Hate to break it to you, but Service Members don't go to combat for little pieces of ribbon and brass.
Civilians seem obsessed with medals for some reason. Nobody in the military would volunteer for a dangerous assignment for a freaking medal.
You are both putting words into my mouth. I never said that people
only go into combat for medals. I said there is only one
advantage to a front line combat assignment: medals. Without combat, your chances of becoming a General officer are much, much lower... unless you are female and get a "diversity" pick, and even then you are probably at least closely related to combat (helicopter pilot, flight doc/nurse, etc).
I was enlisted in the Air Force, and there they used medal points toward promotion. I don't know how it works in the other services, but even as enlisted you are not competitive for rank-up without the medals. Then again, you rank up according to your AFSC (MOS) and compete with others of your AFSC, so in some cases you have to get the medals just to get back on the playing field (but, again, only among those that share your same job description). If that's the same in other services, then as far as enlisted are concerned not being able to earn medals does not hurt your chances of promotion, seeing as how if you can't be in a combat specialty then you aren't in competition with people who are going to naturally have more medals than you.
With officers of all branches, however, it is very difficult to see a star without some heavy combat time under your belt. Unless you have a specialty like being a doctor or a lawyer, you're pretty much screwed when it comes to hitting anything over 0-5. Then again, we are starting to see more and more "diversity" picks, for lack of a better word. And I'm not using "diversity" in the sense of Twofor on 30 Rock either; for the longest time Intel officers had a glass ceiling for making O-9 and O-10 for having a lack of combat experience (read: medals). The upper echelons of rank are starting to get more and more picks from non-combat specialties, because the JCS pretty much declared that's what has to be done now. And very much in the 30 Rock, affirmative action sense - it doesn't hurt if you're a woman, or a minority (or both).
So, seeing as how there are already methods to combat the singular drawback of being barred the most dangerous of career paths within the Armed Forces... why would anyone fight for the "right" to get shot at more than they have to?
And we don't call the enemy by denigrating terms to "dehumanize" them. We know damn well that they're people, regardless of how we describe them. Words don't mean a damn thing when you're getting shot at.
The psychology is on my side on this one. When you refer to a German as a kraut or Jerry, or an Asian as a Jap or a squint or a slant or a gook, you are no longer referring to them as a person. You have made them an item, a thing, a target to fill your reticule. Humans have done this throughout our entire recorded history, even as far back as the Babylonians repurposing the Sumerian mother-god Tiamat into a heinous beast that was the font of all evil. You see, if you aren't like us, then YOU must be "the bad guys," and we can kill you with a clear conscious.
In the naval/aeronautical tradition, enemy troops on other ships are not people, they're "the enemy." But when that ship gets sunk, all of the survivors stranded in the water are "souls," as in, "the ship went down with 100 souls aboard, twenty souls got out in time"... until you pick them up out of the water, at which point they are then "prisoners".
This phenomenon is widely rampant today in the world of politics, most especially in the terms of overgeneralizaton, i.e. "
all conservatives must necessarily be bigots," or "
all liberals must necessarily be stupid and gullible." This accomplishes the same feat of taking an individual person out of any future equation and replacing them with a "thing" that just happens to be stupid/bigoted/something we can fundamentally disagree with on
everything, and both parties have used this to package popular ideas with unpopular ones.
Sociologists and historians often view dehumanization as central to some or all types of wars. Governments sometimes represent "enemy" civilians or soldiers as less than human so that voters will be more likely to support a war they may otherwise consider mass murder.[citation needed] Dictatorships use the same process to prevent opposition by citizens. Such efforts often depend on preexisting racist, sectarian or otherwise biased beliefs, which governments play upon through various types of media, presenting "enemies" as barbaric, undeserving of rights, and a threat to the nation. Alternatively, states sometimes present an enemy government or way of life as barbaric and its citizens as childlike and incapable of managing their own affairs. Such arguments have been used as a pretext for colonialism.[citation needed] The Holocaust during World War II and the Rwandan Genocide have both been cited as atrocities predicated upon government-organized campaigns of dehumanization, while crimes like lynching (especially in the United States) are often thought of as the result of popular bigotry and government apathy. Anthropologists Ashley Montagu and Floyd Matson famously wrote that dehumanization might well be considered "the fifth horseman of the apocalypse" because of the inestimable damage it has dealt to society. When people become things, the logic follows, they become dispensable - and any atrocity can be justified. Dehumanization can be seen outside of overtly violent conflicts, as in political debates where opponents are presented as collectively stupid or inherently evil. Such "good-versus-evil" claims help end substantive debate (see also thought-terminating cliché).