The Author of Our Best SF Military Novel Explains the Future of War

And then it does basically nothing with that. The 70 year old soldiers distinguish themselves in no way from the 30ish protagonists of every other scifi story.

Catch-22?

Once we switched from foraging in a bountiful nature to scrounging a meager living from the dirt, defending that dirt or seizing more of it became a much bigger thing.

The author starts out with the right idea,

"It’s about as pitch-perfect metaphor for what it’s like to go to war a civilian can ever hope to absorb—not only is the organized violence of the battlefield interminable, but the dislocation brought about to those subjected to it is total and unrelenting, too."

but then drops off into the convenient and easy, but completely false, proposition that science fiction is about predicting the future. And does so badly:

"In fact, when we begin our discussion in earnest, and I tell him his book has seemed to have proved prescient, that all signs seem to point to a perpetual state of forever war, he laughs."

The forever war of the Forever War is a completely different kind of beast from the forever war discussed in the article. That first quote above is a very good description of the book, that war permanently removes even those who survive it from the society they were part of before, but the "military adventuring" that they go on to discuss has more in common with the late 19th century exploits of the British Empire (and the fiction regarding those) and with Vietnam itself than with the story of the Forever War. (As an aside, does anyone have any information about the longest period the United States has gone without using military force somewhere? I have this suspicion that post-Vietnam may be it.)

Then we get things like

"...3D printers may soon allow anyone with the right hardware to manufacture deadly weaponry at home. Obscene weapons are increasingly obscenely easy to find."

(Does someone need to point out that, historically, everyone has normally had access to something equivalent tothe most deadly weapons of their time? How about the fact that "3D printers" doesn't do anything but advertise that this is a "techy" article?)

and

"His words resonate, depressingly, when you consider that the US now averages one mass shooting per day[1], and that the trend is only accelerating upwards."

(The link defines "mass shooting" as "any single incident in which at least four people are shot, including the gunman." If you're having to defend your ideas with statements like "But there's an uncomfortable assumption here that some crime victims' lives should be valued differently — or are less worthy of attention — than others." you have likely gone off some kind of edge somewhere.)

And what am I supposed to do with quotes like, "'I don’t know what we do about that,' he adds. 'I wouldn’t feel uncomfortable taking away that freedom, and I don’t even have guns.'" and "'The idea of abolishing war has been with us for thousands and thousands of years,” he adds. 'I think we’re more likely to invent the speed of light.'"

[1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonkblog/wp/2015/08/26/we...

Its been quite a long time since I read Starship Troopers, but IIRC it doesn't read like much of a paean to the military on any but an extremely shallow reading.