Word: combatant
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There's a particular buzz tonight. The cadets have just attended their last branch meetings, at which they glimpsed their immediate future in the specialty each has chosen. For most, the future will soon include a taste of war: 71% of the class branched into combat units and could deploy to Iraq or Afghanistan as little as a year from...
Over the four years, Pae's intentions shifted away from finance and toward a combat branch--in his case, armor. It's an indication of the strains on today's military that West Point has changed the rules surrounding branching. Starting with the class of '02, anyone who chose to specialize in back-office fields like finance would still be required to serve first in a combat unit. Not coincidentally, the number of finance officers graduating from West Point this year matches an all-time low: two. Cadets get to pick their branches in order of their class rank; once...
...military changed, and the academy that produces its leaders, a place so dense with ancient tradition and ceremonial weaponry that it feels more like the Harvard of Sparta, would have to reinvent itself as well. Much of the faculty was soon rotating into the classroom straight from combat zones and bringing back combat skills--and scars. The engineering department learned to make replicas of roadside bombs so the cadets could learn how to spot them. Classes in counterinsurgency and comparative religion and sub-Saharan Africa became as essential as rifles and boots. Twenty-three times since 9/11, the cadets have...
...lieutenants into an Army that has signed up for a generation's worth of war. Against the backdrop of Abu Ghraib courts-martial and new reports of prisoner abuse in Afghanistan, as the Pentagon fails to meet its recruiting goals and Congress debates the ban on women serving in combat, many cadets too have freely questioned the effects of U.S. policy and wondered how hard that policy will land on them in the years ahead. But they are united in devotion to one another and the soldiers they will lead. They hear the reports coming from the war zones...
...violent overthrow of Saddam’s Ba’athist dictatorship—as the goal. Critics scoffed at the time at ex post facto change of objective, but now, just over two years after President Bush announced the end of major combat operations in Iraq on May 2, 2003, it seems that the man from Crawford might actually be intent on spreading democracy across the world...