It's a shame that Eddie feels the need to leave this forum, he was certainly able to add a lot information and experience to the discussions.
I do think however that nearly everybody has over-reacted a bit to what has happened this time around.
Personally I found Webstral's dissection of Cameron's interpretation of Vietnam & the US military via Aliens to be right on the mark. I never thought Webstral set about to criticize current officer training practice or indeed criticize the US Army at all because I believe he was commenting on James Cameron's criticism of the US Army and its Vietnam experience. He had some thoughts about the commissioning process and he expressed them, I understand Eddie may be tired of hearing those ideas but a simple statement of "I say the idea is bogus because..." would have been sufficient.
Many of us don't like to examine our mistakes, the government and military particularly so. Cameron uses Aliens to show what he believes are/were mistakes in the military system at the time, it doesn't mean he's right.
As for the notion that nobody should be allowed to receive a commission unless they have prior military service, I agree with the naysayers, I think the idea is wrong and probably too much influenced by Heinlein's own view of his own military experience.
I think the fatal flaw in this whole thread is a three-parter. One part has been mistaking the dissection of the movie as a representation of people's views on the real world military instead of seeing it as them using the movie as an example of what should or should not be done.
Part two was expressing thoughts in a manner that felt like people were treating the movie as if it was real world - it's just a movie, it was never going to show how a real military would have approached the objective, a bunch of boyscouts would have achieved more in real life than the completely fictional and deliberately flawed people were allowed to achieve in the movie.
The third part was people taking offence at what in the end amounts to things that better experienced people could fix simply by explaining the flaws in the argument.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not immune to any of that either but I'm trying not to get bent out of shape by it... some days I even succeed.
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