I'm not sure how it was in Butler's time, but I've read that the overwhelming majority of casualties in modern warfare are civilians. It would seem to me that they are the ones who pay "the biggest part of the bill".
Not that I would deny that the people doing the mass murder can themselves become the victims of war. But I'd personally have more sympathy for civilians who are not trying to murder others but are themselves murdered.
It's very unfortunate that this 80 year old polemic by Butler is still radical in this day and age, when so many are chomping at the bit to wage war.
But more importantly back then American soldiers were conscripted and forced to fight against their will.
What about going to jail against one's will? Can you refuse to do that? That doesn't seem so debatable.
It's disingenuous to say they didn't have a choice or they did it against their will, for if they really willed otherwise, they could have done otherwise (as demonstrated in the previous paragraph). They may have preferred to do something else, but not enough to actually do anything about it.
If you really and truly object to going to war or killing, then don't. You always have that choice. Don't pretend you don't.
This tendency obviously ran counter to the goals of the generals, so after WWII the military devised ways to make the soldiers comfortable with aiming at people.
That's just to say - even among active-duty soldiers, there is a spectrum of those willing to kill or not.
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Killing-Psychological-Cost-Learning-S...
It's disingenuous to say they didn't have a choice
or they did it against their will
I would say I had done so against my will - because although I had a choice between two bad options, I was forced to submit to a choice that was structured to deny me the option to do neither.
Hey choose between joining the army or jail time! It's your free choice so it can't be against your will!
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posttraumatic_stress_disorde...
> Not only will America go to your country and kill all your people, but what's worse I think, is that they'll come back 20 years later and make a movie about how killing your people made their soldiers feel sad.
> America making a movie about what Vietnam did to their soldiers is like a serial killer telling you what stopping suddenly for hitchhikers did to his clutch.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uZwuTI-V8SI
It's not that PTSD doesn't exist or affect many people, but the scale of the tragedies involved.
Focusing on this aspect is kinda lame since the main point of Butler's message was that someone suffers, and someone else profits, and that military action is generally taken for monetary profit, and not for any higher purpose.
This may be true, but a soldier probably has a far higher likelihood of dying in a war than a civilian, thereby "paying the bill." This means that in expectation, each individual soldier pays a higher value of the bill in comparison to each individual citizen.
His use of the term "bill" refers to the cost of US participation in war; All of the wars he's talking about took place outside the US, so de minimis US citizen casualties
still i would agree, and i bet Gen Butler would as well that civilians suffer the "biggest part of the" damage, but Butler's statement that you quoted was more specific.