I was thinking on exactly these lines: " friends don't let friends join an Army." People don't realize how much negative impact this kind of ruling would have on future recruitments of the army?

None at all. Most people don't join the Army hoping to get a clearance in order to dump secret files.

Well you're right. Also most people don't join army to kill civilians and then be gagged for life.

I'm not going to take the bait and allow you to define that default behavior for Soldiers as that of a civilian killer.

The Soldiers know what they sign up for, and if you've never been scared for your life in a combat zone, I'd argue that you lack the perspective to that claim.

If a Soldier doesn't feel comfortable with their mission, they have many ways of dealing with it that do not involve being gagged by their superiors.

I hope you'll agree that the discussion on the parent thread was about newbies joining the army and not about Soldiers who are through with their training and know the many ways of 'dealing' with it.

I don't agree that there is a need to separate them. They are thoroughly indoctrinated going in, and during basic training. New Soldiers are given a battle buddy to watch over them, and a team leader to watch over them, and a squad leader, platoon leader, etc. Sorry, but it's just not there.

So you mean set of people who are yet to join the army are the same as the set of people who are already in the army? :-)

> scientific studies that border on eugenics

I don't understand what kind of experiment that could be, unless they're forcing specific couples to have children.

Are you sure you're using the word eugenics right? You're not just trying to say 'nazi' without using the word 'nazi', surely?

The first thing that came to mind is this (which turns out to have actually been on the general population, rather than on the military like I thought I remembered): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuskegee_syphilis_experiment

It seems perfectly reasonable to call that "[a] scientific stud[y] that border[s] on eugenics".

I don't see any connection between investigating the symptoms of a disease and... oh wait are you saying that the 'eugenics' would be the army performing such experiments only on certain racial/whatever groups of army grunts, and not on the general population of army grunts?

I don't really buy it. I think the army would want test data for all races. Contaminated agent orange for people of all colors.