Loscon: well said.

I'll add that war opponents will tend to overvalue each soldier killed, both as a political point and because they feel that since the war is unjustified, each death is a waste.

War supporters will often undervalue each soldier killed, saying "they volunteered" or whatever else they need to say to downplay the cost.

But those are gross generalities. People with many loved ones at risk may support the war while grieving each loss. People with no loved ones at risk may oppose the war while not really caring about or feeling the losses.

On another board I read a discussion among (largely conservative) vets about what they saw as a growing cultural divide between the military and the nation as a whole. They saw this as a problem -- not in a "civilians are soft" way, but in a "what happens when the military's values are not the same as the citizens" and "what happens when most civilians don't know anybody who is/was in the military"? They were equally worried about a military that might feel the need to meddle in civilian affairs, and a civilian population that is so far removed from the realities of the military that they will carelessly use and toss away military lives and resources because the pain is not theirs.

The most interesting part of the discussion was the hypothesis that the cause of the divide might be the growing urbanization of America. The military ethos can arguably be called a rural ethos, and rural areas are declining as a percent of population. I think the figure they tossed about was that rural areas account for only 18 percent of the population, but 30 percent of the military. They openly wondered if that presaged a Prussification of the armed forces, where a small, insular military elite developed outside the mainstream of American thought.

Others pointed out that "small, insular military elite" pretty much defined the U.S. military for almost it's entire existence. But the counterargument to that was that we weren't a superpower back then, and the military was weak both politically and in fact. A small, insular group with the power of our modern military at its disposal would be a much different animal.

This may seem like a tangent, but it's not. Answering the question of "who cares?" means answering the question of "who understands, who empathizes, who has a stake." The fewer people that think they have a stake in the military, the fewer people will care.

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Man up.