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Comment by tedd4u | Hacker News Reader

What’s a “warfighter?” Do they come from the “Gulf of America?” We used to call them servicemen or service members. Emphasizing they served the people. I guess that’s too effeminate for our roided up and ironically hyper-insecure Secretary of Defense.

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The term war fighter is distinct from service member. War fighter means mission critical and typically in a theater, while a service member might be someone sitting behind a desk in a less critical role. Similar to having mission critical production systems and supporting production systems.

When you perform your business impact analysis, these will bubble up in different ways, requiring some differences to the playbooks.

There isn’t really a distinction day to day on this in practice. It covers everybody - just easier to say than all the official titles and typically for morale helps to carry the name all the way to the back office to connect to what’s happening at the pointy end.

Not really a new term: “warfighter” always has made me cringe but it’s been commonplace in defense contractor pitches to DoD for many years. Basically, if you hear it being used you’re likely in the presence of someone who does (or did) DoD work. Totally unsurprising to see it here given this is a DoD contracting argument that we’re all watching from the sidelines.

What term to you prefer for referring to sailors, pilots, soldiers, etc collectively?

Literally what they wrote: service members.

Warfighter is not a new term and has been used in the military since at least the 1990s and was used by Clinton, Bush, Obama, Biden, and Trump.

Service members are anyone serving in the military.

Warfighter is used to describe combat roles.

If useful to distinguish between the two, warfighter is the correct term.

I was unaware that the secretary of defence was a combat role?

He (and his allies) have referred to him as "warfighter": https://www.radiofree.org/2025/04/23/look-ma-im-a-warfighter...

In that context he is clearly referring to his previous combat roles on the ground in Iraq.

It would be like a barista becoming CEO of Starbucks and saying, "the employees are happy to have a barista as CEO."

You're right about the age of the term but it's nothing to do with combat, but rather just a nice sounding umbrella term that makes talking about joint forces easier because every military service has their own special name for their personnel (soldiers, sailors, Marines, etc..).

The POGiest of POGs are "warfighters" and individual organizations within the DoD proudly advertise how they serve runny eggs and chicken to warfighters every day or issue their uniforms/equipment with incredible lethargy or maintain their personnel records in 20+ different systems duct taped together.

"Service member" does get used a lot still. Usually abbreviated to "SM".

Source: Personal experience in both combat arms and non combat arms roles.

Reddit discussion from 2016 (so before Trump).

https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/comments/4ta3hh/cmv_th...

There are many reasons to detest the current political landscape. Don't get distracted.

I hate this glorification of war.

A new term was needed some decades ago. "man" titles have not been politically correct for a while, "member" sounds awkward and bureaucratic. In some other languages, "soldier" can be used for all military personnel, while English ended up with a more narrow meaning.

"Awkward and bureacratic" is literally the point of naming conventions commonly adopted by democracies. Titles like "president" or "prime minister", departments like "Department of Defense", referring to government employees as "civil servants", etc. are all intentional measures meant to strip away the prestige and egotism associated with positions of authority in an effort to avoid it going to people's heads, and to remind them that they are meant to serve the good of the public that pays for their existence rather than ruling over them.

"Service member" is awkward, because it has too many syllables. People won't use it when shorter alternatives are available. And it's bureaucratic because it's unspecific. It doesn't tell anything the service those people are members of, and it doesn't tell what kind of work they do.

It has one more syllable than ‘warfighter’, which also doesn’t do any of the things you said.

I'm not sure how much more clear warfighter could be. "One who fights wars."

Service member is extremely vague. "A member of a service."

Growing up, "the service" was synonymous with "the military" among my grandparents who, y'know, fought in WWII

The world wars were an unusual period. When I grew up, "veteran" usually meant an old man. Most men in my grandparents' generation had seen combat.

Except for extreme periods in history (that I hope we can avoid), most service members don't end up directly participating in a war.

> It doesn't tell anything the service those people are members of, and it doesn't tell what kind of work they do.

I'm pretty sure that term could even work for the Pods in some of my Deployments.

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