In essence, that is the bedrock truth. Some argue that it is deterrence, or peacekeeping or whatever. The reason threat they are a deterrence, or able to keep the peace is because of the threat of breaking things and killing people. Making or maintaining peace is not the job of the military, that is for the diplomats and politicians. The military is one of their tools.

Another truth is that they are lead by civilians. I am not making an argument against that, just recognizing it. At the highest level, those civilians report to a politician. The politics don’t just rest at the top though. It starts at the president and travels through the civilian secretaries, through the joint chiefs and on down it goes. Combine the politics, with the inability of the services to say no to an order, and that makes the military population a wonderful place to experiment with social policy.

Pushing social policy onto the military is really just a way to virtue signal to all outside of those it  impacts. The politicians get to point back to the ranks of young people that have no choice in the matter, and say “Look at my priorities. Obviously I think (insert cause here) is important.”

What if showing the policy’s success is seen as important as the mission? There is an example from Naval Aviation . Kara Hultgreen was the first female carrier qualified fighter pilot. She was also the first female class A mishap where she lost her life on final approach. I am not making the argument against women. But being the first, I bet she felt a lot of pressure to succeed. I’ll bet there was even more pressure on her instructors along the way as well. I would not have wanted to be one of the guys that needed to give her a failing grade. It wasn’t just her that needed to succeed. It was the policy. It may be argued that she was a victim of that policy.

We need to be wary of new policies just for the sake of virtue. I think we can agree that generally, there are differences in societal subgroups. If there weren’t, we wouldn’t be having so many argument about transgender men in women’s sports. Can other subgroups have generalities as well?

Studies show that the prevalence of suicide thoughts and attempts among transgender adults is significantly higher than that of the U.S. general population. Using data from the 2015 U.S. Transgender Survey, this report examines key risk factors associated with suiciality among a sample of transgender people.

Remember the primary mission. We need to look beyond platitudes and what some define as fairness, and ask if the policy supports that mission.