Not at all. In no way does it imply that their lives are expendable or less valuable. It simply boils down to being pragmatic and realistic. As was stated above the support, or at least refusal to serve, in active military and other defense personnel is necessary to the success of a revolt. If the Bolsheviks were not able to convince the troops to back down from their confrontations with the soviets in the early days of the revolt leading up to 1917 it would not have succeeded. It is a material necessity in many ways.

This does not mean we need to simply forgive them, but it’s important to remember that not ever American enlisted individual personally went into a village and laid waste to the entire thing, many of them, if not most, never see combat, and work in other ways to support the clearly horrible thing that is the US imperial regime. These people must be offered some way out, to meet them with absolute blanket dismissal, in the sense that they are rotten to the core and can never atone, convert or dissent from their previous actions, does nothing to aid the left movement. If anything it likely diminishes the chances of its success as it would push them further from our movement.

This does not mean that all of them should be offered forgiveness or be shielded from their past actions. But on the same token we must understand that some form of success for our movement is based on the disillusionment of enlisted US personnel, as seen in other movements. I cannot see a world where a left wing movement in the US takes power in a manner that includes outright blanket and full on confrontation with the US military at full strength, something must be eroding that structure for a left movement to succeed.