ways to honor those who donned the uniform and served to defend this country.

However there is another way we need to start honoring veterans, which can't change what happened but could change the future of veterans.  In this I mean to have the civilians make sacrifices along with veterans.  These sacrifices could include, requiring the politicians who have the ability to send tens of thousands of mostly young people into harm's way, to also be required to mandate the citizens who remain behind pony up and <i>pay as you go</i> for the deployments and wars those politicians decide are worthy of the young soldiers, sailors, marines and airmen sacrifice sometimes in life and limb.

We have in our history now two wars where the American civilians were not asked to sacrifice while troops marched off to war, Vietnam and Iraq.  In both cases the wars were totally optional, and pushed hard by certain political groups to achieve foreign policy goals which didn't necessarily align with the needs or goals of ordinary Americans security.  In both cases life in America remained mostly normal and unless you knew someone personally involved you really were not affected in any major way.

In both cases the military did its job, however the political goals of the wars were never fully explained when they were started. Also the strategy for what winning looked like was lacking and how militarily it could be achieved was never properly explained either by the generals on the ground and in the pentagon, nor by the politicians pushing for the wars to continue in perpetuity.  In both cases the stated reasons for the wars never matched the realistic ability of a military solution for political success.  In both cases the military was asked to conquer an enemy which resided in the land who never could be separated from the rest of the civilian populace.  And in both cases the politicians at home never faced up to the reality they were asking the military to do something which the military was not designed to do, conquer hearts and minds with bullets and bombs.

So in the future, to help the American people from making this mistake a third time, I propose that any military involvement that is NOT totally defensive in nature, i.e. one where we send our troops to defend a certain faction in another country or enact regime change, the mandatory requirement for the congress to RAISE taxes to pay the expenses of the troops and combat in real time. No waivers, no presidential signing statement, they ask the American taxpayer to foot the bill or cancel the optional foreign war. Also when the troops come home there is NO question about a GI bill and medical care, it is mandated to be included in the actual request at the start of combat, not after the troops have done their job, no more troops homeless, asking for help.


In this manner the American people will really pay attention. The propaganda machines which are used to push hard for wars will be called out and checked much closer before troops face the ultimate sacrifice. Unless the rest of the country has to get their wallets out and pay for it, the troops stay home.  It doesn't put the rest of the country in the harms way, but it does get them very interested in whether we really need to march off to another political use of our military with has no National Security need that can be justified.

So in the future if you really want to honor the veterans, ask your representatives to step up and ask YOU to sacrifice a little while you ask the members of the military to sacrifice a lot.